Robin R. Vallacher – författare

This topical textbook provides a thorough insight into the discipline of social psychology, presenting students with a rich and engaging account of the human social experience.

Fully revised, the second edition includes a greater emphasis on cutting-edge topics within social psychology, including AI, virtual reality, social media, and political polarization. The textbook uses an accessible and readable style to show how the field’s dizzying and highly fragmented array of topics, models, theories, and paradigms can best be understood through a coherent conceptual narrative that builds on learning from previous chapters. The text also examines recent developments, such as how computer simulations and big data supplement the traditional methods of experiment and correlation. It contains a range of features, including key term glossaries and compact “summing up and looking ahead” overviews for ease of reading.

Social Psychology: Exploring the Dynamics of Human Experience covers an enormous range of topics from self-concept to social change, making this comprehensive textbook essential reading for any student of social psychology.

This topical textbook provides a thorough insight into the discipline of social psychology, presenting students with a rich and engaging account of the human social experience.

Fully revised, the second edition includes a greater emphasis on cutting-edge topics within social psychology, including AI, virtual reality, social media, and political polarization. The textbook uses an accessible and readable style to show how the field’s dizzying and highly fragmented array of topics, models, theories, and paradigms can best be understood through a coherent conceptual narrative that builds on learning from previous chapters. The text also examines recent developments, such as how computer simulations and big data supplement the traditional methods of experiment and correlation. It contains a range of features, including key term glossaries and compact “summing up and looking ahead” overviews for ease of reading.

Social Psychology: Exploring the Dynamics of Human Experience covers an enormous range of topics from self-concept to social change, making this comprehensive textbook essential reading for any student of social psychology.

Recent years have witnessed the ascendance of a new way to conceptualize and investigate the nature of dynamism at different levels of psychological reality. Areas of inquiry as diverse as cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, organizational behavior, and political sociology are being reframed in terms that allow rigorous and precise insight into basic dynamic processes. There are signs that this new approach to dynamics is emerging as a potentially integrative paradigm for personality and social psychology as well. This special issue highlights this new paradigm and illustrates its relevance to a broad spectrum of topics in personality and social psychology.

Recent years have witnessed the ascendance of a new way to conceptualize and investigate the nature of dynamism at different levels of psychological reality. Areas of inquiry as diverse as cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, organizational behavior, and political sociology are being reframed in terms that allow rigorous and precise insight into basic dynamic processes. There are signs that this new approach to dynamics is emerging as a potentially integrative paradigm for personality and social psychology as well. This special issue highlights this new paradigm and illustrates its relevance to a broad spectrum of topics in personality and social psychology.

Computational Social Psychology showcases a new approach to social psychology that enables theorists and researchers to specify social psychological processes in terms of formal rules that can be implemented and tested using the power of high speed computing technology and sophisticated software. This approach allows for previously infeasible investigations of the multi-dimensional nature of human experience as it unfolds in accordance with different temporal patterns on different timescales. In effect, the computational approach represents a rediscovery of the themes and ambitions that launched the field over a century ago.

The book brings together social psychologists with varying topical interests who are taking the lead in this redirection of the field. Many present formal models that are implemented in computer simulations to test basic assumptions and investigate the emergence of higher-order properties; others develop models to fit the real-time evolution of people’s inner states, overt behavior, and social interactions. Collectively, the contributions illustrate how the methods and tools of the computational approach can investigate, and transform, the diverse landscape of social psychology.

Computational Social Psychology showcases a new approach to social psychology that enables theorists and researchers to specify social psychological processes in terms of formal rules that can be implemented and tested using the power of high speed computing technology and sophisticated software. This approach allows for previously infeasible investigations of the multi-dimensional nature of human experience as it unfolds in accordance with different temporal patterns on different timescales. In effect, the computational approach represents a rediscovery of the themes and ambitions that launched the field over a century ago.

The book brings together social psychologists with varying topical interests who are taking the lead in this redirection of the field. Many present formal models that are implemented in computer simulations to test basic assumptions and investigate the emergence of higher-order properties; others develop models to fit the real-time evolution of people’s inner states, overt behavior, and social interactions. Collectively, the contributions illustrate how the methods and tools of the computational approach can investigate, and transform, the diverse landscape of social psychology.

This concise monograph introduces and examines social influence from the perspective of the so-called target, rather than from the source, thus providing for the first time a bidirectional account of this pervasive social phenomenon, further bridging  simple micro-level dyadic interaction rules with macro-level properties of the (social) system. This integrative approach allows for advanced models of influence to be developed in both the social and natural sciences (e.g. social animals). In particular, when used to investigate emergent properties of social change, this approach shows that social transitions occur as “bubbles of new” in the “sea of old.” 

While in the traditional view influence is synonymous with achieving power and control over others, the present approach to social influence puts the emphasis on the target’s motives and strategies. Here, the target may actively seek out influence to help forge opinions and achieve guidance regarding courses of action. In this process, the target observes others, models their thought and behavior, and asks for information and opinions. In this broadened perspective, the processes of social influence enables those being influenced (the targets) to use the knowledge and processing capacity of influence sources to maximize their access to information, minimize their processing effort, while optimizing their own functioning and that of the social system in which they evolve.

This short text addresses above all scientists interested in social influence in the fields of psychology, sociology, economy, marketing, and biology. However, also researchers interested in modeling social processes, especially opinion dynamics and social change, such as computer scientists, physicists and applied mathematicians will benefit from the insights provided.

This book introduces the reader to the concept of functional synchronization and how it operates on very different levels in psychological and social systems – from the emergence of thought to the formation of social relations and the structure of societies.

For years, psychologists have investigated phenomena such as self-concept, social judgment, social relations, group dynamics, and cooperation and conflict, but have discussed these phenomena seoarately.This book shows how synchronization provides a foundational approach to these otherwise distinct and diverse psychological processes.This work shows that there is a basic tendency with many processes to become coordinated and progressively integrated into increasingly larger units through well-defined processes. For these larger units, new and largely adaptive functions emerge. 

Conflict is inherent in virtually every aspect of human relations, from sport to parliamentary democracy, from fashion in the arts to paradigmatic challenges in the sciences, and from economic activity to intimate relationships.  Yet, it can become among the most serious social problems humans face when it loses its constructive features and becomes protracted over time with no obvious means of resolution.

 This book addresses the subject of intractable social conflict from a new vantage point.  Here, these types of conflict represent self-organizing phenomena, emerging quite naturally from the ongoing dynamics in human interaction at any scale—from the interpersonal to the international.  Using the universal language and computational framework of nonlinear dynamical systems theory in combination with recent insights from social psychology, intractable conflict is understood as a system locked in special attractor states that constrain the thoughts and actions of the parties to the conflict.  The emergence and maintenance of attractors for conflict can be described by means of formal models that incorporate the results of computer simulations, experiments, field research, and archival analyses.  Multi-disciplinary research reflecting these approaches provides encouraging support for the dynamical systems perspective.

 Importantly, this text presents new views on conflict resolution.  In contrast to traditional approaches that tend to focus on basic, short-lived cause-effect relations, the dynamical perspective emphasizes the temporal patterns and potential for emergence in destructive relations.  Attractor deconstruction entails restoring complexity to a conflict scenario by isolating elements or changing the feedback loops among them. The creation of a latent attractor trades on the tendency toward multi-stability in dynamical systems and entails the consolidation of incongruent (positive) elements into a coherent structure.  In the bifurcation scenario, factors are identified that can change the number and types of attractors in a conflict scenario.  The implementation of these strategies may hold the key to unlocking intractable conflict, creating the potential for constructive social relations.