Social psychology and the body

Eve Shapiro

pp. 191-224

in: Amanda Ward (ed), Handbook of social psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

Social psychology is intimately about the bodies of individuals. The body is the mediator between the thinking, meaning-making mind and the sensory experience of interaction. While the material body has historically been absent from most micro sociological theorizing, modern society's focus on the body and on body/self projects has reignited interest in the body within social psychology. To take the body seriously in social psychology means both to recognize and theorize the body as social and to recognize and theorize the social self as shaped by the body and biology. This chapter begins by examining the body and embodiment in classical theory and then traces its development through pragmatism, early social psychology and phenomenology, and ends by examining its maturation in twenty-first-century social psychological research and theorizing.