Attitude and Social Representation

AbstractIn this paper, I compare attitudes and social representations and their relations. Social representation theorists have criticized the attitude theorists for their failure to conceptualize the social nature of attitudes. The Person here is considered as isolated one and apart from his social environment. An exploration about it that the person can affect the nature of the environment and vice versa has not been conducted. Theories of attitudes do not consider the reasons and circumstances of their creation and their relation with social, ideological and historical structure and communication. The European approach of social representation is a mean for socializing these concepts. Social representation focus on community, collective practices and the institutionalization of social knowledge. Moscovici (1981) had offered the social representation to be as a foundation on which attitudes are made. According to Moscovici (1963) social representation is the fundamental cause of attitudes. Attitudes, not only the result of an individual cognitive process but are related with social and cultural representation. According to the theory of social thinking architecture, representations lead to attitudes that will be modeled based on a classified system (Rateau, 1999). For a better showing this requires further research and preferably using a qualitative method