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Discursive psychology (DP) is a form of
discourse analysis Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse analysis (discourse, writing, conversation, communicative sy ...
that focuses on
psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
themes in talk, text, and images. As a counter to mainstream psychology's treatment of discourse as a "mirror" for people's expressions of thoughts, intentions, motives, etc., DP's founders made the case for picturing it instead as a "construction yard" wherein all such presumptively prior and independent notions of thought and so on were built from linguistic materials, topicalised and, in various less direct ways, handled and managed. Here, the study of the psychological implies commitment not to the inner life of the mind, but rather, to the written and spoken practices within which people invoked, implicitly or explicitly, notions precisely like "the inner life of the mind". Discursive psychology therefore starts with psychological phenomena as things that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. An evaluation, say, may be constructed using particular phrases and
idiom An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a Literal and figurative language, figurative or non-literal meaning (linguistic), meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic speech, formulaic ...
s, responded to by the recipient (as a compliment perhaps) and treated as the expression of a strong position. In discursive psychology, the focus is not on psychological matters somehow leaking out into interaction; rather, interaction is the primary site where psychological issues are live. It is philosophically opposed to more traditional cognitivist approaches to
language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
. It uses studies of naturally occurring conversation to critique the way that topics have been conceptualised and treated in psychology.


History

The origins of what is now termed "discursive psychology" can arguably be traced to the late 1980s, and the collaborative research and analysis sessions that took place as part of
Loughborough University Loughborough University (abbreviated as ''Lough'' or ''Lboro'' for Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a public university, public research university in the market town of Loughborough, Leicestershire, England. It has been a university sinc ...
's then newly formed Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG). A key landmark was the publication of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell's classic text ''Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour'' in 1987. Charles Antaki, writing in the ''Times Higher Education Supplement'', described the impact of this book: The field itself was originally labeled as DP during the early 1990s by Derek Edwards and Potter at Loughborough University. It has since been developed and extended by a number of others, including (but by no means limited to): Charles Antaki, Malcolm Ashmore, Frederick Attenborough, Bethan Benwell, Steve Brown, Carly Butler, Derek Edwards, Alexa Hepburn, Eric Laurier, Hedwig te Molder, Sue Speer, Liz Stokoe, Cristian Tileaga, Sally Wiggins and Sue Wilkinson. Discursive psychology draws on the
philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the Body (biology), body and the Reality, external world. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a ...
of
Gilbert Ryle Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase " ghost in the machine". Some of Ryle's ideas in philosophy of mind have been ca ...
and the later
Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Witt ...
, the rhetorical approach of
Michael Billig Michael Billig (born 1947) is a British academic. He is Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, working principally in contemporary social psychology although much of his work crosses disciplinary boundaries in the social ...
, the
ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction.Garfinkel, H. (1974) 'The origins of the term ethnomethodology', in R.Turner (Ed.) Ethnomethodology, Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp 15–18. ...
of Harold Garfinkel, the conversation analysis of
Harvey Sacks Harvey Sacks (July 19, 1935 – November 14, 1975) was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a ...
and the sociology of scientific knowledge of those like
Mike Mulkay Michael Joseph Mulkay (born 1936) is a retired British sociologist of science. Biography Mulkay worked as a reader and researcher at Aberdeen University until 1966, he was then lecturer in sociology at Simon Fraser University 1966 to 1969, a ...
, Steve Woolgar and
Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (; ; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Librari ...
. The term "discursive psychology" was designed partly to indicate that there was not just a methodological shift at work in this form of analysis, but also, and at the same time, that it involved some fairly radical theoretical rethinking.


Study

Discursive psychology conducts studies of both naturally occurring and experimentally engineered human interaction that offer new ways of understanding topics in
social Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives fro ...
and
cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...
such as
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...
, identity and
attitude Attitude or Attitude may refer to: Philosophy and psychology * Attitude (psychology), a disposition or state of mind ** Attitude change * Propositional attitude, a mental state held towards a proposition Science and technology * Orientation ...
. Although discursive psychology subscribes to a different view of human mentality than is advanced by mainstream psychology, Edwards and Potter's work was originally motivated by their dissatisfaction with how psychology had treated discourse. In many psychological studies, the things people (subjects) say are treated as windows (with varying degrees of opacity) into their minds. Talk is seen as (and, in experimental psychology and protocol analysis, used as) descriptions of people's mental content. In contrast, discursive psychology treats talk as
social action In sociology, social action, also known as Weberian social action, is an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals (or ' agents'). According to Max Weber, "Action is 'social' insofar as its subjective meaning takes acc ...
; that is, we say what we do as a means of, and in the course of, doing things in a socially meaningful world. Thus, the questions that it makes sense to ask also change.


