Origin and definition
The term social representation was originally coined by Serge Moscovici in 1961, [2] in his study on the reception and circulation of psychoanalysis in France. It is understood as the collective elaboration "of a social object by the community for the purpose of behaving and communicating". [3] They are further referred to as "system of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function; first, to establish an order which will enable individuals to orient themselves in their material and social world and to master it; and secondly to enable communication to take place among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history". [4] In his study, Moscovici sought to investigate how scientific theories circulate within common sense, and what happens to these theories when they are elaborated upon by a lay public. For such analysis, Moscovici postulated two universes: the reified universe of science, which operates according to scientific rules and procedures and gives rise to scientific knowledge, and the consensual universe of social representation, in which the lay public elaborates and circulates forms of knowledge which come to constitute the content of common sense.
Moscovici's pioneering study described how three segments of French society in the 1950s, i.e. the urban-liberal, the Catholic, and the communist milieus, responded to the challenge of psychoanalytic ideas. Moscovici found that communication processes, the contents, and their consequences differed across the three social segments. Moscovici identified propaganda as the typical communication of the communist milieu, whereby communication is ordered systematically emphasising incompatibility and conflict. The intention is to generate negative stereotypes. Propagation was the typical form of the Catholic segment, identified as didactic and well-ordered but with the intention to make limited concessions to a subgroup of Catholics with affinities to psychoanalysis, and simultaneously, to set limits to the acceptance within the established orthodoxy of the Church. Diffusion was typical of urban-liberal milieus, whereby communication was merely intended to inform people about new opportunities, with little resistance to psychoanalysis. [2]
Anchoring and objectification
Moscovici described two main processes by which the unfamiliar is made familiar: anchoring and objectification. Anchoring involves the ascribing of meaning to new phenomena – objects, relations, experiences, practices, etc. – by means of integrating it into existing worldviews, so it can be interpreted and compared to the "already known". [5] In this way, the threat that the strange and unfamiliar object poses is being erased. In the process of objectification something abstract is turned into something almost concrete.
Social representations, therefore, are depicted as both the process and the result of social construction. In the socio-cognitive activity of representation that produces representations, social representations are constantly converted into a social reality while continuously being re-interpreted, re-thought, re-presented. [6] [7]
Moscovici's theorisation of social representations was inspired by Émile Durkheim's notion of collective representations. The change from collective representations to social representations has been brought about by the societal conditions of modernity. [7] [8]
Interpretation and developments
Social representations should neither be equated with relatively stable collective representations, nor should they be confused with individual, cognitive representations. This has been elaborated by several authors who contributed to the theory: Gerard Duveen and Barbara Lloyd emphasized the articulation of the individual and the collective in micro-genetic processes of socialization, [9] Wolfgang Wagner theorized about the role of action and social interaction in the construction of social representations, [10] [11] and Sandra Jovchelovitch proposed to regard social representations as a space in-between, at the cross-roads between the individual and society that is the public sphere, that links objects, subjects and activities. [12] Most authors agree that social representations are dynamic elements of knowledge that depend on social conflict and dispute to originate and that have a history of elaboration and change over time. Bauer & Gaskell integrate this view in their formal model relating three elements: subjects, or carriers of the representation; an object, activity, or idea that is represented; and a project of a social group within which the representation makes sense. [13] This conceptualisation is known as the toblerone model of social representations.
There have been various developments within the field since Moscovici's original proposition of the theory. Jean-Claude Abric and his colleagues have explored the structural elements of social representations, distinguishing between core and peripheral elements in terms of the centrality and stability of certain beliefs. This approach has come to be known as the central nucleus theory. [14] Saadi Lahlou explores the relations between social representations and behavior, focusing on eating representations and consumer behaviour. [15] Other important developments have been made by Caroline Howarth in linking Social identity theory with the theory of social representations, [16] by Gerard Duveen in elaborating developmental aspects in relation to the micro-genesis of social representations of gender, [9] by Janos Laszlo and Michael Murray in linking narrative psychology with social representation theory [17] [18] and by Wolfgang Wagner in fathoming the relationship between discursive processes, collective behaviour patterns and the construction of social representations. [19]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
In the interdisciplinary fields of sociology, social ontology, and communication theory, social constructionism serves as a theoretical framework that suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, instead of the pure objective observation of physical reality. The theory of social constructionism posits that much of what individuals perceive as 'reality' is actually the outcome of a dynamic process of construction influenced by social conventions and structures.
