The new handbook of language and social psychology is a collection of essays that aim to highlight the importance of linguistic factors in social psychology and to stress the role of social interaction in the study of language. It follows in the footsteps of The handbook of social psychology, published just over 10 years ago. The goal of the present volume, as stated by one of the editors (Robinson), is to promote interest in and understanding of the dual relationship between the study of language and social psychology. Robinson states that the new handbook, in contrast with the original handbook, puts more emphasis on the “five ints”: intentions and interpretations in interpersonal and intergroup interactions. The volume delivers on its promise of promoting interest and understanding. There are a number of stimulating chapters, of which some provide an overview of a research area, others a particular perspective on a problem or a synthesis of different strands of research, and still others speculations, questions, and directions for future research. The volume as a whole is invaluable as a reference book and for an overview of current research questions in language and social psychology.

The book consists of 32 chapters, subdivided into six sections. There are far too many engaging chapters to be able to do justice to them all, so I will discuss only a subset of them. First, I present an overview of the methodological concerns that appear many times in the volume, followed by some of the applications of language and social psychology research to society. Finally, I point to some chapters that raise challenging issues for the future.

Questions and concerns about appropriate methodology appear in many of the chapters. The main tension appears to be between those researchers who favor a qualitative approach and those who favor a quantitative one. In some cases, choice of methodology is based on the kind of data that the researcher is dealing with; however, in many cases choice of methodology seems to be a question of taste and ideology. For example, Jonathan Potter and Derek Edwards critique the dominant perspective in social psychology, where it is assumed that social behavior is based on information from perceptual input. In contrast, they advocate a discursive social psychology, which stresses activities that are done through discourse and are a part of situated practices. As well as rejecting a particular view of social interaction, Potter & Edwards also reject the use of experiments, surveys, and interviews in favor of qualitative analyses of natural interactions.

Potter & Edwards give an overview of their perspective on social interaction. Discursive psychology is the use of discourse – that is, talk and text – as a social practice. Three properties of discourse are fundamental to Potter & Edwards. (i) Discourse is situated and has rhetorical properties; neither characteristic figures in the mainstream social psychology perspective. (ii) Discourse is action-oriented; in the dominant social psychology perspective, attitudes are inner entities that drive behavior, but according to the discursive perspective, attitudes are evaluations that are not separable from discourse practices. (iii) Discourse is constructed; the discourse itself is constructed, and reality is constructed through discourse. It is because discourse is used to construct reality and cannot be separated from inner states, such as attitudes, that Potter & Edwards reject the dominant factor-and-outcomes model, in which social life is an interplay of factors that determine specific outcomes.

Other chapters also emphasize the use of qualitative approaches. One especially worth mentioning is by Sunwolf & Lawrence Frey. These authors claim that narrative is the principal way for people to structure, experience, and know the world. Methodologically, Sunwolf & Frey stress the importance of examining individual narratives for the form and function of a story, how the story is told, and the effects the story has.

Both Potter & Edwards and Sunwolf & Frey present modes of conceptualizing social interactions that challenge the dominant social psychological perspective. However, there is no reason that a commitment to discursive social psychology should preclude the use of experimental methodology and quantitative techniques. This point is made by Ben Slugoski & Denis Hilton, who argue that one can maintain an emphasis on discourse while using experimental techniques to test specific hypotheses. They suggest that one can investigate specific features of discourse situations to test what factors affect behavior. For example, there is an assumption in social psychology that inferences drawn during conversation occur because the addressee is treating the speaker as an intentional agent. This hypothesis can be tested by persuading an addressee that a message has been generated either by an intentional agent or by a non-intentional agent, such as a computer, and then measuring the addressee's resulting inferences. Hence, discourse factors can be teased apart by using experimental approaches.

This tension between qualitative and quantitative approaches is unfortunate. There is a very nice discussion of this by Robinson, who bemoans needless arguments about which method is the “correct” one. His view is that methodological questions should be decided on the basis of the question asked: “Suffice it to say that in an earlier existence as a biologist, I did not experience methodological battles. The means for answering questions depended upon the nature of the question asked” (p. 28). Given the richness and complexity of the phenomena studied at the intersection between language and social psychology, it is doubtful that a particular methodology will lead scientists to “the truth”; rather, “horse for courses” seems a much more sensible option.

