Notre interrogation porte sur la visibilité de la psychologie sociale à travers les forums de discussion Usenet. Ces espaces thématiques communautaires qui permettent d'échanger de très nombreuses informations sous forme de discussions en temps différé, ont servi de support pour interroger la diffusion de la psychologie sociale auprès du grand public. Les archives des forums Usenet ont été interrogées à l'aide des clefs psychosociologie, sociopsychologie et psychologie sociale. Outre les messages liés aux réseaux d'entre-aide et de recherche d'emploi, deux grandes (...) thématiques émergent de l'analyse des messages recueillis: l'utilisation de la psychologie sociale comme caution scientifique pour appuyer le discours émis et une psychologie sociale comme discipline essentiellement manipulatrice. Dans le corpus étudié, celle-ci semble privilégier la manipulation comme objet d'étude - ou en tout cas les individus ne retiendraient que cet objet - et, qui plus est, «manipule» en retour pour obtenir ses résultats.Our study is concerned with the visibility of social psychology through Usenet forums. These virtual communities, which enable the exchange of a multitude of information in discussion forums in non-real time, were the object of our study which explored the popularization of social psychology with the general public. Archives from Usenet were searched using the following keywords: psychosociology, sociopsychology and social psychology. Besides messages linked to help and job-search networks, two main themes emerged from the analysis of messages namely that social psychology is used as a source of scientific evidence to back up the opinions expressed and that socialpsychology is essentially a manipulating discipline. In the studied corpus, socialpsychology seems to privilege manipulation as an object of study - or at least that the individuals involved only remember that aspect – and that it moreover "manipulates" to obtain its results. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories and rumors, as forms manifesting “social thought”, share processes and functions. The few studies dealing specifically with the question of belief in rumors questioned the link between adhesion and transmission. The aim here will be to question the link between « knowledge », « adhesion » and « transmission » in conspiracy theories and rumors through two empirical studies. Can we know and transmit without adhering to? Can one know and adhere to without transmitting? Can we adhere to (...) and transmit without actually « knowing »? (shrink)

An extensive analysis of all social psychology textbooks included a history chapter published in French between 1947 and 2001, provides a rich corpus for the study of the history of social psychology. Drawing upon this corpus, in this article we study the historical spaces of social psychology in order to show how the discipline was located in geographical, urban, institutional and collective spaces. We argue that spaces are essentially related to some solitary and consensual scholars' names without any informative reference (...) to their institutions, nor to any trace of collective work. Moreover, we try to highlight several styles, ways and norms of collective writing the history of this discipline. (shrink)