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To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: Structural Social Psychology
Yes; Tom Brown is correct: the correlates of class and 
social psychology are many and profound...from Marx' 
famous dictum that one's position in the social order 
determines/shapes one's ways of thinking, feeling, doing 
and being.  This view is, of course, congenial to the
Meadian dictum that mind, self and society are twin-
born...except in most soc/psych texts, Mead is sanitized
with examples/data drawn from homogenous middle class
social life.

In a Structural Marxist Social Psychology, human 'nature'
changes as one changes one's position in the structures
of class, race, gender and age...to mention just of few
of the larger/macro-societal structures out of which
come understandings, opinions, beliefs, interpretations
and pre-dispositions to act.

When one is 'promoted' from worker to foreman; from
professor to Chair; from private to corporal, ways of 
thinking and acting shift dramatically.  So much for
genes, early socialization and physiological theories of
criminal or saintly behavior.  In a word, morality is 
located as much in the sociology of it all as in the
psychology of it all.

Yet one always retains some shifting responsibility for one's
own actions; soldiers who rape and loot in wartime; police
who beat and batter minorities in racist societies; actors
who tout and push commodities in market societies--all these
are at some level of moral culpability, responsible for the
evil they do.
                                        Thank, Tom,   TR

At 04:44 PM 5/27/97 -0400, you wrote:
>TR, thanks for the list of "alternative" social psychologies.
>I would add one more: the work and personality school 
>of structural marxist social psychology, which examines 
>the effects of class and stratification position on personality.
>
>
>
>
TR Young
The Red Feather Institute
8085 Essex, Weidman, Mi.,
  48893  [517] 644 3089
  Email: tr@tryoung.com