ABSTRACT
When mapping literature and reviewing a field of investigation the use of a criterion based on the thematic ‘object of study’ is often misleading. When the authors of a thematic review is simply driven by the ‘area of study or sub-topics’ there is a high risk of them quoting investigations on the same objects but inspired by very different paradigms, let alone the importance of the epistemic principles and theoretical approaches that guide each research’s plan and interpretation of results. If the author neglects the different heuristic horizons underlying the concept of society which inspires theories and paradigms, we have already showed years ago how confusing it can be when we assimilate studies on the same thematic object conducted from the social cognition or the social representations perspective, even if both aim at acquiring knowledge of the social world. A chapter entitled ‘Thematic Perspectives and Epistemic Principles in Developmental Social Cognition and Social Representations’ (de Rosa 1992) has listed an impressive amount of studies conducted on the same areas or objects, either related to inter-individual relations and intergroup comparisons (i.e. moral judgment, rules and convention, interpersonal perception, interpersonal relations, intelligence and its social definitions, health, illness and death, mental illness, deviance and handicap, sexuality, socio-sexual rules and gender, body, etc.) or to macro social organizations and institutions (i.e. economics, politics, institutions and institutional roles, urban and rural environment, etc.). Besides the thematic affinity between the studies listed in that article, the analysis intended to highlight how different outcomes can be when authors inspired by two different paradigms, namely Social Cognition and Social Representations, carry out empirical investigations on and give theoretical explanations for the same phenomena. We made it clear that both paradigms share a constructivist approach to social knowledge (both focus on a subject that actively structures knowledge and is a vehicle of common sense and pre-existing views and informational maps of the world), but in the Social Representations Theory there is a strong integration between constructivism and interactionism as epistemic principles. This is clear when we consider the different meanings ascribed to the word ‘social’:
The Social Cognition approach treats the social world in the same way it addresses the natural world, as an object of cognitive operations and categorization, since invariable forms are considered superior to variable contents. Therefore, the Social Cognition approach ‘by adopting a strictly individual type of constructivism which considers cognitive structure as invariable, ends up defining social psychology by applying general cognitive psychology to the study of social stimuli’ (Ugazio 1988: 44);
On the contrary, in the Social Representations approach, the ‘social’ is an element that generates knowledge (genesis), orients its goal and functions, influences its diffusion and transformation. ‘Thus it is not the common object or sharing criteria which validate the social nature of representations, but the social exchanges that produce them’ (de Rosa 1992: 125).