In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives.
Serge Moscovici was a Romanian-born French social psychologist, director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale, which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. He was a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Officer of the Légion d'honneur, as well as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Moscovici's son, Pierre Moscovici, was European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs.
Ivana Marková FBA is a Czech born social psychologist known for her work on language and the constructs of communication.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
Jungian archetypes are a concept from psychology that refers to a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings. The psychic counterpart of instinct, archetypes are thought to be the basis of many of the common themes and symbols that appear in stories, myths, and dreams across different cultures and societies. Some examples of archetypes include those of the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood, among others. The concept of the collective unconscious was first proposed by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Sandra Jovchelovitch, from Porto Alegre, Brazil, is a social psychologist, currently Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the MSc program in Social and Cultural Psychology at the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics (LSE), of which she serves as head since August 2007. Dr. Jovchelovitch is co-editor of the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology and directs a book series on Contemporary Social Psychology for the Brazilian publishing house Vozes. She also serves on the editorial boards of the European Journal of Social Psychology and Psicologia e Sociedade. She has held appointments at the Maison de Sciences de l'Homme, under the auspices of CNPq and also teaches regularly in Brazil, being on the faculty of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
George Gaskell is a British Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Formerly Director of the Methodology Institute, which he established with Colm O’Muircheartaigh, he was Pro-director for Planning and Resources and a member of the LSE Council and Court of Governors.
Martin W. Bauer is a Professor of social psychology. He directs the MSc in Social and Public Communication at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. Martin Bauer was a Research Fellow in 'Public Understanding of Science' at the Science Museum in London, an academic visitor to the Maison des Sciences de l'homme in Paris, and he teaches regularly in Brazil at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.
Societal psychology is a development within social psychology which emphasizes the all-embracing force of the social, institutional, and cultural environments, and with it the study of social phenomena in their own right as they affect, and are affected by, the members of the particular society. The term societal psychology was coined by Hilde Himmelweit and George Gaskell in 1990, in preference to sociological social psychology, to avoid a single alliance to one other discipline.
Attachment theory, originating in the work of John Bowlby, is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory that provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships between human beings.
Wolfgang Wagner is an Austrian social psychologist, currently professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Formerly he was at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and affiliated with the Department of Social Psychology and Methodology at the University of San Sebastián, Spain. He is renowned for his contributions to the Theory of Social Representations.
Cognitive polyphasia is where different kinds of knowledge, possessing different rationalities live side by side in the same individual or collective. From Greek: polloi "many", phasis "appearance".
Jean-Claude Abric was a French psychologist, professor in social psychology and the former head of the Social Psychology Laboratory at the University of Aix-Marseille.
Saadi Lahlou is Professor in Social Psychology, in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics. He conducts and publishes research in the areas of social psychology, consumer behaviour, survey and forecast methods, lexical analysis, cognition and design. He is the Director of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study
Collective representations are concepts, ideas, categories and beliefs that do not belong to isolated individuals, but are instead the product of a social collectivity. Durkheim originated the term collective representations to emphasise the way that many of the categories of everyday use–space, time, class, number etc–were in fact the product of collective social life: “Collective representations are the result of an immense co-operation, which stretches not only into space but into time as well”. Collective representations are generally slow-changing and backed by social authority, and can be seen as the product of self-referencing institutions.
John Maze (1923–2008) was an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney from 1951 to 1986. Recognised for his achievements in philosophy and psychology, he was awarded a Nuffield Foundation Travelling Fellowship with the University of London in 1958, and returned there as an Honorary Research Fellow in 1980. Maze's theoretical psychology extended from analyses of psychoanalytic metapsychology, to critique of concerns of psychology research of the day, including concepts of attitude, motivation, psychological homeostasis, psychological variables and social constructionism. Drawing on processes of conceptual and logical analysis, Maze sought to draw out logical inconsistencies and conceptual confusions apparent in theoretical psychological discourse. It is the logical structure of his theory and conclusions, as a function of a long connection with Andersonian realism which renders Maze's contribution as unique in theoretical psychology.
Robert Maclaughlin Farr was a social psychologist from Northern Ireland who played an important role in promoting and developing social representation theory.
