Abstract
This paper clarifies a long-standing ambiguity in the notion of social representations; it provides a clear operational definition of the relation between social representation and individual representation. This definition, grounded in the theory of sets, supports most current empirical investigation methods of social representations. In short, a social representation of an object in a population is the mathematical set of individual representations the individuals of that population have for this object. The components of the representation are the components used to describe this set, in intension in the mathematical sense of the term (in contrast with a definition in extension). Statistical techniques, as well as content analysis techniques, can construct such components by comparison of individual representations to extract commonalities, and that is what classic investigations on social representations indeed do. We then answer the question: how come that, in a given culture, individuals hold individual representations that are so similar to one another?
Highlights
This paper clarifies a long-standing ambiguity in the notion of social representations; it provides a clear operational definition of the relation between social representation and individual representation
Intersubjective understanding works well enough for most everyday objects; and this” psycho-social pact” that “What you See is What I See” (“the implicit agreement by which the Participants agree that their respective individual views refer to a single object” (Lahlou, 2006)) is at the root of our social construction of reality, and of the naïve realism that is the implicit assumption behind our everyday life interactions
A social representation (SR) is a set of individual representations (IRs) of an Object by members of a Population of subjects who deal with this Object
Summary
Experience shows that members of a population each hold similar individual representations of many “objects” of their culture. (1) we are able to connect a phenomenon external to our mind (the “object”) to a mental structure internal to our mind (the “representation”) that matches the object in some structural or functional manner, such that the representation will enable recognition of the object and acting upon it in a relevant manner, and (2) for a given object, different individuals in each culture appear to each hold similar representations, to the effect they can communicate and act in a relevant manner about that object Let us call this phenomenon (empirical facts 1+2 above) the intersubjective understanding of objects as we need a shorthand to discuss the nature of social representations. While the above IUO may appear obvious as an empirical fact, in practice that means members of a culture each individually house “similar” mental representations for thousands of “objects”; that is remarkable and a priori improbable. Researchers using the social representations concept have all, including from the very start Moscovici himself, been confronted to that problem
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