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Does Society Shape You, or Do You Shape Society? Social Psychology vs Psycho-Sociology

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@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia [Image: Unsplash ] T wo disciplines study the relationship between the individual and the social world. They share overlapping territory, use some of the same concepts, and are frequently confused with one another. But they ask fundamentally different questions, come from different intellectual traditions, and produce different kinds of knowledge. Social psychology and psycho-sociology are not interchangeable terms. Understanding the distinction matters for anyone trying to think carefully about human behaviour and about which tools are most useful for which problems. "Social psychology asks how society gets inside the individual. Psycho-sociology asks how the individual gets inside society." Social psychology: the individual in social context Social psychology is a discipline rooted primarily in psychology (though it draws on sociology) and its foundational question is: how do social situations, other people, and group membership...

When Democracy Breaks: A Critical Media Psychology Analysis of January 6 and January 8

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@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia T wo acts of political violence. Two of the world's largest democracies. Two years and two days apart . On January 6, 2021 , supporters of Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol. On January 8, 2023 , supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Presidential Palace, the National Congress, and the Supreme Federal Court in Brasília — simultaneously, and live on social media. These were not coincidences of the calendar. A new paper from EMPOWERVERSE  titled Democratic Rupture and Media Psychology: A Critical Comparative Analysis of the January 6, 2021 US Capitol Insurrection and the January 8, 2023 Brazilian Federal Buildings Attack , argues that they were locally embedded expressions of the same structural moment: one in which social media affordances , political disinformation, and authoritarian populist leadership converge to make anti-democratic collective violence not just possible, but psychologically foreseeable. "Democrac...

Psychology, Culture, Journalism, and Democracy in the Digital Age

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@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia H How do people decide what to believe? Why does misinformation spread so easily? Why do news stories persuade some audiences, alienate others, and disappear entirely for others? And what happens to democracy when journalism, culture, psychology, and algorithms all collide in the same information environment? These are the questions that drive our latest article, Psychology, Culture, Journalism, and Democracy: A Critical Literature Review of Their Intersections in the Digital Age . This interdisciplinary review explores how cognitive processes, cultural values, media systems, and digital technologies interact to shape public knowledge and democratic life in contemporary societies. Journalism as a Psychological Institution At its core, the article argues that journalism is not only a communicative institution. It is also a psychological and cultural institution. News is never merely information. It is interpreted throug...