Abstract
Much social psychological study of attitudes and attributions has treated these as properties that are intrinsic to the individual, indicating how the individual evaluates or explains phenomena in the external social world. Critical approaches, by contrast, argue that in expressing evaluations or explanations, individuals are constructing versions of the phenomena that they are describing. From this perspective, evaluative or explanatory talk is oriented towards achieving local outcomes, such as accounting for individuals’ choices, avoiding blame or similar. Attitudes and attributions can thus be seen as produced in discourse and oriented to social actions rather than being (mere) outcomes of individual information processing.
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Notes
- 1.
Note on transcription notation
The transcription symbols included in extracts in this chapter form part of a system devised by Gail Jefferson (2004) for transcribing talk. The aim of transcribing talk in this way is to make available to the reader information about how the speaker delivered the talk, by, for example, indicating points of emphasis, pitch and intonation, and length of pauses between utterances. This level of transcription is designed to reproduce the talk in a form that reasonably reflects actual speech. Details of the transcription symbols found in these extracts are given below.
[ ]
Overlapping talk is shown by square brackets, with ‘[’ indicating where the overlap begins and ‘]’ indicating where the overlapped utterance (or part of an utterance) stops.
=
An ‘equal to’ sign ‘=’ at the end of one line and another at the end of the succeeding line indicates that there is no gap between the two lines.
(.) (dot)
A dot in parentheses ‘(.)’ indicates a very slight gap.
: (colon)
A colon ‘:’ indicates that the sound immediately preceding the colon has been elongated, with the lengthening of the sound indicated by the number of colons.
↑
An upwards pointing arrow ‘↑’ indicates that the speaker is raising pitch.
↓
A downwards pointing arrow ‘↓’ indicates the speaker is lowering pitch.
Numbers
Numbers in parentheses, for example, (0.3) indicate time elapsed in tenths of a second.
Underlining
Underlining of letters or words (e.g. ‘ah’) indicates that the speaker is stressing that part of the speech by increasing volume or raising or lowering pitch.
Upper case
Upper case indicates that the speaker’s utterance is produced with a particularly high volume (e.g. ‘AH’).
Punctuation
Punctuation markers indicate the speaker’s intonation. For example, the question mark ‘?’ indicates a ‘questioning’ intonation.
° (degree sign)
The superscripted degree sign ‘°’ indicates unvoiced production.
< (left caret)
Placed before a word, a left caret ‘<’ indicates a hurried start. Placed after a word it, indicates that the word stopped suddenly.
> < (right/left carets)
Right/left carets ‘> <’ surrounding an utterance (or part of an utterance) indicate the speech is speeding up.
< > (left/right carets)
Left/right carets < > surrounding an utterance (or part of an utterance) indicate the speech is slowing down.
– (dash)
A dash ‘–’ indicates that an utterance is ‘cut off’.
hhh
A row of instances of the letter ‘h’ ‘hhh’ indicates an out-breath.
.hhh
A row of instances of the letter ‘h’ prefixed by a dot, ‘.hhh’ indicates an in-breath.
( )
Empty parentheses ( ) indicate that the transcriber could not make out what was said or, alternatively, who was speaking.
(ah) (word in parenthesis)
Placing parentheses around a word indicates that the transcription is uncertain.
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McVittie, C., McKinlay, A. (2017). Attitudes and Attributions. In: Gough, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_14
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