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8 Communication and the
microgenetic construction of
knowledge
Charis Psaltis
I’ve always said that social psychology was responsible for the study of communi- cation and ideological phenomena and I think that when studying representations, we are actually studying communication. Serge Moscovici, 1995
Moscovici’s words in the epigraph to this chapter suggest that the study of social representations involves the study of communication, and this is in itself one of the main aims of social psychology. This chapter focusses on a discussion of the microgenetic construction of knowledge, which will hopefully clarify the role of communication in social representations processes and will provide an exploration of the dynamics of social representations – a rather overlooked topic in social representations theory. I will start with a short genealogy of the notion of microgenesis in social developmental psychology and will then focus on how microgenesis has been conceptualized by Duveen and Lloyd (1990) in the context of a genetic social psychology. A specific line of research on the microgenesis of knowledge from this theoretical perspective is then presented (Duveen and Psaltis, 2008; Leman and Duveen, 1999, Psaltis and Duveen, 2006, 2007; Psaltis, Duveen and Perret-Clermont, 2009), and the ramifications of the findings are discussed for the theoretical notion of cognitive polyphasia and an understanding of culture and heterogeneity from a social representations perspective.
Microgenesis: the genealogy of a powerful idea
The origins of the idea of microgenesis can be traced back to the 1920s and the work on Aktualgenese by Sander, Krueger and Werner (Cat´an, 1986; Valsiner and Van Der Veer, 2000; Wagoner, 2009b). They studied the evolution of percepts over time throughout the operation of lawfully organized mental activity. Werner was actually the first to use the term ‘microgenesis’ in the English language, in
- For Werner, it referred to ‘any human activity such as perceiving, think- ing, acting, etc. as an unfolding process , and this unfolding or “microgenesis”, whether it takes seconds or hours or days, occurs in developmental sequence’ (Werner, 1956, p. 347). Vygotsky was clearly influenced by Werner’s work in the
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1920s. He argued for the creation of a new methodology, or general psychology, that was sufficiently developed to deal with the phenomena studied. In his case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 65), so that theory and method become intert- wined. It was argued that what both Werner and Vygotsky, as well Vygotsky’s student Luria, had in common was the use of the microgenetic method and experimentation as an imaginative means for constructing small-scale, living models of large-scale developmental processes (Cat´an, 1986, p. 258). A further historical development of the notion of microgenesis in the context of the United States after the 1950s filled it with ‘non-developmental explanatory systems’ (Valsiner and Van Der Veer, 2000, p. 312) that represented a more general trend in psychology of losing interest in the study of psychological processes and treating the outcomes of these processes as if they entailed explanations themselves. For example, Flavell and Draguns (1957), who reviewed the previous work on Aktualgenese , proposed a rather sim- plistic and impoverished sense of microgenesis that lacked the conceptual tools for grasping construction, tension, novelty and the idea of holistic reorganization of the forms in its process. Piagetian theory underwent a similar impoverished and non-developmental translation by Flavell (Valsiner and Van Der Veer, 2000) with its introduction in the United States. Microgenesis has been studied more recently in the United States by Siegler (1995; Siegler and Crowley, 1991). In this work the non-developmental question of locating when particular cognitive strategies emerge is still detectable, but there is an interesting opening towards an understanding of the interdependence between the social and cognitive experiences in training sessions. This illuminates the socio- genetic nature of experimentation among children, as was the case with Vygotsky’s method of double stimulation. Furthermore, it broadens the focus of the study of change by exploring the path, rate, breadth, variability and sources of change. A precursor of this work could be found in the Piagetian microgenetic work of Inhelder and colleagues (1974) in Geneva, where they focussed on an exploration of the functional conditions of the construction of cognitive structures and their integration. By using children who would use ‘primitive’ (e.g. non-conserving) responses, they were able to observe acquisition processes at work and the different transitions and dynamics of progress (Cat´an, 1986). In parallel with Inhelder and his work in Geneva, a group of social developmental psychologists started exploring microgenetic issues in the context of experimental time spanning a single interactive episode and expanding to subsequent imme- diate and delayed post-tests. This research programme was initiated by Willem Doise and his colleagues Gabriel Mugny and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont (Doise, Mugny and Perret-Clermont, 1975; Doise and Mugny, 1984; Perret-Clermont, 1980), and made use of Piaget’s classic experimental investigations as problems for pairs of children. The research was able to focus on the consequences of social interaction for children’s cognitive development (Duveen and Psaltis, 2008; Psaltis and Zapiti, 2014; Psaltis, 2005b).
