Adolescent behavior at an interaface between social representations and personal experience.
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2008 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Annales Psychologici |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Psychology |
| Keywords | social representation communication action experience |
| Description | Theory of social representation by S. Moscovici (1984) provides a comprehensive background that explains how common (social) communicative structures are generated, shared and used in everyday life. We can see the SR as a social system with relatively stable core. The central core gives a social representation its meaning. We can find it and name it as a usually bipolar dimension or rather as a set of dimensions. Peripheral elements are organized around the central core and they constitute an interface between the core and actual situation Since the individual experience beyond a discourse raises tension, the social representations, which set up in the course of dialogical communication, restore comprehensibleness of actions in the group (see Markova, 2003). We can expect that both the core and the periphery influence human representation and action, but they participate differently under different conditions. We can theorize that the roles of certain peripheral parts of social representations become more important in such situations, which are highly familiar and relevant to both the individual and his informal group. We expect that real life experience-based communication is more powerful to bring real variability into (peripheral) SRs and consequently also to the core SR. There were three groups of research subjects - classmates (65 altogether), aged from 16 to 17. Every class-group came from different grammar schools in the city of Brno. There were not any interactions among participants during examination. The participants were asked to solve two problem situations. The first situation showed a person (man/woman) lying on a street, who may be in a need of help. The second situation presented a person (man/woman) wanting to get a job that is very important for her/him. Our results support the assumption that the core of social representations and their peripheries participate on individual representations differently, depending on both subjective familiarity and in-group familiarity of the situation. The communication of common experience, obtained within familiar and relevant situations, takes the thematisation away from the general core of social representations and introduces variability to their periphery. |
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