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.

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A previous experiment (Doise, Mugny and Perret-Clermont, 1975)

A bstraci This paper presents two experiments to support the general hypothesis that the coordination of actions between individuals promotesHow do the cognitive operations controlling the interaction between the individual and his environment develop? The two research studies which we present here suggest that social psychology can help in answering this question. These operations do not develop only when the individual interacts with the objects of his physical environment. We present the hypothesis that the development of cognitive operations is facilitated when several individuals are required to coordinate their actions on the environment. This thesis lies at the crossroads of several lines of thought and research, the most useful for our purposes being the 'theoretical' approach of Piaget and the more 'practical' approach of certain educational psychologists.Piaget often underlines the importances of social factors in the child's cognitive development. 'Human intelligence develops in the individual in terms of qocial interactions too often disregarded' (Piaget, 1971, pp. 224-225). Indeed, according to Piaget, '. . . cooperation is the first of a series of forms of behaviour which are important for the constitution and development of logic ' (Piaget, 1950, In his Etudes sociologiques, Piaget constructs a model which demonstrates that Eur.