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Microgenesis in the context of social representations theory
Duveen and Lloyd (1990) argue that a genetic perspective is implied in the conception of social representations in the sense that the structure of any particular social representation is a construction and thus the outcome of some developmental process. Three types of transformation, associated with social representations as a process, are proposed. There is the process of sociogenesis, which concerns the construction and transformation of the social representations of social groups about specific objects; ontogenesis, which concerns the development of individuals in relation to social representations; and microgenesis, which concerns the evocation and (re)construction of social representations in social interaction (Duveen and Lloyd, 1990). People communicate in social interaction and thus social representations are evoked through the social identities asserted in the activity of individuals. As Duveen (2001a) has convincingly argued, social identity from the perspective of social representations theory appears as a function of social representations. It con- cerns both the process of identification as well as the process of being identified, and can be construed as a point or position in the symbolic field of culture. Rep- resentations always imply a process of identity formation in which identities are internalized and which results in the emergence of social actors or agents. Finally, they provide ways of organizing meanings so as to sustain a sense of stability (Duveen, 2001a). Thus a process of negotiation and (re)construction of both social representations and identities is taking place in social interaction. From the genetic point of view, microgenesis holds a privileged and central position as it is the motor for the ontogenesis and sociogenesis of social representations (Duveen and Lloyd, 1990). Microgenesis is defined as ‘the genetic process in all social interaction in which particular social identities and the social representations on which they are based are elaborated and negotiated’ (Duveen and Lloyd, 1990. p. 8). Compared to the definitions of microgenesis discussed earlier, this definition bears close resemblance to the social constructivist work of ‘social Genevans’ as the emphasis is on change as a form of construction through sociocognitive conflict in social interaction. However, it is unique in that it implicates social identity and social representations in this process. The idea of social representations being evoked in social interaction in this context is also new. According to this perspective, the evocation of social representations in social interaction occurs in the ways in which individuals construct an understanding of the situation and position themselves and their interlocutors as social subjects in the field of social representations. This process can run smoothly along the lines of the ‘taken for granted’, but it can also lead to ruptures (see Zittoun et al ., 2003). Duveen and Lloyd (1990) describe these different paths of change or no change eloquently:
In many circumstances, of course, there will be a mutuality in the understandings constructed by different participants which will obviate the need for any explicit specifications or negotiation of social identities, though one can still describe
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the course of such social interactions as the negotiation of social identities in the same sense as one speaks of a ship negotiating a channel. But where the mutuality of understanding cannot be taken for granted, or where an assumed mutuality breaks down, the negotiation of social identities becomes an explicit and identifiable feature of social interaction. In these circumstances the negotiation of social identities may involve the coordination of different points of view and the resolution of conflicts. In every social interaction there is a microgenetic process in which social identities are negotiated and shared frames of reference established, processes for which social representations provide the resources. (p. 8)
In the process of microgenesis the pragmatic aspects of language play a crucial role. Moscovici (1994), in a somewhat self-critical remark, states that in his early work that focussed on the way representations are shaped and diffused in ordinary communication, he privileged questions of meaning and content at the expense of the study of the pragmatic aspects of communication. As he characteristically said: ‘Yes, the time has come to loosen the link with semantic communication, which is too exclusive, and take more interest in pragmatic communication’ (p. 165). In this work Moscovici convincingly argued that what we effectively transmit in a statement in social interaction is underdetermined by the implemented semantic content,and in this respect what we communicate about a representation is only partially conveyed by the meaning of a sentence. As possible starting points for the study of pragmatics, Moscovici (1994) makes reference to floating representations in communication as ‘taken for granted presuppositions buried under the layers of words and images’ (p. 168) that float in the heads of real people and orient commu- nication, going