220 Stephanie Amedeo Marquez
2009; Dafermos and Marvakis, 2006; Burton and Osorio, 2011) working
towards a ‘really social psychology’, inspired by Dussel’s philosophy of
liberation. Baird (2010) then takes the next step. A step which is essential
to establish critical thinking for students, and to demonstrate the worth of
critical social psychology is to provide alternative interpretations for
research, findings, and experimental observations. These alternative
explanations, if solely individualistic, misrepresent social psychology.
Alternative explanations solely based upon the 1950’s college students in
mainstream United States culture, are incomplete. Baird (2010) goes
beyond these to create the most truly critical and social social
psychological evaluation of the Asch experiment, because of his inclusion
of the social construction of reality--using sociological interconnectedness
as explanations of social psychology.
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
A textbook, which provides an account of conformity concentrated
upon simply individualistic explanations without consideration of the
influence of collectivity, does not suffice to convey the actuality of a social
psychological concept such as conformity. As Gough et al. (2013) pointed
out in their examination of critical social psychology, rethinking social
influence requires exactly the issue pointed out by Mills, that insights into
social psychology are seriously flawed if they are boiled down to only
understanding how “individuals are constituted by society” (Gough et al.,
2013, p. 109). Specific changes to the interpretations of social psychology
as presented in the introductory psychology text would enhance the
impression of conformity
Pilarska (2014) has a strongly elaborated theoretical model of the
interactions of self-construal and various psychological concepts such as
identity formation, self-experience, affiliation, and her approach could be
effective if applied to introductory texts’ examination of conformity in the
Asch experiments.