The use, in history, of the notion of social representations as developed in social psychology: a choice of methodology

The study of the social programming of behavior may be pursued in history according to different viewpoints. One of the possible choices would be, for historians, by employing a notion of social representations as derived from social psychology. It is more usual that historians choose differently, for example by adopting Pierre Bourdieu's habitus. Nevertheless, the latter is marked by strong elitism, a problem not shared by social representations as seen by social psychologists; in fact, in its context, social representations represent a vulgar form of knowledge, an embodiment of the epistemology of common sense. The main reason for historians to adopt the notion of social representations, as used in social psychology, is that it helps to elucidate one of the most important elements explaining the reasons by which people act. This is always very difficult to study historically, due to insufficient data.