unnoticed until a rupture takes place in the form of a violation of customs and habitual ways of ‘what has to be’. Ruptures are therefore opportunities to thematize a social representation and explicitly make it a topic of discussion (see Markov´a, 2003; Gillespie, 2008). The importance of the implicit aspect of communicative expectations was the hallmark of work on the microgenesis of knowledge initiated in the early 1990s by Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont in Neuchˆatel, in the educational context that fol- lowed the work of the ‘social Genevans’. Known as the second generation of research on social interaction and cognitive development, this work focussed on the communicative demands of the task situation (Perret-Clermont et al ., 1991; Schubauer-Leoni and Grossen, 1993; Perret-Clermont, 1994), and particularly on the pragmatics of communication between adult and child in the testing situation, emphasizing the forms of experimental or didactic contracts that exist in the way pupils differentially relate with experimenters and teachers in a testing situation on a single task. An important point to keep in mind here is the partially shared nature of representations that make ruptures possible, but more importantly that make communication itself possible. If we completely shared views, then there would be no need to communicate, and if we had nothing in common then the process of communication would not be possible (Jovchelovitch, 2007, Moscovici, 1994; Gillespie, 2008). In this sense, generativity of social representations is premised on
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Through the study of varying forms of communication, it offered the contours of a model of transition from pre-operational to operational thought in children that could be extended to a more general model of the role of social relations and communication forms (Duveen, 2002; cf. Castorina, 2010; Leman, 2010; Jovche- lovitch, 2010) in the transition from representations of belief to representations of knowledge. 1 In this work the experimental microgenetic paradigm of the ‘social Genevans’ is applied in order to explore how children age 6–7 years interact under conditions where an asymmetry of gender status is crossed with an asymmetry of knowledge on cognitive tasks (Psaltis and Duveen, 2006; Psaltis and Duveen, 2007; Psaltis, Duveen and Perret-Clermont, 2009; Psaltis, 2011a; Psaltis and Zapiti, 2014). This work explores the effects of such criss-crossings of asymmetries on conversation types and on the change of the representation of the conservation of liquids and the village task (for reviews and commentaries of this work, see Castorina, 2010; Jovchelovitch, 2010; Leman, 2010; Ferrari, 2007; Martin, 2007; Maynard, 2009; Nicolopoulou and Weintraub, 2009; Simao, 2003; Sorsana and Trognon, 2011; Psaltis, Duveen, and Perret-Clermont, 2009; Psaltis, 2011b). In this work one can clearly see the interplay between two processes of repre- sentation: the process of evoking social representations of gender and the process of evoking the social represention of the cognitive task, which is of course also an opportunity for the reconstruction of knowledge of both representations in social interaction. The work expands Moscovici’s (1961/2008) insight in Psychoanalysis when he distinguished between the ‘logical system and the normative metasys- tem’ (p. 166), as well as Doise’s plea to articulate the four levels of analysis in social developmental psychology (Doise, 1986a; see also Chapter 3 this vol- ume). One operationalization of the interplay between the two systems came from Doise (1990), who argued that the study of social representations should highlight the social regulations which the normative meta-system of social representations exerts over the cognitive system, in order to explain under what conditions social positioning activates specific ways of cognitive functioning. Doise and Mugny specifically introduced the notion of social marking^2 as working in tandem with sociocognitive conflict, forming a twofold mechanism of cognitive development (Doise and Hanselmann, 1990). Social marking refers to ‘The correspondences
1 Moscovici’s (1998/2000, p. 136) distinction is between (a) social representations ‘whose kernel consists of beliefs which are generally more homogeneous, affective, impermeable to experience or contradiction, and leave little scope for individual variations’, and (b) social representations founded on knowledge ‘which are more fluid, pragmatic, amenable to the proof of success or failure, and leave a certain latitude to language, experience, and even to the critical faculties of individuals’. 2 An example of social marking from Doise and Mugny (1984, pp. 69–72) is in an experimental condition where original non-conservers distributed fruit juice to two children who ‘had worked equally hard and therefore merited the same amount of juice to drink’. In the control situation, without marking, the aim was only to establish an equality between two quantities of liquid in the classical transformations. It was found that the socially marked condition produced significantly more correct solutions than the unmarked one and this was explained as the result of conflict between the equality norm and the unequality perception of the non-conserver.
