ABSTRACT
This book is part of a new wave of research sweeping across social psychology, and breaking down boundaries between social psychology and other parts of the discipline. The chapters collected here illustrate the way that discourse analysis can help us refonnulate what it is that developmental and social psychologists, personality theorists and cognitive scientists think they are doing when they try to study what goes on 'inside' the individual. We argue that personality profiles for different jobs (Moir, Chapter 2, this volume), attitudes towards social issues (Marshall and Raabe, Chapter 3, this volume; Macnaghten, Chapter 4, this volume), prejudice towards women (Gill, Chapter 5, this volume), personal identity (Widdicombe, Chapter 6, this volume) and even deeply felt emotions like jealousy (Stenner, Chapter 7, this volume) are not things hiding inside the person which a psychologist can then 'discover' but are created by the language that is used to describe them. Psychological phenomena have a public and collective reality, and we are mistaken if we think that they have their origin in the private space of the individual.
