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Discuss the social cognition, social identity, and discursive approaches to social psychology. Compare and contrast these approaches with reference to key debates in the literature.

What is this question asking? This question is asking you to evaluate the contribution to social psychology (SP) of each of the these three major approaches in terms of their ontological and epistemological assumptions (social cognition is firmly realist and locates phenomena inside individuals, social identity theory is also internal-individualistic but tries to incorporate e n element of ‘the social’ into its theory – it’s a ‘half-way house’ between approaches that are firmly internal-individualistic and entirely social such as social constructionism).  You can use an example of a social issue (“For example, with reference to the social issue of racism, ….”). These three approaches can be viewed on a continuum ranging from soc cog at one end, to social identity theory somewhat in the middle and social constructionism at the other end.

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