The emergence of a social representation of human rights via interpersonal communication: empirical evidence for the convergence of two theories
✍ Scribed by Pascal Huguet; Bibb Latané; Martin Bourgeois
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 214 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0046-2772
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
To test the common assumption that social representations originate in ordinary communication, ten 24-person groups of American college students exchanged messages for 2 1 2 weeks about six speci®c issues drawn from a 21-item questionnaire previously used by CleÂmence, Doise, & Lorenzi-Cioldi (1994) in a cross-cultural investigation on human rights. As expected, interpersonal communication led to increased spatial clustering (neighbors in social space became more similar) and enhanced correlations among these issues, leading to a more coherent factor structure of human rights conceptions. Clustering and correlation simultaneously illustrate the emergence of selforganization in social systems and are taken as evidence for the social origin of social representations. These ®ndings show how LataneÂ's Dynamic Social Impact Theory complements Moscovici's Social Representation Theory, providing a mechanism for understanding how and criteria for knowing when social representations arise from communication.