The Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology is an essential resource for researchers and students of social psychology and related disciplines.

Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology

The theory of social representations is one of the most vigorous areas in social psychology. Far from constituting a homogeneous body of knowledge, the theory consists of several analytical perspectives, including the structural approach. In this paper I propose that most of the assumptions of the structural approach applied to social representations or the central core theory are grounded in traditional conceptions of social cognition and mental representations, which are at variance with the general theory. The fact that one can view the structural approach embedded within associative networks and schema models makes it similar to most theories of attitude structure. Since the structural approach has remained within a mentalist social cognition paradigm, this paper proposes to move it towards a theory of social cognition that reflects the sociocultural conditions of creation and transformation of thought, and then emphasizes the communicative and ideological components of social life.

On the Structural Approach to Social Representations

Craft vs. industrial: Habits, attitudes and motivations towards beer consumption in Mexico

In many westernized countries, organ donation rates are low in comparison with the need for life-saving organ transplants, and are at odds with generally high community endorsement of organ donation. This is particularly true for Western Australia, the location of this study. This contradiction between endorsement and donation is investigated within a framework that draws from Moscovici's (1984) theory of Social Representations, Guimelli's (1998) differentiation between normative and functional dimensions of the central core, and Billig's (1988) rhetorical position on the role of argumentation in discourse. Four focus group discussions on organ donation and transplantation were conducted. Analysis of the discourse suggests that the social representation of organ donation and transplantation can be understood best as a representational field organized around two dialectically 'opposed' images-the gift of life and the mechanistic removal and replacement of body parts. The normative and functional expression of these two images as a pro-donation stance and a qualified pro-donation stance is discussed, as is the role of argumentation in the production of a social representation.

Talking about transplants: social representations and the dialectical, dilemmatic nature of organ donation and transplantation.

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01298502/document

Trust as indicator of robot functional and social acceptance. An experimental study on user conformation to iCub answers

La pensée sociale

Social representation theory

Les recherches sur les representations sociales se font surtout par enquete. Or des travaux recents ont mis en evidence (en parlant de zone muette) le fait que des zones, normativement sensibles presentes dans une representation, peuvent etre masquees, c’est-a-dire non completement exprimees dans les conditions ordinaires d’enquete ; il faut alors recourir a des conditions specifiques pour demasquer ces zones. Une bonne connaissance de ce phenomene est donc necessaire pour eviter certaines erreurs et assurer la validite d’une enquete de representation. L’hypothese centrale est que le masquage / demasquage de ces aspects depend de l’enjeu de la situation, tel qu’il est percu par l’enquete par rapport aux normes impliquees dans la situation. Dans le but de bien montrer l’existence de ce phenomene, on presente quatre experimentations qui font varier l’intensite des effets de masquage ou de demasquage : en jouant sur la nature de la consigne, sur certaines caracteristiques de l’enqueteur, sur le deroulement de l’enquete, sur l’activation prealable du theme contre normatif ; ce ne sont que quelques variables parmi celles qui peuvent etre envisagees. Les objets de representation touchent a des evenements dramatiques tres mediatises (Islam, Musulmans), mais aussi a des themes plus familiers (la femme au travail, le travail masculin/feminin). Prenant pour reference la theorie structurale des representations, on essaiera, in fine, de situer les diverses expressions d’une meme representation dans le cadre de la theorie structurale du noyau central de la representation.

Christian Guimelli

Papers

La pensée sociale

Social representation theory

Effets de masquage dans l'expression d'une représentation sociale

Effets de contexte sur la production d'associations verbales: le cas des représentations sociales des Gitans

Contribution du modèle associatif des schèmes cognitifs de base à l'analyse structurale des représentations sociales