Social Representation

The concept of social Representation , one of the notions founders of the social Psychology, but also of the Sociology, indicates a form of social knowledge, the thought of the common Sens, socially elaborate and divided by the members of the same social unit or Culturel. It is a manner of thinking, of adapting, of interpreting our daily reality and our report/ratio with the world.

A history of the concept

Emile Durkheim introduces in 1898 the idea of Représentation collective and fixed to social psychology the task to study the social representations.

Indeed, the social psychology located at the interface of psychological and social, individual and the collective appears the discipline the best capable one to think the social one like the cognitive one and the properties of cognition like something of social connected to emotional and the symbolic system.

Cognitive psychology highlighted the structural properties of the Représentation. But, its models based on the artificial intelligence (data processing, storage….) the mental process of its social, psychic and body base crosses.

However, Henri Wallon since 1942 then later Jean Piaget showed the importance of the postural and imitative driving base in the representation.

Michel Foucault , from the epistemological point of view and for archeology of the To know, introduced as for him the concept of épistémè: it is about a design of the world which gathers different Paradigme S or mental representations individual, relating to the practice of the world, the Histoire, the Cosmologie,… Michel Foucault thinks that we enter one new era, that he calls Hypermodernité.

In addition, work analyzing the conditions of comprehension and the linguistic exchange ( John Searle ) postulates a back melts Culturel, a tacit knowledge, conventions, i.e. what in the Représentation is social.

From the clinical point of view inspired for the psychoanalysis D. Kaes articulates, as for him, in its work the cognitive processes, the representations with the order of the desires and the affects.

The recent contributions of the history ( Georges Duby ), of sociology ( Pierre Bourdieu ), of anthropology ( Marc Trough ) recognize and clarify the function of the Représentation in the constitution of the orders and the social reports/ratios, the orientation of the collective behaviors and the transformation of the social world. For example Georges Duby in connection with the imaginary one of feudalism speaks about the representation like “frame”, “structure latent”, “simple Image” of the social organization ensuring the passage towards various systems symbolic systems.

These various approaches allow that cognitive psychology and social sciences are found by the means of social psychology.

In France, Serge Moscovici poses the terminals of a vast research field articulated around the social representations. In its various works (,), it shows the role of the social representations in the institution of a consensual reality, their socio-cognitive function in the integration of the innovation, the orientation of the communications and the conduits. It also shows that the social representations can be studied overall like contents of which dimensions (information, values, opinions…) are coordinated by an organizing principle (attitude, standards…) or in a way focused like structures to know organizing the unit of the significances relating to the object concerned. This second approach is to be put in parallel at the concept of central organizer worked out by Solomon Asch in 1954 at the time of its research on the formation of the impressions.

D. Jodelet in 1985 and 1991, and then M.L. Rouquette in 1996 specify the specificity of the representative phenomena have regard to the ideology:

The social representation has an object (for example the mental disease) whereas the ideology relates to a class of objects whose borders remain permanently open. For example the communist ideology could inspire by the judgments on the religion but also the psychoanalysis, etc

The Idéologie interprets and does not distinguish what is interpretable of what is not it. The ideology seems a whole of conditions and cognitive constraints governing the development of a family of social representation, it is located at a larger level of general information. They are the same conditions and cognitive constraints which on the one hand bind certain representations together and on the other hand reject the different or antagonistic representations. This same mechanism explains partly how the members of a reflexive group are identified without knowing each other. M.L. Rouquette writes “Behind the apparent diversity of the preferences and of engagements configuring rules of social origin are”.

Definition of the concept

After this outline of the history altogether rather short of the concept of social representation, we now will attach we to define it precisely.

Several authors ( Piaget , Moscovici ) tried to formulate definitions giving an account of various dimensions of the concept of social representation, we will propose two, one of it dynamic ( Jodelet ), the other more descriptive ( Fischer ):

According to D. Jodelet

“The concept of social representation indicates a specific form of knowledge, the knowledge of common direction, whose contents express the operation of generative and functional processes socially marked. More largely, it indicates a form of social thought. The social representations are methods of practical thought directed towards the communication, the comprehension and the control of social environment, material and ideal. As such, they present characters specific to the plan of the organization of the contents, mental operations and logic. The social marking of the contents or the processes of representation is to be referred in the conditions and the contexts in which emergent representations, with the communications by which they circulate, with the functions that they serve in the interaction with the world and the others. ”

According to G.N. Fischer

“The social representation is a development process perceptive and mental of the reality which transforms the social objects (people, contexts, situations) of symbolic systems categories (values, beliefs, ideologies) and confers a cognitive statute to them, making it possible to apprehend the aspects of the ordinary life by a realignment of our own conduits inside the social interactions”

Notes and sources

Jean-Marie Seca, 2003, social representations , Paris, Armand Colin

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