ABSTRACT
In order to deal with the amount of information that is all around us in social relationships, we each develop ways of categorising that information and linking the categories together so that in some way they organise and predict how our world will work. We use our own categories or constructs to build up a view of how the social world is happening for us. By placing psychological order in our world we not only simply organise it but we actively create it, in such a way that future events are seen as ®tting in with the organisation that we have placed on the world. It therefore becomes possible for us to deal with future time by predicting how we believe social events occur and how people will behave. The way in which we shape our information becomes an `ideology' ± a system of psychological categories and constructs that shape and provide meaning for how we think about our experience in the world (Street and Downey 1996).
