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DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.606
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Social Representation Theory: An Historical Outline
Wolfgang Wagner, Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu, Estonia
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.606
Published online: 30 July 2020
Summary
The concept of social representation (SR) was developed by Serge Moscovici in 1961 as a
social psychological approach articulating individual thinking and feeling with collective
interaction and communication. SRs are conceived as symbolic forms that come about
through interpersonal and media communication. They are the ways individuals think,
interact with others, and shape social objects in their interaction with the local world.
This text presents an outline of the history of social representation theory (SRT), using a
four-period model: first, creation and incubation in France starting with Moscovici’s first
book; second, the opening to the English-speaking academe around 1980; third,
institutionalization and proliferation with the start of the journal papers on SRs and
regular conferences in 1992; and, fourth, normalization, approximately from 2000
onwards.
The first period (1961–1984) started with Serge Moscovici’s first presentation of his ideas
in a French-language volume on “La psychanalyse son image et son public.” This was
republished in an updated version in 1976 and translated into English in 2008. The
theory postulates cognitive and social factors in the genesis and structure of SRs. These
are accompanied by specific styles of communication that reflect the communicators’
identity and ideology. Together these aspects constitute common sense.
The first period was a time of incubation because Moscovici and his first PhD students,
Claudine Herzlich, Denise Jodelet, and Jean-Claude Abric, tried the concept in different
domains. The second half of this period saw Moscovici and collaborators extend SRT’s
theoretical frame to include the idea of consensual vs. reified domains. A consensual
domain of communication is characterized by the free interchange of attitudes and
opinions, while a reified domain is determined by institutionalized rules. Moscovici also
postulated a process of cognitive polyphasia. By cognitive polyphasia he described a
phenomenon where individuals use different and even contradictory thoughts about the
same issue depending on the social setting they are in.
The year 1984 marked the publication of a book for English-speaking scholars edited by
Robert Farr and Moscovici that collected papers from an international conference in
1979. It was the first book-length collection of works on SRT and highlighted empirical
research by a variety of international scholars. The period following 1979 through to
1992 saw a broadening of the base of scholars becoming interested in SRT. The 1980s
brought Willem Doise’s conceptualizing of anchoring as a process of social marking,
Abric’s theory of core and peripheral elements of a representation, and Hilde
Himmelweit’s founding of a societal psychology.
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Proliferation was boosted 1992 by the founding of the journal Papers on Social
Representations and the beginning of a biannual series of International Conferences on
Social Representations, starting in 1992. This increased the international visibility of SRT
and helped scholars to organize themselves around topics and form cross-national
research groups.
The period from 1992 to the first decade of the new century was characterized by an
increasing number of empirical and theoretical studies. A series of theoretical branches
emerged: there was research on the micro-genesis of SRs on the individual level, an
extension of the structural theory of SRs, the discussion of the socially constructive
aspects and sociopolitical uses of SRT, the design of a dialogical approach to the mind
and social life, and Moscovici’s suggestion to consider large-scale themata as a factor in
social thinking.
If the period after 1992 was a time of institutionalization, the time after the turn of the
century can be called a period of normalization. That is, a period when SRT was
presented in chapters for handbooks of social psychology and when dedicated handbooks
and monographs were published. From this period onward it becomes virtually
impossible to give even a superficial account of the most important contributions to SRT’s
burgeoning field of research and theory development.
Keywords: social sciences, social psychology, history of psychology, social representations, social
construction
Introduction
Few theories or approaches in social psychology reach a respectable age. In most cases
theories fade in importance after a few decades or even years. From those that emerged in
the 1950 and 1960s, Festinger’s dissonance theory springs to mind, as do several models of
causal attribution or aggression, which still appear in textbooks, but less so in scientific
discourse and practice (e.g., Rizzoli, Castro, Tuzzi, & Contarello, 2018). They became part and
parcel of scientific common sense without guiding much research.
The case of social representation theory (SRT) is different. The term social representation
(SR) was first mentioned 1961 in a French book in which Serge Moscovici presented an
inquiry into how Freud’s psychoanalytic theory entered the French public imagination during
the 1950s, a decade of considerable importance for psychology in general and social
1
psychology in particular. In this tumultuous decade social psychology drew from pre-World
War II roots, particularly from the work of Aleksei Leontiev, Kurt Lewin, Alexander Luria, and
Jean Piaget. These scholars had a profound interest in the “socialized” mind and in getting a
hold on thinking as a social activity embedded in relationships and situations. Naturally, the
Soviet scholars were interested in the impact of large-scale social events such as the Russian
Revolution on individual psychologies.
Page 2 of 30
This historical account follows a timeline according to the most important changes that divide
the theory’s development in four periods: first, the making of SRT followed by an incubation
time where SRT was matured by French scholars working with Moscovici and applying the
theory in different fields; second, the entry of SRT in the English-speaking world in the 1980s
after the publication of the English-language proceedings of a conference in 1984; third, a
period of institutionalization and proliferation in the 1990s; and fourth, a normalization period
approximately from the mid-2000s onwards.
TEXTBOX 1: A Note on Citations, Quotes, and Referencing
When citing Moscovici’s book La psychanalyse, son image et son public we refer to the
revised second edition of his original 1961 PhD thesis, published in 1976 and translated
into English in 2008.
In the section on “The Making of SRT” we exclusively refer to Moscovici’s own writings
when giving a citation, irrespective of whether later authors wrote about related aspects
of SRT.
From the section “Incubation Time: 1960s–1984” onwards we will cite early and later
work if it has a bearing on a theoretical topic instead of repeating mention of a concept
in different periods. This way of citing may violate strictly historical considerations but is
a pragmatic compromise. Then we follow the convention to list citations referring to the
same issue chronologically instead of alphabetically by author names. This acknowledges
the cited authors’ merit of primacy.
It must be said here that during his lifetime Moscovici did not always use the same
terminology for the concepts constituting SRT. This is no big surprise given the vast
quantity of his writings. We will use the historically later naming and terminology as this
is usually more comprehensible for the reader.
The Making of SRT
Popularization of Psychoanalysis
During the 1950s Freudian psychoanalysis became popular in various European countries as
an import from the United States, despite its European origins. Even though psychoanalysis
was well established in French academe at the time, it had just started to become popular in
the broader French public. The interested public received the new science of conflictual
emotions, the unconscious, sexuality, and neuroticism with curiosity. That was when
Moscovici, born in 1925 in Romanian Brăila into a Jewish family, came to France after World
War II and took up the topic of popular interest for his PhD thesis at the Sorbonne, supervised
by the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache (Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Front Page of Moscovici, La Psychanalyse son Image et son Public.
Private photograph by the author.
His research included questionnaires, interviews, and an analysis of press reporting. It