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which may exist between, on the one hand, the social relations presiding over the interactions of persons actually or symbolically present in a given situation and, on the other hand, the cognitive relations bearing on certain properties of the objects through which these social relations materialise’ (Doise, 1989, p. 395). More recently, Doise, Mugny and P´erez (1998) specified Doise’s definition of social regulations by forging more explicit links between the social psychology of influ- ence (Moscovici, 1984; P´erez and Mugny, 1996) and the findings from the first generation of studies. Here, a broad conception of social regulations (implying both social marking and modalities of resolution) and an articulation of how these contribute to cognitive progress – on the condition that they are used to orient a sociocognitive conflict – is provided. Moreover, it is concluded that the resolution of conflict depends largely on the nature of the sources of this influence. Those of higher status tend to induce a more relational regulation of the conflict, that is to say, a socially explicit re-establishment of consensus (imitation in developmental studies, compliance in social influence). Sources of an equal status (developmental studies) or inferior status, minorities or out-group (studies of influence) induce a more constructivist process. The importance of introducing the notion of social marking by Doise and his colleagues is that of finding a notion that makes the link between the ‘logical system and the normative metasystem’, but it would appear as a mechanism to be ‘too good to be true’, to use the same words that Moscovici (1990, p. 179) used when he raised doubts about Vygotsky’s notion of internalization. What disturbs Moscovici is that Vygotsky’s formula suggests a direct relationship between social practices and individual functioning. In Vygotsky’s work there is no reference to any structures or processes mediating between the inter-psychological and the intra-psychological. What is missing in Vygotsky’s notion of internalization as well as Doise’s notion of social marking, even if we accept that social marking does work in tandem with sociocognitive conflict, is the dynamics emanating from group belongingness and social identities of the interlocutors as they relate to positioning and resistance (Duveen, 1993, 2001) during the actual unfolding in microgenetic time of a social interaction. This would be closer to Moscovici’s original argument about how the cognitive system is regulated by the normative meta-system in natural thought, where he evokes dynamics of group belongingness:
We have in other words, ordinary operational relations on the one hand, and normative relations that check, test and direct them on the other. Normative values and principles are by definition, organized. This means that relations between the logical terms are directional, and that the relationship between A and B is not the same as that between B and A... If we look for the criteria defining permitted combinations and forbidden combinations we find that the former are associated, either directly or indirectly, with the subject’s group, whilst the latter are associated with another group. (Moscovici, 1961/2008, p. 167)
The way that social representations are striving for the whole is captured by Duveen when he argues that the stability of particular forms of identity is linked to
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expectations or habitual ways of positioning the gendered self derived from pre- suppositions of social representations of gender – the same ‘presuppositions buried under the layers of words and images’ discussed by Moscovici earlier (Moscovici, 1994, p. 168). A girl positioned as a novice by a boy asserting himself as an expert may find this situation all too familiar, while a boy who finds himself positioned as a novice by a girl may find that this conflicts with his expectations as an expression of a certain dominant masculinity. Indeed, this is exactly what we find with the well- established ‘Fm effect’^3 (Leman and Duveen, 1999; Psaltis, 2005a, 2005b, 2011a; Psaltis and Duveen, 2006, 2007; Psaltis, Duveen and Perret-Clermont, 2009; Zapiti and Psaltis, 2012; Zapiti, 2012; Zittoun et al ., 2003; Psaltis and Zapiti, 2014). We consistently find that the conflicting nature of gender status and knowledge asym- metries in dyadic interaction of female expert-male novice (Fm) creates a more balanced communication between the interlocutors. Such communication is linked with more flexible and novel forms of knowledge, interiorization of operations and in-depth understanding of the object under discussion. As Jovchelovitch vividly