Abstract
The theory of social representations is one of the major theories in social psychology with the thousands of scientific articles that has been published since its birth. In this article we return to the reasons for this success. First, it can be explained by the relative flexibility of the initial postulates of this theory. This flexibility has allowed researchers who are sometimes far removed from psychology to adapt it to their own problems. But the success of the theory of social representations can also be explained by the action taken by Serge Moscovici throughout his career to spread his theory throughout the world. Finally, Serge Moscovici never ceased to suggest new ideas about social representations and many of his suggestions remain untapped to this day. They constitute a real reservoir for researchers of tomorrow.
Highlights
The theory of social representations is one of the major theories in social psychology with the thousands of scientific articles that has been published since its birth
In a few exceptional cases there have been among them those who proposed even two! This was, for example, the case for Leon Festinger who, after formulating his theory of social comparison (1954), would later develop his theory of cognitive dissonance (1957). It was true for Serge Moscovici who gave our discipline the theory of social representations (1961) and the theory of minority influence (1976)
We will explore the reasons for the success of one of them, namely the theory of social representations
Summary
In 1961, Serge Moscovici (Figure 1), a young French researcher of Romanian origin, published in the Presses Universitaires de France the results of a vast survey on French opinion about psychoanalysis. In the beginning of the 20th century, it was mainly sociology, anthropology and ethnology (Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Lévy-Bruhl, 1922; Linton, 1945; Mauss, 1903) that made use of the concept of representations, mainly for descriptive purposes, in the study of various collective representations of cultural or ethnic communities It was only in the early 1960s that, following Durkheim’s intuition and based on the assumptions of child psychology (Piaget, 1932) and clinical psychology (Freud, 1908, 1922), Serge Moscovici (1961) began to develop the social psychology of representations. Social representations will be viewed as cognitive structures
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