showed how psychoanalysis had become a widespread topic of discourse, receiving reactions
ranging from rejection to enthusiasm, and how people compared the novel psychology with
older ideas. It also included an analysis of the communication styles that newspapers used
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when addressing their readerships. The tenets of SRT were published in 1961 (Moscovici,
1961). Two years later Moscovici summarized his thoughts in an English-language Annual
Review volume (1963, pp. 251f.).
A revised edition of the 1961 book appeared in 1976 in French and as late as 2008 in the
2
English language. The fact that this book was translated nearly 50 years after its French
original reflects a surprisingly constant interest of scholars in SRT over the decades (Duveen,
2008).
This text looks at the concept of SRs, the social psychological processes constituting
representations, different styles of media communication for particular audiences, an
understanding of how scientific concepts are transformed when becoming part of common
sense, an understanding of how consensus and diversity come about in modern societies, and
a way of understanding how “thinking is necessarily social” (Moscovici, 2000, p. 249; see also
3
Figure 2). At that time the approach was loosely affiliated with an academic interest in “la
popularisation de science” in France (Barbichon & Moscovici, 1965; Dulong & Ackermann,
1972; Bauer, 1993).
Figure 2. Serge Moscovici in Paris, 1998. The author gratefully acknowledges permission by
Saadi Lahlou, 2019.
The Symbolic Dimension

SRs incorporate two perspectives, which cannot be considered separately: the static aspect,
focused on the content and structure of SRs; and the dynamic perspective on the involved
social processes (Moscovici, 1995, pp. 310f.). Both perspectives together define the symbolic
function of SRs and their power to construct the real.
In the static view SRs are an ensemble of beliefs, images, and behaviors forming well-
structured networks of meaning that resemble a naive theory. The target, or “object,” of
representation can be any issue, thing, relationship, person, group that is both understood
and evaluated through the representation’s contents and constructed through it. The elements
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of a SR are conceptualized as a figurative model consisting of a figure and the signification
symbolizing an “object,” where figure is not only a reproduction of something but also the
meaning imbued on it by the subject (Moscovici, 2008, p. 21).
The social and dynamic perspective has to do with communication and discourse where SRs
emerge, develop, change, and are used among members of groups. According to Moscovici,
SRs are simultaneously psychological facts experienced as part of one’s self, and
interpersonal accomplishments expressing local instantiations of the common sense of a
culture. They are not attained by direct instruction but come about by implicit negotiation
processes, by people’s everyday exchanges.
Representations are engendered in “the interdependence of several subjects in their relation

to a common environment, physical or social. [. . .] The relationship between ego and object is
mediated through the intervention of another subject” (Moscovici, 1972, p. 52). Ego and alter
are inseparable in the social appropriation of an object and often depicted as a triade (Figure
3).
Figure 3. Ego–Alter–Object Triad according to Moscovici (1961).

The author.
SR scholars elaborate SRs as an abstract phenomenon describing psychological activity in the

context of discourse and communication, out of which emerges a system of common sense.
They are neither an attribute of individual minds nor are they a thing in collective life. That is,
one can neither fixate the concept on the individual nor on the social level but must consider
both simultaneously. A SR is not social only by being shared among members of a group;
consensuality is not mandatory. A SR is social because it is created in the social field of
communication, in the encounter of people who are going about their daily business, as well
as by the institutions that people maintain. They form a common ground for communication
that allows people to participate in discursive communities. In communication people
incorporate parts of the social heritage in their meaning repertoires and vice versa: the
private becomes social and the social private. Given its integrated character, SRT is not
developed as a micro-theory but a large-scale framework uniting societal and psychological
aspects.
Page 6 of 30
Media Communication Styles
France’s fourth republic after World War II was characterized by rather deep divisions
between the Catholic right wing, the communist radical left, and the center-right bloc of more
or less liberal parties (Wright, 1987). Each political party had their own media outlets that
competed for the public’s attention. Choosing the main newspapers of each of the three
groupings for analysis, hence, was a natural choice for Moscovici. He distinguished three
communication styles (Moscovici, 2008). The newspapers with a dominant readership in the
liberal professions presented psychoanalysis in a neutral style, with articles primarily
diffusing expert opinions, presenting psychoanalysis in a factual way, geared toward informing
the readers. This diffusion did not attempt any synthesis, or to reflexively accommodate
contradictory ideas.
The Catholic press followed a style where parts of the psychoanalytic theory were suppressed
if they contradicted the Church’s teachings. This style was called propagation. Only elements
that could be resignified in a way compatible with Christian teachings and with a bearing on
shared matters, such as education, childrearing, feeling, or spirituality were selectively
spread and elaborated. Discussions of the general worldview of psychoanalysis and the
significance of the libido were avoided.
The reporting style of the communist press emphasized conflict, presenting bourgeois and
American psychoanalysis as a nuisance and as a rival to the Marxist worldview (Moscovici,
2008, pp. 408ff.). This propaganda style attempts to consolidate the identity of the in-group by
addressing ideological contradictions and depicting psychoanalysis as an external threat. It
also has the function of adapting a worldview to new situational demands. Propaganda tries to
create a target which complies with the conditions of the social field, whilst simultaneously
toeing the party line by styling the information to fit (2008, pp. 438ff.).
Moscovici (2000) also hypothesized that the styles of communication observed within
newspapers may reoccur in interpersonal communication. Just as with the media, everyday
communication reflects the interlocutors’ affiliation with certain ideologies and relationships
that would express and construct different forms of self–other relations.
The media communication styles described here came from a time that did not yet know the
Internet and where the only electronic medium was the radio. It is likely that widespread
access to the Internet, social media, and the amplification and manipulation effects that “like-
buttons” and platform control allow nowadays have significantly changed communication
behaviors; more investigation in terms of SRT is thus needed.
Objectification and Anchoring

