Discursive psychology

For other uses of the word, see discursive.

natives on oer. It could rescue social psychology from

the sterility of the laboratory and its traditional mentalism'. The eld itself was originally labeled as DP during the early 1990s by Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter at Loughborough University. It has since been developed and extended by a number of others, including (but
by no means limited to): Charles Antaki, Malcolm Ashmore, Frederick Attenborough, Bethan Benwell, Steve
Brown, Carly Butler, Derek Edwards, Alexa Hepburn,
Eric Laurier, Hedwig te Molder, Jonathan Potter, Sue
Speer, Liz Stokoe, Cristian Tileaga, Margaret Wetherell,
Sally Wiggins and Sue Wilkinson. Discursive Psychology draws on the philosophy of mind of Ryle and the
later Wittgenstein, the rhetorical approach of Michael
Billig, the ethnomethodology of Harold Garnkel, the
conversation analysis of Harvey Sacks and the sociology
of scientic knowledge of those like Mike Mulkay, Steve
Woolgar and Bruno Latour. The term Discursive Psychology was designed partly to indicate that there was not
just a methodological shift at work in this form of analysis, but also, and at the same time, that it involved some
fairly radical theoretical rethinking.

Discursive psychology (DP) is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes in talk, text and
images.
As a counter to mainstream psychologys treatment of
discourse as a mirror for peoples expressions of
thoughts, intentions, motives, etc., DPs founders made
the case for picturing it instead as if a construction yard
wherein all such presumptively prior and independent notions of thought and so on were built from linguistic materials, topicalised and, in various less direct ways, handled
and managed.[1] Here, the study of the psychological implies commitment not to the inner life of the mind, but
rather, to the written and spoken practices within which
people invoked, implicitly or explicitly, notions precisely
like the inner life of the mind.[2] Discursive psychology
therefore starts with psychological phenomena as things
that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. An evaluation, say, may be constructed using particular phrases and idioms, responded to by the
recipient (as a compliment perhaps) and treated as the
expression of a strong position. In discursive psychology
the focus is not on psychological matters somehow leaking out into interaction; rather interaction is the primary
site where psychological issues are live. It is philosophically opposed to more traditional cognitivist approaches
to language. It uses studies of naturally occurring conversation to critique the way that topics have been conceptualised and treated in psychology.

2 Study
Discursive psychology conducts studies of both naturally
occurring and experimentally engineered human interaction that oer new ways of understanding topics in social
and cognitive psychology such as memory and attitudes.
Although discursive psychology subscribes to a dierent
view of human mentality than is advanced by mainstream
psychology, Edwards and Potters work was originally
motivated by their dissatisfaction with how psychology
had treated discourse. In many psychological studies, the
things people (subjects) say are treated as windows (with
varying degrees of opacity) into their minds. Talk is seen
as (and in experimental psychology and protocol analysis used as) descriptions of peoples mental content. In
contrast, discursive psychology treats talk as social action;
that is, we say what we do as a means of, and in the course
of, doing things in a socially meaningful world. Thus, the
questions that it makes sense to ask also change.

History

The origins of what is now termed discursive psychology can arguably be traced to the late 1980s, and the
collaborative research and analysis sessions that took
place as part of Loughborough Universitys then newly
formed Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG).[3] A
key landmark was the publication of Jonathan Potter and
Margaret Wetherells classic text 'Discourse and social
psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour' in 1987.
Charles Antaki, writing in the 'Times Higher Education
Supplement', described the impact of this book: 'Potter
and Wetherell have genuinely presented us with a different way of working in social psychology. The books 3 DP-in-action: an illustration
clarity means that it has the power to inuence a lot of
people ill-at-ease with traditional social psychology but DP can be illustrated with an example from Derek
unimpressed with (or simply bewildered by) other alter- Edwards research on script formulations.[4] Traditional
1

