Introduction
Although psychology developed as a scientific discipline that aimed to identify the universal laws underlying human behavior, experiences of members of different social groups have been studied from the early days of the discipline. Events in North American and Western European history in the mid-twentieth century have lead psychologists to recognize the diversity of human experience and transform the discipline by focusing on this diversity explicitly. Critical psychologists with their emphasis on context, power, and justice have been influential in this transformation.
Study of diversity in psychology focused on processes such as categorization, stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, social identity development, intergroup relations, and more recently on intergroup inequality and social injustice.
Definition
Diversity, as studied by psychologists, is defined as social difference. Individuals in a society differ from each other in terms of the social categories to...
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Bikmen, N. (2014). Diversity. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_83
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_83
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