A Brazilian Way of Looking at the Aix Social Representations School of Thought

Résumé

The writing that follows describes how a Brazilian social psychologist became familiar with

the Aix school of thought, and relates his personal assessment of the part it played in the

growth of social representations’ field of study. Among the contributions the Aix school made

to that field, the most remarkable are deemed to be: its complementary nature with general

theory, its experimental spirit, its refinement of the core nucleus hypothesis into the structural

approach, the social basis of representations’ core and peripheral cognitive elements, the

explicit relations between them and social practices; as well as later developments, a

representation’s ‘hidden zone’ for instance. Finally, considerations of the influence Jean-

Claude Abric and his colleagues exerted on social psychology in Brazil will be discussed.