Abstract
Twenty years ago, Guimelli and Deschamps (2000) hypothesised the existence of the mute zone of social representations. According to the authors, certain parts of the social representations of objects, described as sensitive, were not expressed under normal survey conditions. This fundamental question was curiously addressed very late in literature on social representations, but has been having significant success within the community of researchers working in this field since then. This seminal work, which offered a methodological perspective capable of highlighting such unspoken facts, paved the way for studies that proposed several theoretical interpretations and new techniques for exploring this mute zone. The challenge was twofold: to identify the processes involved and to invent the appropriate tools to express the counter-normative contents potentially attached to certain objects of representation. This article proposes to take stock of these 20 years of research and to anticipate new avenues oriented on the one hand on the study of the socio-cognitive processes involved in the mute zone phenomenon, and on the other hand on the proposal of new theoretical and methodological articulations with other concepts dealing with similar issues.
Highlights
This article proposes to take stock of these 20 years of research and to anticipate new avenues oriented on the one hand on the study of the socio-cognitive processes involved in the mute zone phenomenon, and on the other hand on the proposal of new theoretical and methodological articulations with other concepts dealing with similar issues
Would you always tell anyone what you really think about anything? not – that is why this question has been widely debated in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as it questions the validity of the answers collected when human individuals are asked about their opinions on certain objects
It is only recently that research dealing with social representations has found interest in this question through the study of what Guimelli and Deschamps (Deschamps, Guimelli, 2002, 2004) referred to as the ‘mute zone’ of social representations. This term refers to the idea that several elements of the representational field could be ‘masked’ by individuals with regards to certain objects, and made mute as they are not expressed in a usual context of collection of opinions
Summary
Would you always tell anyone what you really think about anything? not – that is why this question has been widely debated in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as it questions the validity of the answers collected when human individuals are asked about their opinions on certain objects. It is only recently that research dealing with social representations has found interest in this question through the study of what Guimelli and Deschamps (Deschamps, Guimelli, 2002, 2004) referred to as the ‘mute zone’ of social representations This term refers to the idea that several elements of the representational field could be ‘masked’ by individuals with regards to certain objects, and made mute as they are not expressed in a usual context of collection of opinions. This phenomenon had already been observed by Moscovici (1961) in his seminal research on the representation of psychoanalysis: some of the elements of psychoanalytic theory were not mentioned by individuals.
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