Embodiment and the Construction of Social Knowledge: Towards an Integration of Embodiment and Social Representations Theory

Abstract

Recent developments in the psychological and social sciences have seen a surge of attention to concepts of embodiment. The burgeoning field of embodied cognition, as well as the long‐standing tradition of phenomenological philosophy, offer valuable insights for theorising how people come to understand the world around them. However, the implications of human embodiment have been largely neglected by one of the key frameworks for conceptualising the development of social knowledge: Social Representations Theory. This article seeks to spark a dialogue between Social Representations Theory and embodiment research. It outlines the position the body occupies in the existing theoretical and empirical social representations literature, and argues that incorporating concepts gleaned from embodiment research may facilitate a more comprehensive account of the aetiology of social representations. The value of analytic attention to embodiment is illustrated with reference to a recent study of social representations of neuroscience, which suggested that embodied experience can shape the extent to which people engage with certain topics, the conditions under which they do so, and the conceptual and affective content of the ensuing representations. The article argues that expanding Social Representations Theory's methodological and conceptual toolkit, in order to illuminate the interplay between embodied experience and social communication in the development of common‐sense knowledge, promises productive directions for empirical and theoretical advancement.

Embodied Social Representation

“…There have been a series of theoretical ideas popping up in psychology during the last 50 years that try to capture one or the other process that Social Representation Theory embraced in its initial formulation 1961. One of them is the concept of scaffolding (O'Connor, , p. 12) that boldly recycles the ideas of anchoring and Vygotsky's developmental approach to the social mind (Vygotsky, ). Somehow it is reassuring that on and off some concepts become re‐‘invented’, which testifies to their usefulness.…”

“…Somehow it is reassuring that on and off some concepts become re‐‘invented’, which testifies to their usefulness. However, it is a bit ironic to see O'Connor () review these approaches as achievements and not as misappropriation of pre‐existing ideas. It is ironic because Social Representation Theory as sketched by Moscovici () already includes body, behaviour, and social objects.…”

“…In his comprehensive approach experience is grounded in an external environment, which entails worldliness to the extent that body and world are a single system, and objects extend action and can legitimately be conceived as part of the mind and tools are experienced as an extension of one's body. (O'Connor, , p. 5)…”

“…In other words, in experimental archaeology the archaeologists imitate the behaviours of the ancestors as an extension of the bodies and establish their relationship to artefacts by analogy. It is, however, beyond their scope to establish the social representation or cultural significance of which the original behaviour was part of, because “the meaning of another's behaviour is not intrinsic, but requires considerable mediating judgement and interpretation” (O'Connor, ), particularly when the respective culture is extinct.…”

Agency of depressed adolescents: embodiment and social representations

“…Current theorizing about embodiment focuses on the interplay between embodied experience and influences of social representations (O'Connor, 2017). In our research the concept of social representation was chosen to investigate influences of sociocultural factors on processes of meaning construction of depressed adolescents.…”