Hommage à Serge Moscovici
Rencontres de l'European Association of Social Psychology organisées avec le soutien de l'IEA de Paris
This meeting is held in honor of Serge Moscovici (1925-2014) and his lifelong achievements in social sciences in general and social psychology in particular. Moscovici played a founding role in the creation of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, and was its first president. Throughout his multi-faceted work, Moscovici paid special attention to the examination of the epistemological foundations of social psychology and its position at the crossroads of the social sciences. In many writings he argues that the originality of the psychosocial perspective resides in articulating of the collective with the individual, science with common sense, social thought with individual thought, minorities with majorities. Moscovici developed new theories (collective polarization, social representations, influence of minorities, social innovation) and applied his critical talent to many other articulating theories of social psychology (attribution, reactance, altruism, social cognition, mass psychology, etc.) His work on political ecology, less known by social psychologists, adds a further dimension to a multifaceted intellectual œuvre, engaged in the present and the future of our societies.
Today, maintaining the epistemological identity of social psychology within the overall dynamics of the social sciences has become a major challenge. Our current practices of scientific writing, focused almost exclusively on the publication of short articles, often tend to make our discipline solitary and ahistorical. Moreover, the current debates around the neural and the social sometimes make us forget that social psychology, according to Moscovici, must consider "what men think determines how they think" and not the opposite.
The meeting aims at bringing together junior and senior researchers to discuss theoretical aspects of Moscovici’s work, his conceptual contributions and the impact of his findings that grounded an essential part of psychology social. We will examine how his contributions can help to face the contemporary challenges of our discipline.