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(2017) The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Much social psychological study of attitudes and attributions has treated these as properties that are intrinsic to the individual, indicating how the individual evaluates or explains phenomena in the external social world. Critical approaches, by contrast, argue that in expressing evaluations or explanations, individuals are constructing versions of the phenomena that they are describing. From this perspective, evaluative or explanatory talk is oriented towards achieving local outcomes, such as accounting for individuals' choices, avoiding blame or similar. Attitudes and attributions can thus be seen as produced in discourse and oriented to social actions rather than being (mere) outcomes of individual information processing.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_14
Full citation:
McVittie, C. , McKinlay, A. (2017)., Attitudes and attributions, in B. Gough (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 269-289.