Towards a More Social Social Psychology 221For instance, to apply Lev Vygotsky’s theory of development (as cited
in Griggs, 2017, p. 307) in portrayals of social psychology, that one change
would create an emphasis on how “cognitive abilities develop through
interactions with others and represent the shared knowledge of one’s
culture” (p. 307). Students from collectivist cultures, would be using their
self-construals, would identify with the information, and would therefore
learn more effectively. Using Vygotsky, Griggs (2017) points out the
concept of teaching as a style called “scaffolding” (p. 307). Using this style
of teaching, the text would be expected to take the student from a
collectivist culture, from where he or she is now in terms of knowledge to
the higher zone of proximal development through structured steps. The
authors of the texts should gauge the amount of assistance necessary and
move the reader of the text from one point of knowledge to another,
considering the “level of performance” (Griggs, 2017, p. 307), in this case,
the level would include the collectivist self-construal especially pertinent
for students whose social milieus are non-mainstream in the United States,
or are global, and predominantly collectivist.
A presentation of alternative explanations for the classic experiments,
such as Asch’s, would make the chapter more critically social social
psychology. This change towards critical social psychology would be
particularly effective if the social psychology text included social cognition
following Baird (2010). Authors of the introductory text could recognize
that scaffolding and greater inclusion of collectivist interpretations of the
material discipline of psychology, particularly within the social psychology
chapter, would enable the text to influence students to learn “in accordance
with his or her expectations” (Baird, 2010, p. 203). To include an advanced
and detailed explanation of the nature and effectiveness of specific
collectivist cultures on perception of one’s connectedness to the group,
would similarly create a more social social psychology. Following Bond
and Smith’s (1996) contention that conformity research must attend more
to cultural variables and to their role in the processes involved in social
influence, presenting this research to introductory students the instructor or
textbook author should carefully pay more attention to cultural variables,
and present them as alternative explanations of the Asch experiments,