Anchoring and prototypes

Social representations are construed as ways of knowing and organising reality; they provide the social psychological instruments for the construction of objects of knowledge, and in this sense they are at the core of any process of developing knowledge. The locus of social representations is social groups, and they play an essential role in developing as well as in maintaining intergroup relations. It is probably for this reason that anchoring, the mechanism which has been most widely studied in empirical surveys of social representations, has been interpreted mainly in terms of how objects become rooted in a group's system of values. While this interpretation is certainly true, this chapter also draws on other meanings of the term in presenting a study in the field of group values. The aspect of anchoring which has been considered less often concerns the socio-cognitive process of comparisons between categories in order to locate the familiar category which offers the best fit for something ‘new’ as a social representation is constructed about a novel object.

What I have tried to analyse in this study of social representations of the professionalisation of psychology are precisely these socio-cognitive procedures of categorisation through which anchoring takes place. These procedures result in different ways of knowing as different social groups evaluate and elaborate the same object in different ways. The point at which a particular group anchors an object in its conceptual field is influenced by the dynamic of its relations with other groups.