Wolfgang Wagner (social psychologist)

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Wolfgang Wagner
Portrait of Wolfgang Wagner in 2017.jpg
Born1949 (age 74–75)
NationalityAustrian
Alma mater University of Vienna
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology
Institutions Johannes Kepler University Linz

Wolfgang Wagner (born 1949 in Vienna, Austria) 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.

Contents

Biography

Wolfgang Wagner studied psychology, philosophy and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he received his PhD. He trained in sociology at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies and took the position of Assistant Professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz 1979 where he also received his habilitation. He has two children, Joy Pamela who is a politician in Austria, and Joscha David, an engineer. His brother, Günter Paul, is an Evolutionary Biologist. Since 2018 he is professor of psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. [1] He is founding editor of Papers on Social Representations and board member of several scholarly journals. As a social scientists he has been expert consultant to the European Union’s DG XII and panel member for European Research Council. He is known for his contribution to the Theory of Social Representations, [2] Societal psychology, Public understanding of science and psychological essentialism.

Work

In his professional publications, Wolfgang Wagner covers a wide range of social psychological topics that have to do with the interaction of individual and collective processes. Throughout his career Wagner explored the mechanisms involved in the individual vs. cultural vs. social interface in modern and in more traditional societies. In doing so he attempted to integrate Social Cognition, Social Constructionism, Discourse Theory, and Social Representations Theory.

Social Representation Theory

Social Representation Theory is an approach that bridges the traditional divide between the individual and the collective in psychology and the social sciences. The theory was first presented by Serge Moscovici in 1961. [3] Wagner took up this thread of ideas and illustrated the theory’s cornerstones in empirical studies. The theory and its development are summarized in Wagner & Hayes’ 2005 monograph. [4]

With regard to knowledge systems Wagner theorizes that people have access to others’ representational systems to enable concerted interaction even and particularly in cases of conflict. Hence, he suggested the existence of a system of holomorphic or meta-representations that encompass not only an individual's or a group's representation of an issue but also bits and pieces of the adversary's view of the world. [5] [6]

In terms of representational structure Wolfgang Wagner and colleagues showed that the existence of a well-structured representation crucially depends on an ongoing debate or discourse. Even though people do have lots of ideas about a vast range of objects, their ideas will not constitute a well-organized representation in the absence of a pressing situation that triggers extended discourse about a particular issue. [7] Another central tenet of Wagner's thinking is the constructivist unity of a social representation and the social object it constructs. He also popularises social scientific research for the general public like in the interviews in the Estonian weekly SIRP and in the science news portal Novaator [8]

Public Understanding of Science and the Theory of Collective Symbolic Coping

Serge Moscovici's research on how psychoanalytic theory was received in the French public was an early approach to Public Understanding of Science. Together with George Gaskell, Martin Bauer, Nicole Kronberger and others Wagner worked on how the European public responded to the introduction of genetically modified organisms, which resulted in a number of key publications [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

Intergroup Psychology

Wolfgang Wagner, together with Nicole Kronberger and Peter Holtz, extended the framework of Social Representation Theory by including Psychological Essentialism as a hitherto overlooked representational tool in thinking about natural organisms and social groups. As an outcome of their research on genetic engineering, the authors showed that thinking in terms of essence, that is by attributing living beings a species-specific essence, has the curious consequence that genetic hybrids are perceived as lacking identity and a clear belonging to a natural kind. The hybrid's lack of belonging makes respondents judge them as close to being monsters; a straight continuation of the cultural interpretation of monsters signalling a category confusion. Their Essentialist Theory of Hybrids gives an easy explanation of the frequently observed „yuk-factor“ with regard to genetically modified organisms. [15] [16] This work received the Misumi Award

Related Research Articles

Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In Categories, Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a substance that, as George Lakoff put it, "make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing". The contrary view—non-essentialism—denies the need to posit such an "essence".

Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas. It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Fodor</span> American philosopher (1935–2017)

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.

Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.

Social representations are a system of values, ideas, metaphors, beliefs, and practices that serve to establish social order, orient participants and enable communication among the members of groups and communities. Social representation theory is a body of theory within social psychology and sociological social psychology. It has parallels in sociological theorizing such as social constructionism and symbolic interactionism, and is similar in some ways to mass consensus and discursive psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Representation (arts)</span> Signs that stand in for and take the place of something else

Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements. Signs are arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations.

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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.

A mental representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions.

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.

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 has served 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).

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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.

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Common coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations and motor representations are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation for both perception and action. More important, seeing an event activates the action associated with that event, and performing an action activates the associated perceptual event.

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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.

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References

  1. ↑ Allik, J. (2021). Eesti psühholoogia lugu (The story of Estonian psychology, Estonian). Tartu, EE: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus.
  2. ↑ Verheggen, T., & Baerveldt, C. (2007). We don’t share! The social representation approach, enactivism and the ground for an intrinsically social psychology. Culture & Psychology, 13(1), 5-27.
  3. ↑ Moscovici, S. (1961). La psychanalyse son image et son public. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
  4. ↑ Wagner, W. & Hayes, N. (2005). Everyday Discourse and Common-Sense—The Theory of Social Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  5. ↑ Wagner, W. (2021). Groups in contact: Meta-representations, interobjectivity, and cultural incompatibilities. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 51(1), 2-24.
  6. ↑ Wagner, W. (1995). Social representations, group affiliation, and projection: Knowing the limits of validity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 25, 125-140.
  7. ↑ Wagner, W., Valencia, J. & Elejabarrieta, F. (1996). Relevance, discourse and the "hot" stable core of social representations—A structural analysis of word associations. British Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 331-352.
  8. ↑ Wagner, W., Kello, K., & Rämmer, A. (2018). Making social objects: The theory of social representation. In A. Rosa & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (2nd edition) (pp. 130-147). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  9. ↑ "Genfreie" Paradeiser für Europa? Die Presse, 6. Mai 1997
  10. ↑ Wagner, W., Kronberger, N., Allum, N., De Cheveigné, S., Diego, C., Gaskell, G. et al. (2002). Pandora’s genes - images of genes and nature. In M. Bauer & G. Gaskell (Eds.), Biotechnology - the Making of a Global Controversy (pp. 244-276). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  11. ↑ “Die Grenzen des Klonens”. Ärztemagazin, Nr 5, 1998.
  12. ↑ Wagner, W., Kronberger, N., & Seifert, F. (2002). Collective symbolic coping with new technology: Knowledge, images and public discourse. British Journal of Social Psychology, 41(3), 323-343.
  13. ↑ Interview: "Die genetisch vorprogrammierte Gesellschaft". Der Standard, 28. Februar 2001 (Page A7)
  14. ↑ “Biotechnologie in Europa”, Round Table, Austrian Radio broadcast, January 2002.
  15. ↑ Wagner, W., Kronberger, N., Nagata, M., Sen, R., et al. (2010). Essentialist Theory of 'Hybrids': From Animal Kinds to Ethnic Categories and Race. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 13(4), 232-246.
  16. ↑ Holtz, P., & Wagner, W. (2009). Essentialism and attribution of monstrosity in racist discourse: Right-wing internet postings about Africans and Jews. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 19(6), 411-425.
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