In his monograph, Moscovici (2008) suggests two core processes that later became a
catchphrase in the first paragraphs of research papers on SRs: objectification and anchoring.
By objectification, the author describes the process where actors start to perceive something
abstract, for example a concept, as a real thing that they take for granted. “Objectification
helps, . . . to make a conceptual schema real and to reduplicate it in a material
counterpart” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 54). He exemplifies its workings by reference to the
frequently used term “complex,” which in everyday discourse may take on a multitude of
Page 7 of 30
meanings and linguistic forms. According to the author, fixating a variety of knowledge and
meaning to an imagined “material structure,” that is, naturalizing an idea, simplifies
understanding and communication: “Invested with a new power, the words ‘complex’ and
‘repression’ now designate obvious manifestations of the real” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 55).
Moscovici’s elaboration of objectification allows us to see the social environment as being

populated by objects whose symbolic origin has been transformed into material reality. Their
materiality is constituted by the ways actors relate to the social objects and by the way they
jointly interact with regard to them. This interaction creates the objective environment where
groups live. Even though Moscovici did not call his theory a social construction approach, SRT
is one of several theories that became popular via the scientific climate created by Peter
Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1965).
“Whilst objectification shows how the elements of a science [or abstract idea] that are
represented are integrated into a social reality, anchoring allows us to understand how they
help to model social relations and how they express those social relations” (Moscovici, 2008,
p. 106). Hence, anchoring refers to how a representation expresses and is modeled by social
relations. On one hand, any new idea or scientific insight needs to be made accessible and
familiar by introducing the relevant concepts into everyday language and repertoires. This
happens by condensing the SR’s ideas into images and metaphors that allow the
representation to become a tool for thinking, communication, and action. On the other hand,
representation of the novel will take on characteristics of the involved social relationships,
and therefore imply specific ways of communication. The socio-cognitive process of anchoring
is triggered by some novelty that potentially contradicts a group’s rules and complements
objectification in making the unfamiliar familiar. In short, “objectification transposes science
into the domain of being, and anchoring defines it within the domain of doing so as to get
around the taboo on communications [that is, because of the violation of existing
rules]” (Moscovici, 2008, p. 104; original emphasis).
TEXTBOX 2: Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl: SRT
SRT strives for a deep understanding of what social means beyond the fact that two or
more individuals are a social entity. But it is equally clear that such a definition of the
social is not the exclusive domain of SRT. Cultural anthropology has long been concerned
with structures of collective religious beliefs, ritual, magic, and folk-thinking about
matters of nature and issues of culture. An example is the seminal work by Evans-
Pritchard on the Azande (1937), where he treats the representation of witchcraft and
magic very much like Moscovici approached the topic some 30 years later. At one place
in his book Moscovici references the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss in the context of
meaning and signification of the psychoanalytic term “complex,” which is as “real” as the
symbolic function of Lévi-Strauss’ term “Mana” (Moscovici, 2008, pp. 160f.).
Émile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl were forerunners of the idea of overarching
meaning systems. Durkheim’s (1898) concept of “collective representations” refers to
comprehensive symbolic systems, such as religions, that impose themselves with an
irresistible force upon members of a culture. The external nature of social facts,
especially social facts of an obligatory nature, justifies understanding them as
Page 8 of 30
autonomous supra-individual collective constructs. They express themselves not in
individuals, but in their togetherness, taking on an autonomous reality. Durkheim takes a
decidedly sociocentric path that relegates the individual to a marginal and passive
position. Their counterparts are individual representations that, according to him, are
the neural processes in the brain. In setting this contrast, Durkheim sidetracks the
psychological space of analysis that encompasses contemporary psychology’s field of
inquiry.
Lévy-Bruhl’s (1922) approach to magic and primitive thinking somehow fills the void that
collective representations leave. Lévy-Bruhl assigns everyday thinking processes a
significant position in the functioning of social relations. Moscovici sees much of Lévy-
Bruhl’s elaboration of primitive or pre-logical mentality as containing kernels of his
ideas, because in Lévy-Bruhl’s theory the integrated character of seemingly weird beliefs
can only be understood if seen in their totality: that is, by emphasizing the emotional
slant of primitive myths and by underlining the local truth of seemingly contradictory
representations existing within different societies. But, and this is important, Moscovici
denies that there is a profound rupture between everyday and scientific thought, as does
Lévy-Bruhl in his distinction between primitive and logical mentality (1922).
The works of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl relate to the two sides of SRT, each reflecting an
aspect of Moscovici’s concept: that is, first to see representations as dynamically
emerging and changing in communication and interaction in everyday life. And, second,
that the apparent inconsistencies of pre-logical contents of everyday thought are rational
because rationality is inscribed in the language, institutions, and representations of
societies and cultures.
Incubation Time: 1960s–1984
The two decades after Moscovici’s first book (1960s to 1980s) was a period of refinements of
the new approach, akin to an incubation time. The period ended with the appearance of the
first edited book on SRT in English (Farr & Moscovici, 1984). In that period SRT was largely
restricted to French publications, which were not easily available in other countries.
This was the situation when PhD students started working with the new theory in Moscovici’s
laboratory: Claudine Herzlich (1969), Jean-Claude Abric (1976), and Denise Jodelet (1985), as
well as Willem Doise (1972), though he was not a student. In their work, these scholars tested
and applied SRT to various realms of life and showed the viability of the conceptual
framework.
In her study of everyday understandings of health and illness, Herzlich developed a figurative
scheme of three representations of health that are linked to different social experiences in the
life of her respondents (1969). Together with Abric (1976) Moscovici used experimental
situations that were social by virtue of being presented as competitive games between
persons to evoke responses related to SRs interpreted as independent variables (Faucheux &
Moscovici, 1968).
Page 9 of 30
Jodelet’s work is of particular importance as she adhered to a markedly dynamic
understanding of SRs in her study of a French village, Ainay-le-Château, where local families
hosted psychiatric outpatients, sharing their everyday life and chores with them (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Denise Jodelet on the Occasion of being Awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa at
Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, 2017. The author gratefully acknowledge
permission by Natalia Edith García.
She considered SRs to be cognitive and emotional units that emerge and change in the daily
interactions and conversations among people. The cognitive and emotional contents and the
social process together form a representational field. She shows how the details of SRs appear
in the concrete life context of people who cope not only with strangers but with the otherness
of patients who may differ in terms of behavior and speaking. Reading her book-length study
makes one understand how novel elements in the world of the locals, that is, the unfamiliarity
of their guests, are appropriated by constructing and enacting SRs in everyday interaction. It
also shows how behavior is part of SRs, when she reports that washing family and guest
dishes and clothes was undertaken separately, reflecting a fear of contagion (Jodelet, 1985).
There exist only a handful of studies where the idea of SRs not being a representation of
something but being for communication and social behavior and predicated on a particular
social setting is presented so clearly. Her research combined observation and interviews,
which became a reference for later researchers.
At the start of this period, Moscovici felt that the details of SRT’s concepts were still relatively
incomplete (1969). What was missing was applying SRT to different fields of inquiry and
refining some conceptual distinctions. A first conceptual concern was what Moscovici called
consensual and reified universes (1981). A discursive universe is consensual if the members of
a community are free to share in a heterogeneous common sense where SRs are exchanged
Page 10 of 30
“like money” (Moscovici, 1995, p. 311). In a reified universe people are bound by institutional
rules that prescribe how the world ought to be. A discourse in this universe lacks the
situational flexibility and spontaneity of communication prevalent in consensual universes
(Wagner & Mecha, 2003; Batel & Castro, 2009; Callaghan & Augoustinos, 2013).
Furthermore, in Moscovici’s (1961) initial research he hypothesized a process of cognitive