6 BIBLIOGRAPHY

social psychology treats scripts as mentally encoded templates that guide action. Discursive psychology focuses
on the foundational issue of how a description is built to
present a course of action as following from a standardized routine. Take the following example from a couple
counselling session (the transcription symbols here were
developed by Gail Jeerson). The Counsellor says: before you moved over here how was the marriage. After a
delay of about half a second Connie, the wife who is being jointly counselled, replies Oh to me all along, right up
to now, my marriage was rock solid. Rock solid = We had
arguments like everybody else had arguments, but to me
there was no major problems. One thing that discursive
psychologists would be interested in would be the way
that Connie depicts the arguments that she and her partner have as the routine kind of arguments that everybody
has. While arguments might be thought as a problem with
a marriage, Connie script formulates them as actually
characteristic of a 'rock solid' marriage. Action and interaction is accomplished as orderly in interactions of this
kind. Discursive psychology focuses on the locally organized practices for constructing the world to serve relevant activities (in this case managing the live question of
who is to blame and who needs to change in the counselling). In the discursive psychological vision, scripts are
an inseparable part of the practical and moral world of
accountability.

Print Press by Derek Edwards and Katie MacMillan.[7]

The generally applicable discourse analytic approach articulated and demonstrated therein has proved particularly useful to and for the study of media texts.[8] Whereas
traditional DP studies explore the situated, occasioned,
rhetorical use of our rich common sense psychological
lexicon across various forms of spoken data, this newer
form of textual DP shows that and how authors use that
same lexicon in order to present themselves (or others)
as individuals and/or members of larger collectives that
are (ab)normal, (ir)rational, (un)reasonable, etc.[9] This
approach has proved particularly productive in an age
marked by the growth in usage of social media, SMS
texts, photo messaging apps, blogs/vlogs, YouTube, interactive websites (etc.): never before have so many opportunities for explicitly public, accountably interactional
and rhetorically motivated invocations of psychological
terms been available to so many people.[10]

5 See also
Discursive complex
Critical discourse analysis
Conversation analysis

Applications of DP: spoken and

textual approaches

Ethnomethodology
Ordinary language philosophy

In the past few years, one particular strand of discursive

Sociology of scientic knowledge
psychological has focused its analytic gaze on spoken interaction. As a consequence it has relied heavily on (but
Stylistics (eld of study)
also contributed to the development of) the principles and
practices of Conversation Analysis. Focusing on mate Mediated stylistics
rial drawn from real world situations such as relationship
counselling, child protection helplines, neighbour disputes and family mealtimes, it has asked questions such
as: How does a party in relationship counselling construct 6 Bibliography
the problem as something that the other party needs to
work on? How does a child protection ocer working on
a child protection helpline manage the possibly compet- Classic texts
ing tasks of soothing a crying caller and simultaneously
eliciting evidence sucient for social services to inter Edwards, D (1997) Discourse and Cognition. Lonvene to help an abused child? And what makes a parents
don: Sage.
request to a child to eat dierent from a directive, and
dierent in turn from a threat?
Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology (ISBN 0-8039-8442-1) London: Sage.
Although most recent DP oriented studies take talk-ininteraction as their primary data, it is not dicult to locate
Potter, J. and Edwards, D. (2001). The New handanother strand of DP-related research in which texts are
book of language and Social Psychology.
approached as sites for the active literary/narratorial management of matters such as agency, intent, doubt, culpa Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and
bility, belief, prejudice, and so on.[5] [6] One of the founding studies for this kind of textual approach was 'Who
social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour.
killed the Princess? Description and Blame in the British
London: Sage

