Fifty years ago, Serge Moscovici first outlined a theory of social representations. In this article, we attempt to discuss and to contextualize research that has been inspired by this original impetus from the particular angle of its relevance to political psychology. We argue that four defining components of social representations need to be taken into account, and that these elements need to be articulated with insights from the social identity tradition about the centrality of self and group constructions in order to develop original insights into political psychological phenomena. First, social representations are shared knowledge, and the way interpretations of the world are collectively elaborated is critical to the way people are able to act within the world. Second, social representations are meta-knowledge, which implies that what people assume relevant others know, think, or value is part of their own interpretative grid, and that collective behavior can often be influenced more powerfully at the level of meta-representations than of intimate beliefs. Third, social representations are enacted communication, which means that social influence is exerted by the factors that constrain social practices as much as by the discourse that interprets these practices. Fourth, social representations are world-making assumptions: collective understandings do not only reflect existing realities but often bring social reality into being. Put together, these four components provide a distinctive theoretical perspective on power, resistance and conflict. The added conceptual value of this perspective is illustrated by showing how it allows revisiting ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude with implications for research practices and discuss how the proposed model of social representations invites us to define new priorities and challenges for the methods used to study political psychological phenomena.
Most countries worldwide have taken restrictive measures and called on their population to adopt social distancing behaviours to contain the spread of the COVID‐19 pandemic. At a time when several European countries are releasing their lockdown measures, new uncertainties arise regarding the further evolution of a crisis becoming multifaceted, as well as the durability of public determination to face and contain it. In this context, the sustained social efficacy of public health measures will depend more than ever on the level of acceptance across populations called on to temporarily sacrifice daily freedoms, while economic insecurity grows and social inequalities become more blatant. We seek to develop a framework for analysing how the requirements of ‘social distancing’ can be reconciled with the conditions that allow for the maintaining, or even strengthening, of social cohesion, mutual solidarity, and a sense of collective efficacy, throughout the crisis. To reach this goal, we propose a summary of relevant findings and pragmatic policy principles derived from them.
Theoretical and empirical accounts of violent intergroup conflict or reactions to victimization suggested psychosocial processes that are likely to paradoxically enhance war victims' justification of violations of humanitarian norms. To test for differences and similarities between individual and community reactions, multilevel analyses of the 'People on War' dataset were conducted. This data combines survey responses from fourteen different communities recently involved in armed conflict (N ¼ 12, 047). At the individual level, findings support a specific cycle-of-violence hypothesis, indicating that victims of war report less support for a legal conception of humanitarian norms than do non-victims. In contrast, at the community level, the higher the rate of victims, the more frequently community members adopt a legal conception of humanitarian norms. Further, the strength of condemnation of humanitarian norm violations is positively related to war duration and magnitude of fatalities. These findings are interpreted within a social-representational framework. The collective experience of generalized vulnerability strengthens a shared perception of the need for formal justice, which cannot be reduced to the sum of the psychological consequences of community members' individual experiences of war trauma. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The 20th century has been a century of outrageous collective violence. War atrocities have reached unprecedented heights during this century, resulting in large-scale suffering and moral catastrophes for the human community. At the same time, it has been a century of development of international procedures for preventing, containing or stopping armed conflicts, and for judging and punishing individuals engaged in war crimes. As a reaction to the threat for the respect of fundamental rights caused by periods of armed conflict and by the breakdown of national institutions, there have been repeated efforts from the international community resulting in the growing institutionalization of international humanitarian law, which is supposed to compensate for the legal loophole generated by The creation of these international courts took place in the aftermath of events that made the fragility of the existing international procedures for containing mass violence tragically apparent: when the international community proved incapable to prevent genocide and mass killings in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In both cases, public acceptance of the international justice remains characterized by tensions and ambivalences within the concerned communities (Stover & Weinstein, 2004). For an effective prevention of violent intergroup conflicts leading to mass atrocities during the 21st century, it is important to develop a systematic understanding of the psychosocial mechanisms and outcomes caused by a twofold legacy from the previous century, composed of individual and collective memories of traumatizing war events and of moral breakdown, on the one hand, and of institutional arrangement...
G T (2020) It's not just 'us' versus 'them': moving beyond binary perspectives on intergroup processes. European Review of Social Psychology, 31 (1). pp. 40-75.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.