Evolutionary Psychology Blog Archive

What Are Social Psychologists Talking About?

The 13^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) took place a few days ago, in San Diego, California. This meeting brings together social psychologists from all over the world, where they had the chance to do all the sorts of things that people who go to academic conferences do, and I hope that the attendees had a good chance to enjoy the food and fun of the Gaslamp Quarter.

I, unfortunately, was unable to go, which is really too bad, since there is no zoo I like better than San Diego’s. So, I can’t give you a first hand report, though I welcome any comments from those who could attend.

Still, I’m very interested in what people who present at SPSP are discussing. I think of SPSP – perhaps unfairly – as the community of researchers who study human social behavior typically, but not always, without any emphasis on evolution. (Note that there as been an evolutionary pre-conference every year since 2003, however.) I think that SPSP gives a window on what you look at if you’re not guided by the sorts of theories that evolutionary psychologists are guided by.

To have a look at this, I took the text from the SPSP program and fed it into a word frequency count program. It’s not a perfect assay for a number of reasons, but I thought this might help to give a sense of what this community is focusing on.

The first bunch of words in the list consists of the predictable articles and conjunctions, and I’ll just ignore stuff like that. Other than “university” (3,497), the first content word to come up is, again unsurprisingly, “social” (1,656), which maybe doesn’t count because it’s a social psychology conference, after all (though “personality” is only 674). The first real content word that comes up is… “self,” with 1,363 occurrences. The word appears in places such as Symposia titles, as in “Threat’s Effect On The Self And How The Self Fights Back,” in theories, such as “self-regulation,” and in the methodological context, as in “self-report.” “Psychology” and “relationship” come in 575 and 561, the latter because it’s used not just in the sense of “romantic relationship” but also as in “the relationship between the variables.” The plural, “relationships,” comes in at 309.

“Negative” (461) edges out “positive” (440), but “over” (189) comes in over “under” (104).

“Moral” (292) is arguably the highest frequency content word that doesn’t have the sort of problems that “relationship” and “control” have, and I confess the popularity of moral, morality, immoral and immorality make me feel a bit like I’m on the bandwagon, given this is one area I’ve been looking at. Just below “moral” comes prejudice (288), with the word “implicit” (282) shortly thereafter. “Emotion” and “emotional” (277, 280) follow close behind, with “affect” (256) in the mix, though of course the term has multiple common meanings.

Between 300 and 200, here is another set of words that I thought were interesting.

269      identity
266      perceptions
255      threat
249      power
236      emotions
235      goals
233      health
232      partner
230      sexual
227      sails
212      esteem
206      bias

The word “Sails” confused me, until I saw that it was the name of one of the rooms in which presentations took place. Between 200 and 100, again using the technique of Words That Seem Interesting To Me In This Context:

199      cultural
197      romantic
194      cognitive
193      status
189      motivation
183      intergroup
179      sex
179      racial
161      attachment
160      stereotype
150      judgments
146      race
146      interpersonal
128      regulation
127      risk
121      political
120      strategies
119      jennifer
119      discrimination
119      david
118      stress
117      identification
117      anxiety
115      ingroup
113      couples
113      aggression
109      attitude
105      trust
103      science
103      love
102      neural

And then below there you have the also-rans. “Facebook” made a surprisingly strong appearance, with 51 occurrences. “Happiness” and “friends” had a satisfying tie at 76 each. Michigan had the honor of being the most frequent state (Go Blue), excepting the host, befitting the state’s role in social psychology.

Oh, and evolution-related terms (evolutionary, evolved, evolution, evolutionary) came in at 30, 15, 11, and 4, respectively the same amounts as Purdue, embodiment, blue, and… seldom.

 

31. January 2012 by kurzbanepblog
Categories: Blog | 14 comments