Social psychology and folk psychology

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24653163
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Social psychology
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: Karasawa Kaori 東京大学, 人文社会系研究科, 教授 (50249348)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): TODAYAMA Kazuhisa 名古屋大学, 大学院情報科学研究科, 教授 (90217513)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 通俗的信念

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Social psychology often uses folk psychology as a resource for making hypotheses and constructing the academic concepts. Folk psychology is a list of naive beliefs which describe the relationship between psychological concepts and social behavior, and lay people often adopt it when explaining own and others’ social behavior. This project examined the relationship between folk psychology and social psychology and clarified some methodological problems when folk psychology is misused, as well as its contribution for social psychology to be a platform to discuss the psychological phenomena at physiological, intra-personal, interpersonal, and societal levels. Furthermore the project, through empirical studies of social cognition, demonstrated the usefulness of folk psychology as a resource for the research hypotheses concerning the roles of the concepts came from naive psychology (i.e., cognition, motivations, emotions and intentions).

Free Research Field

社会心理学