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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Therapeutic Discourse And The American Public Philosophy: On American Liberalism's Troubled Relationship With Psychology, Clifford D. Vickrey
Therapeutic Discourse And The American Public Philosophy: On American Liberalism's Troubled Relationship With Psychology, Clifford D. Vickrey
Honors Theses
I explore the main currents of postwar American liberalism. One, sociological, emerged in response to the danger of mass movements. Articulated primarily by political sociologists and psychologists and ascendant from the mid-fifties till the mid-seventies, it heralded the "end of ideology." It emphasized stability, elitism, positive science and pluralism; it recast normatively sound politics as logrolling and hard bargaining. I argue that these normative features, attractive when considered in isolation, taken together led to a vicious ad hominem style in accounting for views outside the postwar consensus. It used pseudo-scientific literature in labeling populists, Progressives, Taft conservatives, Goldwaterites, the New …
No, I’M Really, Really Bad At Math: Competition For Self-Verification, Alexandra E. Wesnousky
No, I’M Really, Really Bad At Math: Competition For Self-Verification, Alexandra E. Wesnousky
Honors Theses
In their theory of self-verification, Swann and Read’s (1981) postulate that people like feedback that is consistent with their self-concept. Researchers have yet to examine what happens when two individuals are both seeking feedback from each other to verify their self-concept on the same domain. When individuals are competing against someone to verify a similarly held self-concept, they should try to seek more polarized feedback, especially when the domain is highly important. In two experiments, participants expected to receive computer feedback on their responses to identity-related questions, either based on their own responses or on how they compared to the …