The use of sperm donation by single women has provoked public, professional and political debate. Newspapers serve as a critical means of both broadcasting this debate and effecting a representation of this user group within the public sphere. This study uses the theory of social representations to examine how single motherhood by sperm donation has been represented in the UK news over time. Th...

This comment on Valsiner’s (2003) theory of enablement appreciates the theory’s contribution to fill the lacuna of social representation theory in dealing with individual reasoning and behaviour through a mechanism of semiotic mediation. It is shown, however, that the experimental illustration of the theory falls slightly short of providing evidence for the claims. In re-interpreting the experi...

This paper discusses on the social representations of community health agents (CHAs) about drug use as part of a qualitative, ethnographic study with data collected by means of a set of research techniques among health professionals including 22 CHAs in a basic health unit in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) from January, 2006 to January, 2007. The Theory of Social Representations was adopted as the th...

This poster reports an investigation of children’s perceptions of their own and one other religious group. 242 5to 11-year-old children living in south-east England took part in the study. The children came from two religious groups, Muslim and Christian. The children were questioned in order to elicit their descriptions of members of the two religious groups, and to assess the perceived variab...

To build a theory of social complexity, we need to understand how aggregate social properties arise from individual interaction rules. Here, I review a body of work on the developmental dynamics of pigtailed macaque social organization and conflict management that provides insight into the mechanistic causes of multi-scale social systems. In this model system coarse-grained, statistical represe...

Social life depends on understanding other people’s behavior: why they do the things they do, and what they are likely to do next. These actions are just observable consequences of an unobservable, internal causal structure: the person’s intentions, beliefs, and goals. A cornerstone of the human capacity for social cognition is the ability to reason about these invisible causes; having a “theor...