Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the cover illustration
- A note on transcription notation
- Introduction
- 1 A discursive psychological approach
- 2 Intellectual disability as diagnostic and social category
- 3 The interactional production of ‘dispositional’ characteristics: or why saying ‘yes’ to one's interrogators may be smart strategy
- 4 Matters of identity
- 5 Talk to dogs, infants and …
- 6 A deviant case (written with Alec McHoul)
- 7 Some tentative conclusions
- Appendices
- References
- Index
3 - The interactional production of ‘dispositional’ characteristics: or why saying ‘yes’ to one's interrogators may be smart strategy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the cover illustration
- A note on transcription notation
- Introduction
- 1 A discursive psychological approach
- 2 Intellectual disability as diagnostic and social category
- 3 The interactional production of ‘dispositional’ characteristics: or why saying ‘yes’ to one's interrogators may be smart strategy
- 4 Matters of identity
- 5 Talk to dogs, infants and …
- 6 A deviant case (written with Alec McHoul)
- 7 Some tentative conclusions
- Appendices
- References
- Index
Summary
If a person is forced to give an absurd reply by making use of an alternative pronounced in an authoritative voice, it does not in the least prove that he is lacking in judgment.
(Binet, 1905: np)The famous social psychological phenomenon known as the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (Ross, 1977) suggests that humans are predisposed to attribute the actions of others (especially perhaps accountable, or otherwise morally disreputable actions) to characteristics of the person in question, yet tend to account for their own conduct in terms of situational constraints. John did x because he's mean-spirited, I did y because I had a gun to my head. On balance it would seem that what has been described by social psychologists as a defining characteristic of humanness,may also be seen at work in the scholarly accounts offered by these workers of the conduct of people described as ‘intellectually disabled’.That is, much of the psychological, and the greater proportion of the sociological literatures, can be read as an extended attempt to account for the conduct of intellectually disabled people in terms of inherent, individual, dispositional characteristics – rather than of the situations or circumstances in which the objects of their study find themselves.
The canonical texts concerning psychological practice, and the instruments designed to assess psychological functioning, construct testing as a largely unproblematic technical encounter (Fowler and Mangione, 1990; Foddy, 1993).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability , pp. 78 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004