Dynamic Social Impact and the Evolution of Social Representations : A Natural History of Stereotypes

Although the term artificial life was coined less than a decade ago to describe “the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems” (Langton, 1989, p. l), social scientists had long before begun studying the man-made systems of values, beliefs and behaviors that comprise a culture. With others, we suggest that these mental entities emerge, develop, and evolve in ways not unlike organic entities (Boyd & Richerson, 1774; Hull, 1988). In this paper, we apply this evolutionary metaphor to social representations, a form of culturally shared belief exemplified here by group stereotypes. Our purpose is to show how dynamic social impact theory (DSIT) and an evolutionary perspective offer new ways of understanding the emergence, integration, maintenance, and change of social representations through communication. We first outline the metatheoretical perspective that social representations emerge as structure in self-organizing systems, the result of individual-level communication dynamics. DSIT explains how social representations become organized into cognitive bundles and distributed through social space. We then explore ways in which DSIT might be further informed by the dynamic processes of biological self-organizing systems. In doing so, we consider the ways in which social representations are responsive to dynamic processes analogous to those underlying the evolution of species and population fluctuations within biological ecosystems.