Further reading
Antaki, Charles; Leudar, Ivan (October 2001).
Recruiting the record: Using opponents exact words in parliamentary argumentation.
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study
of Discourse (de Gruyter) 21 (4): 467488.
doi:10.1515/text.2001.008.
Attenborough, Frederick T. (May 2011). "I dont
f***ing care! Marginalia and the (textual) negotiation of an academic identity by university students.
Discourse & Communication (Sage) 5 (2): 99121.
doi:10.1177/1750481310395447. Pdf.
Attenborough, Frederick T. (2013). Sexism reloaded ... or sexism re-presented? Irrelevant
precision and the British press. Feminist Media Studies (Taylor and Francis) 13 (4): 693709.
doi:10.1080/14680777.2012.700524. Pdf.
Attenborough, Frederick T. (2015), Part 3: Social categories, identity and memory: A forgotten legacy? Towards a discursive psychology of
the media, in Tileag, Cristian; Stokoe, Elizabeth, Discursive psychology: classic and contemporary issues, Oxford New York: Routledge, ISBN
9780415721608. Pdf.
Attenborough, Frederick T. (2016). Discursive psychology and the media. Media Topics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press. (forthcoming)
Button, G., Coulter, J., Lee, J.R.E. & Sharrock,
W. (1995). Computers, minds, and conduct. Polity
Press, Cambridge, UK.
Garnkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology.
Englewood Clis, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.
Hepburn, Alexa (2004). Crying: Notes on
description, transcription, and interaction.
Research on Language & Social Interaction (Taylor and Francis) 37 (3): 251290.
doi:10.1207/s15327973rlsi3703_1.
Horton-Salway, Mary (August 2013). Gendering
attention decit hyperactivity disorder: A discursive analysis of UK newspaper stories. Journal
of Health Psychology (Sage) 18 (8): 10851099.
doi:10.1177/1359105312456326.
Lamerichs, Joyce; Te Molder, Hedwig F.M. (December 2003). Computer-mediated communication: From a cognitive to a discursive model.
New Media & Society (Sage) 5 (4): 451473.
doi:10.1177/146144480354001.
Laurier, Eric (2001). Why people say where they
are during mobile phone calls. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space (Pion) 19 (4): 485
504. doi:10.1068/d228t.

Nicholas, Lionel (2008). Introduction to psychology.

Cape Town: UCT Press. ISBN 1919895027.
Parker, Ian (2002). Critical discursive psychology.
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York:
Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780333973813.
Sneijder, Petra; Te Molder, Hedwig F.M. (September 2005). Moral logic and logical morality: attributions of responsibility and blame in online discourse on veganism. Discourse & Society (Sage) 16
(5): 675696. doi:10.1177/0957926505054941.
Sneijder, Petra; Te Molder, Hedwig F.M. (June
2009). Normalizing ideological food choice and
eating practices. Identity work in online discussions on veganism. Appetite (ScienceDirect) 52 (3):
621630. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2009.02.012. PMID
19501759.
Speer, Susan A. (August 2002). Sexist talk: gender categories, participants orientations and irony.
Journal of Sociolinguistics (Wiley) 6 (3): 347377.
doi:10.1111/1467-9481.00192.
Stokoe, Elizabeth; Benwell, Bethan (2006). Discourse and identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748617500.
Wiggins, S. (2016). Discursive psychology: theory,
method and applications. London: Sage. (forthcoming)

8 References
[1] Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality. London: Sage.
[2] Edwards, D., Potter, J. (2005) Discursive psychology,
mental states and descriptions, in L. te Molder, J. Potter
(eds.) Conversation and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 241-259.
[3] Tileaga, C. (2012) Twenty ve years of Discursive Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, 1-8.
[4] Edwards, D. (1994) Script Formulations: An Analysis of
Event Descriptions in Conversation, Journal of Language
and Social Psychology, 13(3): 211-247.
[5] Attenborough, F. (2015, forthcoming) A forgotten
legacy? Towards a disursive psychology of the media, in
C. Tileaga, E. Stokoe (eds.) Discursive Psychology: Classic and Contemporary Issues. London: Routledge.
[6] Horne, J., Wiggins, S. (2009) Doing being 'on the edge':
managing the dilemma of being authentically suicidal in
an online forum, Sociology of Health and Illness, 31(2):
170-184.
[7] MacMillan, K., Edwards, D. (1999) Who Killed the
Princess? Description and Blame in the British Press, Discourse Studies, 1(2): 151-174

[8] Attenborough, F. (2014) Rape is rape (except when its

not): the media, recontextualisation and violence against
women, Journal of Language Aggression and Conict,
2(2): 183-203.
[9] Ashmore, M. (1993) The Theatre of the Blind, Social
Studies of Science, 23(1): 67-106.
[10] Sneijder, P., and te Molder, H. (2005) Moral logic and
logical morality: attributions of responsibility and blame
in online discourse on veganism, Discourse and Society,
16: 675-696.

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