polyphasia, mentioned on three pages in his 2008 book (initially published in 1976). This
concept refers to the observation that in their lives people may attain potentially contradictory
knowledge about a domain and use the items in different contexts. That is, the expression of
representations is situationally dependent, such that in one situation people may use one
modality of knowledge about a domain and in another setting they may draw on another, even
a contradictory, idea (Moscovici, 2008, pp. 190f.). This turned out to be a widely applicable
process in later research (Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Themel, 2000; Jovchelovitch, 2002b;
Kalampalikis & Haas, 2008; Provencher, 2011).
Expansion to the English-Speaking World: 1984–1992
Farr and Moscovici, 1984

For psychology, the pre- and post-1980s were a time where research interests increasingly
focused on individual social cognition, and also one when several voices criticized this
narrowing of social psychology’s scope. This was when Robert Farr was a guest at the École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1977, and, together with Moscovici,
conceived the idea of organizing an International Colloquium on Social Representations. They
realized this colloquium in January 1979 under the auspices of the Maison des Sciences de
l’Homme, Paris. This resulted in an English-language volume titled Social Representations,
which gathered together papers from the meeting. As the editors state, it sought “to facilitate
the diffusion of a knowledge of this tradition of research throughout the English-speaking
world” (Farr & Moscovici, 1984, p. x). Its collection of chapters on SRs, applied to different
research fields, exposed the breadth and versatility of SRT to an English-speaking audience.
In the wake of this publication, a few institutions crystallized to become hotspots of the theory
besides Paris: most significantly, Farr, together with Hilde Himmelweit, made the London
School of Economics (LSE) social psychology department a “bridgehead” of SRT in the United
Kingdom. In the decades to come, many significant scholars emerged from this department.
Additionally, Geneva with Doise, Lausanne with Jean-Claude Deschamps, and Aix-en-Provence
with Claude Flament became central places where SRT was taught and developed. Smaller
centers where SRT guided research were Stirling, Budapest, San Sebastian, and Lisbon. SRT
became “a domain in expansion” (Jodelet, 1989b).
During the 1980s, English translations of French key books appeared. These included
Jodelet’s La folie . . . (1991) and a volume collecting contributions to SRT and showcasing its
expansion which she edited (Jodelet, 1989a). This decade also saw the publication of
Moscovici’s Age of the Crowd (1985), Doise’s Levels of Explanation . . . (1986), and Gerard
Duveen and Barbara Lloyd’s developmental studies (1990).
Page 11 of 30
In responding to a critical paper by Gustav Jahoda (1988), Moscovici (1988) published one of
the most transparent expositions of SRT. There he reaffirmed the main points of his concept as
a generative and constructivist approach that can hardly be captured in a precise and
experimentally accessible definition. In this paper he emphasized SRs as being tools for
familiarizing the unfamiliar and he introduced three new terms that have to do with the
distribution of SRs in society. Hegemonic representations are those that prevail in large parts
of a “thinking society” and that are undisputed. However, if subgroups in a society create
their own versions of SRs on an issue, when they exist side by side and are understood as
different versions by group members, Moscovici calls these emancipated representations.
They are brought together when a discourse or conversation unfolds about a specific issue.
Polemical representations belong to different factions in conflict and are brought to bear in
disputes (for a discussion of these concepts see Vala, Garcia-Marques, Gouveia-Pereira, &
Lopes, 1998; Ben-Asher, 2003; Kus, Liu, & Ward, 2013; Castro & Mouro, 2016).
Anchoring and Social Marking

Doise received his PhD at the Sorbonne in 1967 and moved to Geneva in 1970, which became
a hotspot of SRT during the 1980s. He was interested in many topics and contributed
significantly to SRT’s development. Two strands of research shall be mentioned here: the role
of the metasystem in social thinking, as well as social marking and anchoring. Doise departs
from the assertion that what is being thought by people is rational by virtue of its insertion in
their social belonging (Moscovici, 1995). The thoughts come with a metasystem which
restricts cognitive and evaluative processes about the content. This operational system adapts
thought processes according to the logical rules of everyday life. “The exigencies of the meta-
system vary with regard to the situational position taken by individuals; they may, for
example, imply a rigorous logic during scientific work, or a fierce defence of in-group
cohesion in the event of a conflict with an out-group” (Doise, 1990, pp. 115f.).
For Doise, SRs function as a metasystem that works by associating social conditions with
cognitive operations related to particular objects called social marking (de Paolis, Doise, &
Mugny, 1987, p. 11). Social marking is the correspondence between object relations and the
norms which govern the symbolic interactions between individuals (Doise, 1990, p. 122). The
processes of marking and metasystem link contents and forms of social thinking to the social
conditions under which people live and with which they maintain social relations (Doise,
1992).
At approximately the same time Michael Billig suggested a rhetorical framing of anchoring
and objectification (1988). He called for SRT to broaden the project on how common sense
was transformed not just by the appropriation of science-related notions, but by other sources
like myths, and how representations come about through argumentation and opposition to
other points of view (Billig & Sabucedo, 1990; Duveen, 2001; Kalampalikis, 2009).
Core and Periphery