The second theme that recurs throughout the volume is the applications to and implications of language and social psychology research for society. Most of the chapters in the volume in fact conclude with a pointer to both established and possible future applications. For example, Charles Berger outlines a theoretical framework for investigating miscommunication and communication failure, as well as discussing the empirical evidence and outlining the application to mass media. Berger presents various taxonomies of communication failure and a critique of existing models. The taxonomies provide a way to catalogue communication problems that can arise between people, such as acoustic problems (e.g., failing to hear a particular word), or lexical problems (e.g., failing to understand a specific word), right through to the making of unwarranted inferences. He goes on to argue that communication failure is found not only in face-to-face interactions but also in communication between mass media and the audience. Berger claims that the mass media use specific communication devices to encourage the audience to make erroneous inferences. Although such faulty inferences do not involve the goals and plans of a conversation partner, as in face-to-face interaction, they can have significant social consequences because they lead the audience to incorrect beliefs about the physical and social world. For instance, teenagers who do or do not watch television talk shows every day differ in their estimation of various social phenomena: Those who watch talk shows overestimate the incidence of teenage pregnancy, the number of students in possession of guns at school, and the number of teenagers who run away from home. Because of the potential social implications of such unwarranted beliefs, Berger proposes that communication researchers should do more to expose communication failures and devise strategies for overcoming them.

Another chapter that explores the social implications of language and social psychology investigates how communication impacts on health. Mary Anne Fitzpatrick & Anita Vangelisti provide evidence that social interaction is fundamental for achieving positive health outcomes. Specifically, they claim that communication can affect quality of life, prolong life, and affect how people respond to health-related advice – all important social consequences. Fitzpatrick & Vangelisti emphasize the psychosocial dimensions of health over biological and medical ones, although they do acknowledge that for some diseases, such as the end stage of Oates cell carcinoma, no amount of communication will cure the patient. Their main point is that communication affects both the prognosis of patients and how many people succumb to illness by making people understand health risk messages better.

As an example of how communication can affect the prognosis of a patient, Fitzpatrick & Vangelisti discuss spousal interaction style and its impact on hypertension. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is strongly linked to death from stroke, congestive heart failure, and coronary disease. Fitzpatrick & Vangelisti report that frequency of hostile exchanges between husbands and wives with hypertension is associated with increases in blood pressure. The implications of such findings is that by changing the communication patterns between spouses, the rate of cardiovascular diseases could perhaps be reduced. Similarly, children who are chronically ill, with for example rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes mellitus, have better psychological and physical outcomes when they have supportive parents than when they do not. Such findings clearly show the need for a better understanding of the role of communication in health.

Part 3 of the handbook is a thought-provoking introduction to various phenomena at the center of language and social psychology that pose some challenging questions for researchers in the future. Mary Lee Hummert & Ellen Bouchard Ryan provide an overview of patronizing, by which one person addresses another in a manner which suggests that the former has a low opinion of the latter's competence. Specifically, they discuss how patronizing language is displayed by young people toward older people. This is studied under a number of different titles: elderspeak, dependence-inducing, and secondary baby talk. Their chapter questions why such patronizing talk occurs: Is the talk justified by decreased competence on the part of the elderly? Or is it due to speakers' holding a negative stereotype of the elderly? Or is it, in fact, due to the speaker's trying to help communication by speaking in an easily understood style?

Jenny Tornquist, Eric Anderson, & Bella De Paulo, in their chapter on deceiving, present a convincing argument that people are very bad at detecting deception. In more than 100 studies, it has been shown that people distinguished truth from lies only at chance levels – that is, they correctly identify a lie only half the time. People also believe that they lie less often than other people in their cohort. Several questions emerge: Why are we so bad at lie detection? Many studies have focused on lie detection, but relatively little is known about whether some people are better deceivers than others. What are the characteristics of a good lie and a good liar? And how good are we at detecting deception from those we know, in contrast to experimental settings which present information from strangers?

Finally, there is a strong commitment in many of the chapters to cross-cultural research “as a brake on overzealous generalizations” (Robinson, p. 30). Sunwolf & Frey discuss variations in narrative structure as a function of culture. For example, the number of times oppositions, encounters, and subparts of narrative are repeated vary cross-culturally: Western European folktales favor cycles of three, whereas Canadian and Alaskan Athabaskans favor four, and Chinookans favor five repetitions. In another chapter, Michael Hecht, Ronald Jackson II, Sheryl Lindsley, Susan Stauss, & Karen Johnson investigate how language is used to build identity. They compare similarities and differences in communication between various ethnic groups – African Americans, Mexican Americans and Asian Americans – and the ancestral traditions from which they emerged. One hopes such cross-cultural research will be commonplace in the next decade and that it will be strongly represented in a third volume of the Handbook of language and social psychology.