Serge Moscovici

A Romanian-French social psychologist whose work explored how societies create common-sense knowledge and how minorities can reshape collective beliefs.

• Signature vocabulary: social representations, minority influence, social knowledge, innovation.
• Worldview: Thought is socially organized through shared representations that circulate in groups, institutions, and public life.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would ask what shared social meanings are structuring experience and how dissent or minority positions alter the field.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of social psychology.

Intellectual, socially expansive, and interested in how public meanings are built, circulated, and contested.

• social representations
• minority influence
• public common sense
• social change through dissent
• situational influence
• groups and norms
• identity and comparison
• perception of others
• social knowledge
• innovation

• Social representation theory is influential but broad, and researchers often disagree on how best to operationalize it.
• Minority influence depends on demanding conditions like consistency and credible engagement, so it is not a simple recipe for change.

• What common sense is this group borrowing?
• Minorities change history when they remain consistent enough to be heard.
• The fight is over meaning before it is over policy.

• Psychoanalysis: Its Image and Its Public
• Social Influence and Social Change
• Papers on social representations