During the 1980s Abric introduced the concept of the central core of SRs (1987, 2001).
According to this view SRs can be assessed by free association of concepts, words, and ideas
about a topic. The resulting frequency of associated words and the hierarchical
Page 12 of 30
interdependence between them indicates the SR’s structure. The most relevant ideas form a
core that is determined by the words’ degree of consensus and by their significance in the
whole structure. The core is stable, coherent, resistant to change, and relatively independent
from the immediate social context (Abric, 1993). Words that belong to the central core of a
representation show a greater number of associative connections among them than with
peripheral elements, which in turn form a protective layer around the core elements (Flament
& Moliner, 1989). This tradition is being followed primarily in southern French universities
and in some places in Latin America.
Societal Psychology
At the LSE there were two scholars interested in SRT: Himmelweit who held the first chair in
social psychology in the UK, and Farr, who took a chair at LSE in 1983. Himmelweit turned to
SRT in order to follow her interest in medium and large-scale social processes as well as
media effects that were not conceptually amenable to the dominant individualist social
psychology at the time. Together with George Gaskell she outlined a “societal psychology”
that allowed researchers to address social and psychological aspects of institutions, the
environment, and politics, as well as large-scale phenomena in modern society. Thereby,
Himmelweit and Gaskell connected to the tradition of Lewin “who was a brilliant exponent of
the societal approach, with his concern for action research, social change, and psychological
theorizing” (Himmelweit, 1990, p. 18).
In the course of reconstructing a European psychology, it was understood that the social
dimension must take center stage in social psychological research. This perspective was
documented in a widely read book on the context of social psychology (Israel & Tajfel, 1972),
but the “social” became marginalized in what became mainstream European social psychology
in the 1980s and in the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EAESP)
4
(Moscovici & Marková, 2006; Rizzoli et al., 2018). It was in the upcoming “positivist” climate
in psychology that Himmelweit and George Gaskell edited a volume on societal psychology
that made a counterstatement in the late 1980s (Himmelweit & Gaskell, 1990). In the years to
follow, societal psychology provided an umbrella term for a manifold of research that would
flourish in the 1990s and later (Doise & Staerklé, 2002; Laszlo & Wagner, 2003; Pires
Valentim, 2011; Howarth et al., 2013).
Institutionalization and Proliferation: 1992–Mid-2000s
A Journal and International Conferences

By the 1990s SRT was already widely known in Europe, Brazil, and Mexico. Scholars produced
research papers with the potential of furthering the theory but they often presented them in
badly fitting symposia. This was also the case at the General Meeting of the EAESP in
Budapest 1990. While the organizer, László, took pains to find suitable slots for all
contributions, SR-related research was distributed across parallel sessions. This suggested it
was time to organize the SRT community, and one participant, Wolfgang Wagner, took this
state of affairs as an occasion for setting up a Social Representations Communication Network
in the same year. This network was to send three or four newsletters per year to all known
Page 13 of 30
scholars working in the field and to announce their recent publications. This was at a time
when the Internet was not yet part of common usage and hard copies had to be mailed across
the globe (Wagner, 2001).
Once established, Moscovici suggested a further step by institutionalizing the initiative.

Together with Pina Boggi-Cavallo, Augusto Palmonari, and Wolfgang Wagner, he initiated the
first of a series of biannual International Conferences on Social Representations in Ravello,
Italy, in 1992. The conference brought together established scholars as well as PhD students
from many countries. The subsequent biannual conferences were convened at alternating
locations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Some of the contributions to the Ravello conference were published in a newly founded
journal (1992) called Papers on Social Representations that was initially edited by Wagner,
5
Fran Elejabarrieta, and Uwe Flick. Moscovici jokingly called it Samizdat, for being
“subversive” to mainstream (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Front Pages of Two Early Issues of Papers on Social Representations. The author.
Note. The journal was founded under the name of Ongoing Production on Social
Representations. This name was only used in the first year.
Page 14 of 30
This initial organizational structure boosted other initiatives, the most important being a
framework to assemble students during their PhD studies. This framework was organized by
Annamaria de Rosa in 1995, first by summer schools and courses that would eventually lead to
a European PhD dedicated to SRs and communication that exists in some format today (De
Rosa, 2004).
In 1996 Gaskell and Sandra Jovchelovitch organized a small-scale but significant conference at
LSE, which convened European and Latin American scholars for an exchange about the
theory’s strengths and weaknesses. This event targeted the British social psychology
community and was received with high interest. One of the debates concerned the term
“representation” that contrasted with a trend toward anti-representationalism and
structuralism in anthropology at the time.
With a meeting in Natal, Brazil, in 1998, Brazilian scholars initiated a series of conferences,
the Jornada Internacional sobre Representações Sociais. These biannual events showcased
the achievements of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking colleagues in Latin America.
Another sequel to the new institutional frame of SRT was a conference at the City University
of New York in 1998, organized by Kay Deaux and Gina Philogène. It demonstrated the
profound conflict between European and U.S. social psychologists regarding how to
conceptualize a social individual. Unforgotten is Moscovici’s exclamation of despair during a
heated discussion, stating that U.S.-Americans simply don’t understand what “social” means,
leaving his addressees virtually speechless. Even though this conference highlighted various
zones of tension between different understandings of the social, it also opened some avenues
to North America (Deaux & Philogène, 2001).
It is noteworthy that Moscovici (1995, p. 313) started to explicitly acknowledge the

contributions of other approaches to design a more social psychology during that period. This
includes rhetorical and discursive psychology (Potter & Litton, 1985; Billig, 1987; Harré &
Gillett, 1994) and similar approaches, which he thought would complement and deepen SRT.
In fact, at this time the author would consider SRT as a general theory of societal phenomena
and a special theory of psychological phenomena (Moscovici, 1995, p. 272).
The Expanding Domain of SRT