DP-in-action: an illustration

DP can be illustrated with an example from Edwards' research on script formulations. Traditional social psychology treats scripts as mentally encoded templates that guide action. Discursive psychology focuses on the foundational issue of how a description is built to present a course of action as following from a standardized routine. Take the following example from a couple counselling session (the transcription symbols here were developed by
Gail Jefferson Gail Jefferson (22 April 1938 – 21 February 2008) was an American sociologist with an emphasis in sociolinguistics. She was, along with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, one of the founders of the area of research known as conversation anal ...
). The Counsellor says: "before you moved over here how was the marriage". After a delay of about half a second, Connie, the wife who is being jointly counselled, replies "Oh to me all along, right up to now, my marriage was rock solid. Rock solid = We had arguments like everybody else had arguments, but to me there was no major problems." One thing that discursive psychologists would be interested in would be the way that Connie depicts the arguments that she and her partner have as the routine kind of arguments that everybody has. While arguments might be thought as a problem with a marriage, Connie "script formulates" them as actually characteristic of a "rock solid" marriage. Action and interaction is accomplished as orderly in interactions of this kind. Discursive psychology focuses on the locally organized practices for constructing the world to serve relevant activities (in this case managing the live question of who is to blame and who needs to change in the counselling). In the discursive psychological vision, scripts are an inseparable part of the practical and moral world of accountability.


Applications of DP: spoken and textual approaches

In the past few years, one particular strand of discursive psychology has focused its analytic gaze on spoken interaction. As a consequence, it has relied heavily on (but also contributed to the development of) the principles and practices of conversation analysis. Focusing on material drawn from real world situations such as relationship counselling,
child protection Child protection (also called child welfare) is the safeguarding of children from violence, exploitation, abuse, abandonment, and neglect. It involves identifying signs of potential harm. This includes responding to allegations or suspicions ...
helplines, neighbour disputes and family mealtimes, it has asked questions such as: How does a party in relationship counselling construct the problem as something that the other party needs to work on? How does a child protection officer working on a child protection helpline manage the possibly competing tasks of soothing a crying caller and simultaneously eliciting evidence sufficient for
social services Social services are a range of public services intended to provide support and assistance towards particular groups, which commonly include the disadvantaged. Also available amachine-converted HTML They may be provided by individuals, private and i ...
to intervene to help an abused child? And what makes a parent's request to a child to eat different from a directive, and different in turn from a threat? Although most recent DP oriented studies take talk-in-interaction as their primary data, it is not difficult to locate another strand of DP-related research in which texts are approached as sites for the active literary/narratorial management of matters such as agency, intent, doubt, culpability, belief, prejudice, and so on. One of the founding studies for this kind of textual approach was "Who killed the Princess? Description and Blame in the British Print Press" by Derek Edwards and Katie MacMillan. The "generally applicable discourse analytic approach" articulated and demonstrated therein has proved particularly useful for the study of media texts. Whereas traditional DP studies explore the situated, occasioned, rhetorical use of our rich common sense psychological lexicon across various forms of spoken data, this newer form of textual DP shows that and how authors use that same lexicon in order to present themselves (or others) as individuals and/or members of larger collectives that are (ab)normal, (ir)rational, (un)reasonable, etc. This approach has proved particularly productive in an age marked by the growth in usage of social media, SMS texts, photo messaging apps, blogs/vlogs, YouTube, interactive websites (etc.): never before have so many opportunities for explicitly public, accountably interactional and rhetorically motivated invocations of psychological terms been available to so many people.


See also

* Critical discourse analysis * Discursive complex *
Mediated stylistics Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts (e.g. news programs, newspaper articles). It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories ...
*
Ordinary language philosophy Ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting how words are ordinarily used to convey meaning in ...
* Postcognitivism * Stylistics (field of study)


References


Bibliography

;Classic texts * Edwards, D (1997) ''Discourse and Cognition''. London: Sage. * Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). ''Discursive Psychology'' () London: Sage. * Potter, J. and Edwards, D. (2001)
The New handbook of language and Social Psychology
* Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1987). ''Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour''. London: Sage


Further reading

* * * * * (forthcoming) * Button, G., Coulter, J., Lee, J.R.E. & Sharrock, W. (1995). ''Computers, minds, and conduct.'' Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. * Garfinkel, H. (1967). ''Studies in ethnomethodology.'' Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall. * * * * * * * * * * * (forthcoming) {{Psychology Discourse analysis Psychological schools Loughborough University