THE EMERGENCE OF A SOCIAL REPRESENTATION OF HUMAN-RIGHTS VIA INTERPERSONAL-COMMUNICATION - EMPIRICAL-EVIDENCE FOR THE CONVERGENCE OF 2 THEORIES

To test the common assumption that social representations originate in ordinary communication, tell 24-person groups of American college stu dents exchanged messages for 2 1/2 weeks, about six specific issues dr awn from a 21-item questionnaire previously used by Clemence, Doise, & Lorenzi-Cioldi (1994) in a cross-cultural investigation on human righ ts. As expected, interpersonal communication led to increased spatial clustering (neighbors in social space became more similar) and enhance d correlations among these issues, leading to a more coherent factor s tructure of human rights conceptions. Clustering and correlation simul taneously illustrate the emergence of self organization in social syst ems and are taken as evidence for the social origin of social represen tations. These findings show how Latane's Dynamic Social Impact Theory complements Moscovici's Social Representation Theory, providing a mec hanism for understanding how and criteria for knowing when social repr esentations arise from communication. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.