The newly established regular conferences and the journal catalyzed a closer collaboration
and direct exchange among scholars across continents. Publications related to SRT increased
slowly but steadily after 1984, though significantly less than publications about social identity
theory (Eicher, Emery, Maridor, Gilles, & Bangerter, 2011, p. 11.7; see also Figure 6).
Page 15 of 30
Figure 6. Absolute Number of Articles on SRT and on Social Identity Theory (SIT) per Year.
Eicher et al. (2011, p. 11.7). The author gratefully acknowledges permission by Adrian
Bangerter.
In this period, work applying SRT to issues and societal domains that had not been studied
before appeared. Such empirical and theoretical work provides ample material illustrating the
central tenets of SRT: that is, the fact that people’s knowledge and value systems are
predicated on social situations and communication, that “their language, penetrate[s] so
profoundly into all the interstices of what we call reality [and] that they have a socially
creative or constructive effect . . .” (Moscovici, 1995, p. 313). Given the sheer multitude, only
a few domains of research can be described here in chronological order.
Micro-Genesis
At the beginning of the 1990s, Lloyd and Duveen contributed research on developmental
questions. They worked with children as subjects for studying what they called micro-genesis
of SRs. In contrast to socio-genesis, micro-genesis refers to the individual appropriation of
collective knowledge and belief systems such as gender divisions and school knowledge. They
co-constructed representations by brief and recurrent exchanges among peers and not by
formal education. This process of individual attainment and social elaboration of objects
gained prominence during this period and a number of scholars began to research those
details, linking SRT to approaches in developmental psychology (Lloyd & Duveen, 1989, 1992;
Leman & Duveen, 1996; Jovchelovitch, Priego-Hernandez, & Glaveanu, 2013).
Page 16 of 30
Indispensable Core Elements
In the structural domain of SRT Pascal Moliner, among others, developed methods to identify
core elements and discriminate them from peripheral cognitions independently of mere
frequency counts (Moliner, 1993, 1994). Additionally, he showed that central elements cannot
be dispensed of or negated without changing the character of a representation. Even though
this research introduced a more differentiated view on the structure of SRs than before
(Moliner, 1995), the research targets of this approach often lack what Moscovici, Jodelet, and
others identified as a crucial condition: that is, conflict and controversy that fuel the
emergence of SRs about an issue (Wagner, Valencia, & Elejabarrieta, 1996) such that social
objects also have a history (e.g., Bauer & Gaskell, 2008).
Themata
Borrowing from Holton (1974), Moscovici suggested the concept of thema or “archetype” as a
higher order mental structure above SRs (Moscovici & Vignaux, 1994). This is an idea that
anthropologists had used in their inquiries since anthropology’s inception; that is, the role
that fundamental antinomies such as left–right, black–white, good–evil, war–peace, and man–
woman play in everyday thought (e.g., Needham, 1973). These dichotomies seem to be a
constant in human experience and spontaneous classification and therefore these “primitive
notions” are also an overarching principle in organizing SRs (for later applications see Castro
& Gomes, 2005; Moloney, Hall, & Walker, 2005; Moloney, Gamble, Hayman, & Smith, 2015;
Marková, 2017). But here is a catch in this idea that needs to be considered: the two poles of
such dichotomies are not symmetrical in their connotations and cognitive consequences. For
example, the left and right hands are not equal in their symbolic value and the left–right
orientation, for example, has historically been overlaying the women-on-the-left and men-on-
the-right-side rule in Christian symbolism (Schleif, 2005). There are other such examples of
asymmetry in dichotomies and themata that would open interesting avenues for future SRT
research.
Dialogicality
Marková’s approach to dialogicality in social interaction and social thought departs from the
notion of conflict and dissent that was discussed by Moscovici and Doise in the first half of the
1990s (Moscovici & Doise, 1992; Moscovici, 1994). There the authors discuss social change,
innovation, minority influence, and conflict, which Moscovici was already interested in the
1970s (Moscovici & Nemeth, 1974). Marková’s generalization to a dialogical mind based on
internalizing conflict and dialogue also has ongoing relevance (Marková, 2000, 2003) for a
critical approach to SRT (Howarth, 2006; Zadeh, 2017).
Narrative Psychology
A key theoretical addendum to SRT was Janos Laszlo’s approach to narrative psychology
(Laszlo & Stainton-Rogers, 2002; Laszlo, 2008). Stories are “owned” by cultures as well as
individuals and their narrative structure is a basic human way of organizing knowledge. Their
Page 17 of 30
symbolic content is the joint product of generations of storytellers and therefore similar to
SRs in structure and function. In fact, it is surprising that the value of narratives for SRT was
discovered so late (Valsiner, 1994; Jovchelovitch, 2002a; Pléh, 2018).
Community Psychology
The 1990s and 2000s brought applications of SRT in community intervention and particularly
on health issues (e.g., Jovchelovitch & Gervais, 1998; Joffe, 2002) and participatory practices
(e.g., Montero, 1998; Campbell & Jovchelovitch, 2000). This domain addresses the highly
relevant but sometimes precarious relationship between the individual, institutions,
communities, the professionalization of public health, and society at large in a web of
interdependencies (Flick, 1998). There is rarely another domain than communities where the
negotiation of social knowledge converges with issues of identity and positioning. In other
words, communities are the playground where SRs emerge as symbolic entities to structure
the social relations among discursive participants (Howarth, 2001).
Human Rights and Democracy

Societal psychology provides a framework for research in political contexts. Cross-cultural
research on human rights showed that even across 35 countries from four different
continents, the value and normative power of its SR was largely the same. What differed was
how respondents perceived their governments’ efficacy in respecting human rights, which
also had to do with the respondents’ social anchoring and positioning in ongoing ethnic
conflicts (Doise, Spini, & Clémence, 1999; Doise, 2001). In another international context, the
images of democracy and the related perception and evaluation of the individual and
individualism were shown to be relatively similar between West and East European countries
that were in transition from a socialist regime to Western democracy during the 1990s
(Marková et al., 1998; Marková, Moodie, & Plichtova, 2000).
Culture and Cognitive Polyphasia

