ABSTRACT
A social representation exists when a number of people come to share that representation by means of communicating and agreeing on similar beliefs. A social representation also refers to beliefs that are publicly displayed. Such beliefs, scripts, and implicit theories are structured by, and anchored on, ideological and value systems. They also have emotional valence. Moreover, they fulfil social functions, such as to protect social identities, to explain relevant social events, and to guide and justify actions towards the objects of representation (Moscovici 1961). In the present chapter, we apply the preceding propositions to the case of social representations about AIDS. We propose an empirical analysis of the relative impact of belief structures, attitudes, and social sharing on the distortion of recall – an intrapersonal process of retention and reconstruction of information – and on the retransmission of rumours, as an instance of interpersonal information processing. The studies we discuss were conducted in the 1990s, and were aimed to draw conclusions relative to the deployment of prevention strategies against AIDS. Nevertheless, those studies are useful for our present purposes, because they support the important theoretical assumption that affective processes on the one hand, and interpersonal processes on the other hand, are, indeed, important mechanisms for the maintenance of social representations.
