The Psychology of Closed Mindedness (Essays in Social Psychology)

The fundamental phenomenon of human closed-mindedness is treated in this volume. Prior psychological treatments of closed-mindedness have typically approached it from a psychodynamic perspective and have viewed it in terms of individual pathology. By contrast, the present approach stresses the epistemic functionality of closed-mindedness and its essential role in judgement and decision-making. Far from being restricted to a select group of individuals suffering from an improper socialization, closed-mindedness is something we all experience on a daily basis. Such mundane situational conditions as time pressure, noise, fatigue, or alcoholic intoxication, for example, are all known to increase the difficulty of information processing, and may contribute to one's experienced need for nonspecific closure. Whether constituting a dimension of stable individual differences, or being engendered situationally - the need for closure, once aroused, is shown to produce the very same consequences. These fundamentally include the tendency to 'seize' on early, closure-affording 'evidence', and to 'freeze' upon it thus becoming impervious to subsequent, potentially important, information. Though such consequences form a part of the individual's personal experience, they have significant implications for interpersonal, group and inter-group phenomena as well. The present volume describes these in detail and grounds them in numerous research findings of theoretical and 'real world' relevance to a wide range of topics including stereotyping, empathy, communication, in-group favouritism and political conservatism. Throughout, a distinction is maintained between the need for a nonspecific closure (i.e., any closure as long as it is firm and definite) and needs for specific closures (i.e., for judgments whose particular contents are desired by an individual). Theory and research discussed in this book should be of interest to upper level undergraduates, graduate students and faculty in social, cognitive, and personality psychology as well as in sociology, political science and business administration.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Kruglanski, Arie W. W.

Mental Health

Psychology Press

Whatever your reasons, kind reader, for reading these words,-what ever your premises about forewords, whatever the epistemic motivation with which you approach them-Iet me urge you to turn immediately to Kruglanski's first chapter and skim it. If any enthusiasm for sodal psy chology flows in your veins, you will certainly proceed then to read further in this important book. It represents some dozen years of Arie's thought and of his and his colleagues' research. Its intellectual scope covers 50 years of sodal psychology-from attitudes and attitude change, to balance, disso nance, and the various other cognitive consistency theories, to causal attribution, and to current cognitive sodal psychology. Sodal psycholo gists have recently begun to leave the fireside coziness of scribbling textbook catalogues of our field and to venture out into the cold, outdoor adventure of detecting (or creating?) its underlying structure. Of these attempts at providing scope plus order, Kruglanski's must surely be the most ambitious. For his is no mere overarching theory, which, like a circus tent over a diverse set of sideshows, covers everything but does little to provide thematic structure. Rather, Kruglanski tries to produce a basic reorganization of our thinking about sodal psychology. To use his LEGO blocks metaphor for the modification of knowledge structures, he attempts to dismantle the current assembly of elements of our field and reassemble them into a simpler and more coherent configuration.

Lay Epistemics and Human Knowledge: Cognitive and Motivational Bases (Perspectives in Social Psychology)

Psychology & Counseling

Springer

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