From the mid-1990s onward, discussions within the academic community frequently touched
the issue of culture and how the cultural condition relates to SRs. Primarily it was Jodelet
whose interests brought her to attend cultural and cross-cultural psychology conferences
(e.g., Jodelet, 1993, 2002). In an elaboration of the concept of culture, Moscovici (1993a)
fathoms the rationality of individuals and the apparent irrationality that is typical of collective
6
beliefs. He stresses the importance of studying culture in its concrete expression in the daily
life of people and at specific historical points in time. This inspired research on how scientific
conceptions of mental health and illness are being received by members of more traditional
cultures such as the Indian and included in their daily life and conversations (Wagner, Duveen,
Themel, & Verma, 1999). It turned out that knowledge about modern psychiatric conceptions
coexists with traditionally given systems where modern and the traditional conceptions are
employed for specific purposes and in specific situations, revealing cognitive polyphasia
(Wagner et al., 2000). Consequently, this concept attracted the attention of numerous
researchers who gave it more substance in diverse fields of application (to name but a few:
Jovchelovitch, 2002b; Castro, 2006; Kalampalikis & Haas, 2008; Provencher, 2011).
Page 18 of 30
Societal Psychology
SRT served as a conceptual instrument in a series of large-scale studies on the public
perception of biotechnology in Europe in the second half of the 1990s and well into the 2000s.
This was an illustration of how societal psychology tackles real-world issues and how SRT
simultaneously includes studying the general public, mass media communication, and political
processes by different methods in one frame (Gaskell & Bauer, 2001).
Beyond Europe
The period from 1992 onward also saw a widening of SRT’s geographic scope. The theory and
its often qualitative methodology was received as an alternative to experimental approaches
in social psychology in Latin America. In Mexico, Fátima Flores Palacios contributed to the
theory’s impact through her work on representations of sex and gender (Flores Palacios,
2001). In Brazil, Angela Arruda (2001, 2003) and Celso Pereira de Sa (1998; Pereira de Sá &
Arruda, 2000) were among the scholars who popularized and developed SRT in the academe.
In Asia, the Japanese Group Dynamics Association contributed to founding the Asian Journal of
Social Psychology in 1998, in which SRT played a role during the first decade. Toshio Sugiman
was a driving force in this development as well as in integrating sometimes conflicting
approaches to social analysis such as social constructionism, narrative, discursive, and SRT
(Sugiman, Gergen, Wagner, & Yamada, 2008).
Normalization: Mid-2000s Onwards
At what point in its development is a theoretical approach normalized? What does maturity
mean in the case of an approach that, due to its complexity, had little chance of taking center
stage in social psychology? Or is it a peak in publication statistics? (Figure 6) “Why is it so
difficult to understand the Theory of Social Representations?” asked Maaris Raudsepp in
2005, not only referring to her students. It took SRT four decades to be awarded a chapter in
social psychology handbooks for the first time (Lorenzi-Cioldi & Clémence, 2004, 2010;
Rateau, Moliner, Guimelli, & Abric, 2012; Sammut, Andreouli, Gaskell, & Valsiner, 2015; Rosa
& Valsiner, 2018); and, ironically, it took 40 years for Moscovici’s tome become available in
English (2008). At about the same time single-authored monographs about SRT appeared
(Wagner & Hayes, 2005; Jovchelovitch, 2007).
The present historical outline cannot present or enumerate even the most important
contributions to SRT that have been ongoing since the mid-2000s. The number and diversity
of research is far too extensive during the second decade of this century. A glimpse on the
breadth of SR studies can be found in a special issue of Papers on Social Representations
(Howarth, Kalampalikis, & Castro, 2011) and in the existing handbooks.
Page 19 of 30
Outlook
An historical account of a complex theory like SRT can nowhere be nearly as complete as the
authors wish. Consequently, certain parts of the historical development and details of the
“pre-history” of SRT and biographies had to be omitted in favor of presenting the original
theory in appropriate detail. Moscovici was part of European social psychology’s
reconstruction after World War II when Claude Flament, Jaromír Janousek, Jaap Rabbie,
Ragnar Rommetveit, and Henri Tajfel, among others, drafted a social psychology with an
emphasis on the social dimension. This movement did not last long and social and culturally
oriented theories and approaches, such as SRT, discursive psychology (e.g., Edwards & Potter,
1992), sociocultural psychology (e.g., Rosa & Valsiner, 2018), critical psychology (e.g., Shotter
& Gergen, 1989), and so on, covered certain conceptual spaces beyond the so-called
mainstream. As a latecomer, social identity theory gained relatively wide influence after its
concepts had been redesigned as experimental variables (e.g., Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje,
1999).
What is the history of a theory? At the beginning it is the intellectual product of one or a small
number of congenial spirits. In its further development, the theory travels through a network
of many a scholar’s imagination, gets adapted to their particular practices, making it look ever
so slightly different from the original. Scientists make good use of it and add extensions, very
much like the software extensions that are added to internet browsers for one’s daily needs.
Then there are the later adopters of the theory, contributing creative solutions to problematic
aspects of the theory. Taken together, the community of scholars objectify variants of the
theory in their research. In fact, the history of a theory in general, and of SRT in particular,
resembles the SR processes that SRT captures in its scientific propositions. So SRT models its
own evolution over time and may contribute to understanding the life of other scientific
theories (Moscovici, 1993b).
Acknowledgments
The author is particularly grateful to Paula Castro, who contributed important ideas and critique to the first draft. I
thank George Gaskell, Sandra Jovchelovitch, Nikos Kalampalikis, Katrin Kello, Nicole Kronberger, Saadi Lahlou,
Andrés Mecha, Annamaria de Rosa, and Christian Staerklé for providing information and pictorial material.
Links to Digital Material
Letter to Sherif <https://vimeo.com/112049739>. This is a one-hour English-language movie with

Moscovici where he engages in a fictive conversation with Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988) and lets the viewer participate in
his way of thinking.
Page 20 of 30
Further Reading
Aspects of the theory of social representations and related approaches:

Billig, M., Condors, S., Edwards, D., Gane, M., Middleton, D., & Radley, A. (1988). Ideological
dilemmas. London, U.K.: SAGE.
Jovchelovitch, S. (2019). Knowledge in context: Representations, community and culture (2nd

ed.). London, U.K.: Routledge.
Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations: Explorations in social psychology (G. Duveen,

Trans.). Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
Wagner, W. (1998). Social representations and beyond: Brute facts, symbolic coping and
domesticated worlds <https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X9800400302>. Culture and Psychology,
4, 297–329.
Historical trends:
de Rosa, A. S. (Ed.). (2012). Social representations in the “social arena.” London, U.K.:
Routledge.
Farr, R. (1996). The roots of modern social psychology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Perez, J. A., Kalampalikis, N., Lahlou, S., Jodelet, D., & Apostolidis, T. (2015). In memoriam Serge
Moscovici (1925–2014). Bulletin de Psychologie, 68(2), 181–187.
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Notes
1. There is evidence that the concept of SR was used during the 1950s in essays by Ann Parsons (Jodelet, 2008, p. 414)
which were published posthumously (1969). Parsons worked in Italy at the time and may have had contacts with
Parisian universities (Breines, 1986).
2. See Textbox 1.
3. The first explicit mention of a theory of SRs came later, in 1981.
4. The EAESP (later EASP) was founded in 1966 with funding by U.S.-American sources. At the time, the American
project for the European social sciences was decidedly nomothetic (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian & Wallerstein,
1996), seeking to devise general laws. This project intended to re-establish the social sciences in Europe and brought
together the up until then dispersed European social psychologists in two meetings, 1963 and 1964 (Farr, 1996;
Castro, 2002; Moscovici & Marková, 2006).
5. Samizdat was the name of a series of underground publications in the Soviet Union.
6. A French translation of Moscovici’s paper was published by Nikos Kalampalikis 2012.
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TEXTBOX 1: A Note on Citations, Quotes, and Referencing

The Making of SRT

His research included questionnaires, interviews, and an analysis of press reporting. It

The Symbolic Dimension

Representations are engendered in “the interdependence of several subjects in their relation

Figure 3. Ego–Alter–Object Triad according to Moscovici (1961).

SR scholars elaborate SRs as an abstract phenomenon describing psychological activity in the

Objectification and Anchoring

Moscovici’s elaboration of objectification allows us to see the social environment as being

TEXTBOX 2: Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl: SRT

Incubation Time: 1960s–1984

Furthermore, in Moscovici’s (1961) initial research he hypothesized a process of cognitive

Expansion to the English-Speaking World: 1984–1992

Farr and Moscovici, 1984

Anchoring and Social Marking

Core and Periphery

Institutionalization and Proliferation: 1992–Mid-2000s

A Journal and International Conferences

Once established, Moscovici suggested a further step by institutionalizing the initiative.

It is noteworthy that Moscovici (1995, p. 313) started to explicitly acknowledge the

The Expanding Domain of SRT

Human Rights and Democracy

Culture and Cognitive Polyphasia

Normalization: Mid-2000s Onwards

Links to Digital Material

Letter to Sherif <https://vimeo.com/112049739>. This is a one-hour English-language movie with

Aspects of the theory of social representations and related approaches:

Jovchelovitch, S. (2019). Knowledge in context: Representations, community and culture (2nd

Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations: Explorations in social psychology (G. Duveen,

Abric, J.-C. (1987). Coopération, compétition et représentations sociales. Fribourg, Switzerland:

Arruda, A. (2003). Living is dangerous: Research challenges in social representations. Culture

Bauer, M. (1993). Francophone research on popular(izing) science: A commented bibliography,

Ben-Asher, S. (2003). Hegemonic, emancipated and polemic social representations: Parental

Billig, M. (1988). Social representation, objectification and anchoring: A rhetorical analysis.

Doise, W. (1972). Représentations et relations intergroupes. In S. Moscovici (Ed.), Introduction à

Doise, W. (1986). Levels of explanation in social psychology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge

Durkheim, É. (1898). Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives. Revue de

Duveen, G. (2001). Representations, identities, resistance. In K. Deaux & G. Philogène (Eds.),

Himmelweit, H. T. (1990). Societal psychology: Implications and scope. In H. T. Himmelweit & G.

Howarth, C. (2001). Towards a social psychology of community: A social representations

Jodelet, D. (1985). Civils et bredins: Rapport à la folie et représentation sociale de la maladie

Jodelet, D. (1989b). Représentations sociales: Un domaine en expansion. In D. Jodelet (Ed.), Les

Jodelet, D. (2002). Les représentations sociales dans le champ de la culture <https://doi.org/

Jovchelovitch, S. (2002b). Re-thinking the diversity of knowledge: Cognitive polyphasia, belief

Jovchelovitch, S. (2007). Knowledge in context: Representations, community and culture.

Kalampalikis, N. (2009). Le processus de l’ancrage: L’hypothèse d’une familiarisation à l’envers.

Leman, P. J., & Duveen, G. (1996). Developmental differences in children’s understanding of

Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1922). La mentalité primitive. Paris, France: Librairie Félix Alcan.

Marková, I. (2017). Themata in science and in common sense <https://content.sciendo.com/

Moliner, P. (1995). A two-dimensional model of social representations. European Journal of

Moscovici, S. (1969). Préface. In C. Herzlich (Ed.), Santé et maladie: Analyse d’une

Moscovici, S. (1981). On social representations. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Social cognition:

Moscovici, S. (1988). Notes toward a description of social representations. European Journal of

Moscovici, S. (1995). Geschichte und Aktualität sozialer Repräsentationen. In U. Flick (Ed.),

Pereira de Sá, C. (1998). Construçao do objeto de pesquica em representaçoes sócias. Rio de

Pléh, C. (2018). Narrative psychology as cultural psychology. In G. Jovanović, L. Allolio-Näcke, &

Raudsepp, M. (2005). Why is it so difficult to understand the theory of social representations?

3. The first explicit mention of a theory of SRs came later, in 1981.

6. A French translation of Moscovici’s paper was published by Nikos Kalampalikis 2012.