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Related Experiment Videos

Mentality or morality? Membership categorization, multiple meanings and mass murder.

Mark Rapley1, David McCarthy, Alec McHoul

  • 1School of Psychology, Murdoch University, Western Australia, Australia. mrapley@socs.murdoch.edu.au

The British Journal of Social Psychology
|October 22, 2003
PubMed
Summary

Social psychology research on self-representation shifts focus from internal selves to how people categorize themselves and others. Analyzing the Port Arthur massacre, this study reveals moral considerations underpin self-categorization methods in public discourse.

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Area of Science:

  • Social Psychology
  • Sociology
  • Discourse Analysis

Background:

  • Traditional social psychology often assumes an internal self re-presented in discourse.
  • Existing theories like attribution theory and social identity theory focus on cognitive aspects of self-representation.
  • This study challenges the cognitivist tenet by examining how selves are actively constructed in social interaction.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To analyze ordinary members' methods of categorizing the self.
  • To investigate the role of self-categorization in public discourse, particularly in response to significant events.
  • To explore the relationship between lay and professional accounts of the self.

Main Methods:

  • Utilizing Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA).

Related Experiment Videos

  • Analyzing a corpus of press materials related to the Port Arthur massacre.
  • Comparing lay and professional accounts of the perpetrator and victims.

    • Main Results:

    • Lay and professional methods of self-categorization were found to be congruent in the context of the Port Arthur massacre.
    • The study highlights that categorizing persons is fundamentally a moral activity.
    • Everyday moral accounting devices precede and ground technical, clinical, or scientific judgments.

    Conclusions:

    • Describing routine cultural devices for self-categorization should be a central goal of social psychology.
    • Social psychology should avoid tacitly relying on unacknowledged self-categorization devices.
    • Understanding self-categorization as a moral and cultural practice offers a new perspective on social identity and self-representation.