SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF AGGRESSION - CROSSING THE SEX BARRIER

Controversy over Moscovici's concept of social representations has foc used upon the extent to which they can be viewed as enduring cognitive structures characterizing social groups and whether individual member s are 'prisoners' of their social representations, unable to duplicate the social representations of other social groups. Previous research has established a consistent gender difference in orientation toward a ggression with men viewing it as an instrumental act of coercion and w omen as a temporary loss of self-control. These two social representat ions, originally recovered from spontaneous conversation, have been me asured with a psychometric instrument called Expagg. To examine the mu tability of these representations, men and women in the present study were asked to complete the questionnaire either spontaneously or as th ey believed a member of the opposite sex might respond. Under conditio ns of same-sex responding the usual significant sex difference appeare d. When asked to respond as a member of the opposite sex, men accurate ly mirrored women's higher expressive total score on the questionnaire but psychometric analysis revealed that there was no similarity in te rms of item-total correlations. Women grossly overestimated the degree of men's instrumentality but item-total total correlations revealed a considerable degree of similarity with men's structure. The male repr esentation whether natural or assumed showed higher internal consisten cy than did the female mode. The results are discussed in terms of dif ferential modes of access to gender-linked representations and the cul tural dominance of a masculine and instrumental representation of aggr ession.