The Psychology of the Social

Book excerpt: The differences between individual and collective representations have occupied social scientists since Durkheim, and the social psychological theory of social representations has been one of the most influential theories in twentieth-century social science. The Psychology of the Social brings together leading scholars from social representations, discourse analysis and related approaches to provide an integrated overview of contemporary psychology's understanding of the social. Each chapter comprises a study of a topical issue, such as social memory, the language of racism, intelligence or representations of the self in different cultures; the theory of social representations is both exemplified and linked to central concerns of psychological research, including attribution, memory, and culture; and important links with developmental and educational psychology are made.