Introduction

In the last 50 years, social representation (SR) has become an established field within social, cultural, and political psychology and has attracted extensive numbers of students and scholars from around the world (with particular clusters in Europe, South America, and Australasia). Developing Durkheim’s collective and individual representations, the concept of social representations was presented by Serge Moscovici in 1961 in his study of the different understandings of psychoanalysis in different social groups in France. Research has gone on to examine the ways in which knowledge and social practices develop from any socially significant issues (see the list of applications below) in different public spheres (Jovchelovitch, 2007). As a whole, this research demonstrates that social representations are systems of communication and social influence that constitute the social realities of different groups in society. They serve as the principal means for establishing and extending the shared knowledge, common practices, and affiliations that bind social members together (Duveen, 2001, 2008) and thereby act to support systems of identity, community, inclusion, and exclusion.

Definition

In the most common definition, Moscovici (1972) explains that social representations are “a system of values, ideas and practices” that serve (a) to establish a social order that enables individuals to orientate themselves and master the material and social world they live in and (b) to enable communication among members of a community through a shared code for social exchange and for naming and classifying various aspects of the social world including their individual and group history (p.xiii).

This highlights the primary function of social representations: the purpose of making “something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar” (Moscovici, 1984, p. 24), as is evident in Moscovici’s study on psychoanalysis (1961), Jodelet’s classic study on social representations of madness (1991), and more recent studies on the public understanding of science (Bauer, Durant, & Gaskell, 2002).

Social representations thus enable the achievement of a shared social reality; they are ways of world-making (Moscovici, 1998). On the one hand, they are created to conventionalize objects, persons, and events by placing them in a familiar context. On the other hand, once established, they serve to influence social behavior and the negotiation of social identities, imposing themselves in social interaction and limiting socio-cognitive activities.

SR theory allows for the coexistence of competing and contradictory forms of knowledge in one and the same community, culture, and individual (Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Themel, 2000). Cognitive polyphasia implies that different and potentially incompatible systems of knowledge can coexist within one social group and can be employed by one and the same individual. In these knowledge encounters, social representations are created and transformed through processes of anchoring and objectification. Anchoring is a process of classification which locates the strange or foreign within the familiar. Objectification is a process of externalization by which representations are projected outwards into the world through images or propositions (Moscovici, 1984).

Through anchoring and objectification, we take on particular “presentations” of socially significant objects and reinterpret them to fit with what we know “already.” That is, we take on “presentations” and represent them. In this process the social representation may be reinforced or perhaps rearticulated or reenacted in various ways. These processes are dynamic – existing only in the relational encounter, in the in-between space recreated in dialogue and social encounters. Representations are not simply templates that relate to cognitive schemas. As Jodelet (1991) argues, a representation can be “used for acting in the world and on others” (p. 44), as well as for reacting, rejecting, or reforming a presentation of the world that conflicts with one’s stake, position, and identity.

Social representation research has been applied to many different practical areas, such as the public understanding of science (Bauer et al., 2002), legal innovation (Batel & Castro, 2009), citizenship (Andreouli & Howarth, 2012), gender (Duveen & Lloyd, 1986), religion (Wagner, Sen, Permanadeli, & Howarth, 2012), participation (Campbell & Jovchelovitch, 2000), intelligence (Carugati, Selleri, & Scappini, 1994), HIV/AIDS (Joffe, 1995), acculturation (Sammut, Sartawi, Giannini, & Labate, in press), and human rights (Staerklé, Clémence, & Doise, 1999).

Keywords

Social knowledge; social identity; inter-objectivity; cognitive polyphasia; anchoring; objectification

Traditional Debates

An important debate within SR research concerns the relationship between knowledge and practice or action (Marková, 2000). Social representations define what possible responses to certain events within a particular context are seen to be reasonable by different communities (Wagner et al., 2000). They describe how a particular response chosen by a particular individual to a particular stimulus is sensible in the conditions in which it has been generated. Hence rationality is contextually determined.

Another debate concerns the extent to which representations are collectively shared. The theory has been critiqued on the basis of the presumption that every mind needs to be infiltrated with the same images and explanations to develop a consensual view of reality. Rose et al. (1995) argue that social representations are shared but not consensual, meaning that a level of sharedness is involved in a common code for communication but that social interaction is nonetheless characterized by fragmentation and contradiction (Chryssides et al., 2009).

Increasingly there is significant interest on the relationship between representations, identities, social positioning, and intergroup relations (Sammut & Gaskell, 2010). Different representations relate to, defend, or challenge different social identities (Howarth, 2002) and are institutionalized in social and cultural practices (Jovchelovitch, 2007). Hence representations are consequential: they have social effects, support (unequal) social relations, and maintain ideological discourses. However, there is always room for representations to be contested and transformed (Duveen, 2001).

Finally, Moscovici (1961) distinguished between reified (scientific knowledge) and consensual (commonsense) universes. Howarth (2006) argues that science itself is not asocial and that the difference between the consensual and the reified points to a process of reification that privileges certain social representations as “expert knowledge.”

Critical Debates

Howarth (2006) has argued that SR theory should be understood as a critical theory that is fundamentally about the “battle of ideas” (Moscovici, 1998), the ways in which particular representations defend certain interests and protect certain identities as well as the possibilities for agency, contestation, and transformation. Hence it is important to consider the ways in which representations are consequential (in determining how realities are constructed and regulated) as well as contestory (in social psychological mechanisms for critical debate, critique, and social change). Elcheroth et al. (2011) demonstrate the ways in which SR research is valuable for political psychology and addresses questions of intergroup conflict, contested ideologies, and political agency. As Moscovici asserted, it is vitally important to address the politics inherent within social representations as otherwise social researchers will be guilty of the claim that we “calmly ignore social inequalities, political violence, wars, underdevelopment or racial conflict” (Moscovici, 1972, p. 21).