Ideology

Most classical studies of ideology take place in philosophy and the social sciences, and treat ideology as negative - as 'false consciousness'. In this paper ideology is defined in more general terms, as a basic form of social cognition shared by the members of a group, representing group identity, group actions and their goals, group norms and values, relations to other groups, and presence or absence of group resources. Such ideologies represent group interests and are developed by groups to organize and control their discourse and other social practices, which may be to dominate or to resist other groups. General ideologies such as those of (anti) racism, sexism, feminism, socialism, neoliberalism, pacifism, etc. may control more specific socially shared attitudes about important social issues such as immigration, abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage or the economic crisis. Such ideologically based attitudes in turn may control the subjective mental models of individual group members, that is, representations of personal experiences. These mental models finally control the discourse and other social practices of group members. As is the case for underlying ideologies, ideologies and mental models, such ideological discourse is typically polarized between Us, the ingroup, and Them, the outgrpoup. It thus tends to emphasize the good things of Our own group and the bad things of the Others, and to deny or mitigate Our bad things and Their good things. This happens at all multimodal discourse levels, such as overall topics, the lexicon, syntax, speech acts, politeness strategies as well as many semantic strategies, typically negative and positive descriptions of ingroup and outgroup actions and actors.