Social Representations

From Mental Representations to Social Representations

A nice example of how mental representations are socially structured comes from the way people conceive of groups. The psychological literature contains various conceptions of groups. Groups are sometimes conceived of as resulting from a partitioning of the social world into mutually exclusive categories of people. In each category, all the group members share the same basic characteristics, which become the “essence” of the group. Other conceptions stress a limited number of attributes that carry weight in the definition of a prototype of the group. Group membership is based on whether an individual possesses enough of these attributes. Because each group member's characteristics match to a differing degree the group's prototype, heterogeneity arises from comparisons among group members. Still other conceptions posit that a group consists of the accumulation of concrete memories about individuals who have been previously encountered during personal contacts, learned from the media, and so on. Such groups promote even more heterogeneity among the group members.

From the standpoint of social representations theory, these conceptions are not mutually exclusive. Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi has provided evidence [Page 824]that the way we conceive of groups is influenced by where we are positioned in a social hierarchy. Those with power and status emphasize beliefs in a society of loosely related individuals who are striving for mobility based on individual merit. They thus come to define themselves mainly as individual persons whose group membership does not make a relevant or important contribution to their self-definition. People positioned lower in the social hierarchy tend to describe themselves in terms of attributes that are associated with their group membership, making the self coextensive with all the other members of the group.

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