Social Representation

Social representation is the totality of values, ideas, metaphors, beliefs, and practices that are shared among the members of groups and communities, being strikingly similar in some ways to mass consensus and discursive psychology. A term coined by Serge Moscovici in 1961, it is referred to as the collective elaboration of a social object for the purpose of behaving and communicating. It's a system of values and practices with a twofold function: to establish an order which will enable individuals to guide themselves in their material and social world and to enable communication among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and in-group history.