Prejudice reduction and historical understanding: insights from developmental and social psychology

CARRETERO, MARIO; BARREIRO, ALICIA

Aalborg

Seminario; . Human Development in socio-cultural context: understanding conflict and change. International Seminar: Innovations in Psychology Lectures Series; 2021

Center for Cultural Psychology, Universtity of Aalborg

In the last decades, there have been some efforts to complement the contributions of social and developmental psychology to understand the meaning-making process that individuals and social groups develop to make sense of their social worlds. In this frame, this chapter will emphasize that interdisciplinary work from both disciplines could bring new insights into the explanations of prejudice development and reduction by allowing the jointed analysis of the sociogenesis, microgénesis, and ontogenetic processes. However, a complementary analysis combining the main assumptions of both disciplines must deal with some tensions: the complexity of social knowledge, rational vs irrational thinking processes; heteronomous interactions (social transmission) vs. autonomous interactions (social cooperation) in knowledge construction process. Finally, we illustrated this analysis by considering the main findings of the research in conceptual change -a trend of developmental psychology- that may contribute to prejudice reduction allowing more objective understandings of the historical processes, by deconstructing national master narratives and essentialized national identities.