commented on the ‘Fm effect’ in Duveen (2002, p. 148), ‘what the girls are doing is they are bringing the boys an apple, and when the boys bite into it, it becomes new knowledge for them’. This effect resonates quite well with the Vygotskian method of ‘double stimulation’ and the Piagetian notion of groping since it is like the boy is reaching a distant ‘object’ (gaining back his dominant gender posi- tion) through the means of an intermediary (constructing novel conservation argu- ments). In the process of communication he discovers how to use the intermediary object (conserving arguments) as a means to attain his end, and then incorporates this action into his already existing schemata of representing the conservation of liquids. Another innovation of the third generation of studies is the introduction of a more molar level of analysis of unfolding communication in microgenetic time by distinguishing different types of conversation or interaction types (Psaltis, Duveen and Perret-Clermont, 2009; Psaltis, 2005b; Psaltis and Duveen, 2006, 2007; Duveen and Psaltis, 2008). For example, on the conservation of liquids task, the following conversation types were identified:
- Non-conserving. In a minority of cases the non-conserving child was able to per- suade their conserving partner to agree on a joint response of non-conservation.
- No resistance. Conversations which began with an assertion of conservation by the conserving child to which the non-conserving child offered no resistance.
- Resistance. Conversations where the non-conserver offered an argument in sup- port of their position at least once during the interaction.
3 In this series of experiments four different pair types were employed. For example, in Psaltis and Duveen (2006) on the conservation of liquids task in Mm dyads, male conservers worked with male non-conservers, in Mf dyads male conservers worked with female non-conservers, in Ff dyads female conservers worked with female non-conservers, and in Fm dyads female non-conservers worked with male non-conservers.
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- Explicit recognition. Conversations in which the non-conserving child gave some explicit indication that they had grasped the idea of conservation, often by giving a conservation argument themselves.
The coding of interaction at this molar level of analysis provided a clearer and stronger pattern of relationships between this feature of the interaction and the outcome for the original non-conservers on the post-test. Progress on the post-test was observed for almost every child who participated in an explicit recognition conversation (Psaltis and Duveen, 2006), but never for those from non-conserving conversations. And while about half the children from No Resistance and Resistance interactions made progress on the post-test, they did so without producing any novelty on the post-test. Novelty was almost exclusively observed in the post-tests of children who had participated in Explicit Recognition (Psaltis and Duveen, 2006). Explicit recognition therefore is the conversation type which is uniquely associated with the type of interaction which stimulates reflection and leads to an authentic transformation in the representation. In this conversation type there is explicit recognition of conservation by the original non-conserver, but the kind of intersubjectivity implied by the fact that the non-conserving child changed their stance during the interaction suggests that recognition takes a clearly relational nature having to do with how the non-conserver is being identified by the conserver. From the perspective of the non-conserver, there is a validation by the conserver of a change of their subjective point of view at the meta-level culminating in joint agreement as a form of mutual recognition, which Rommetveit (1984) calls an intersubjectivity of a temporarily shared world where both interlocutors know that the other knows the same thing that they know themselves. Such a conversation type is characterized by a form of recognition of the original non-conserver as a thinking subject (Psaltis and Duveen, 2007), or an autonomous agent who on reflection can take responsibility to change their mind. But for this to be done, it also has to coordinate with the other’s point of view and thus the influence taking place here is bi-directional. On the contrary, in Incorrect Answer and No Resistance, there appears to be at play a form of instrumental recognition where one of the partners is relegated by the other to an object that either just fills in the slots offered by the other or is not taken into account at all. Influence here is uni-directional. Finally, resistance seems to be a form of categorical recognition where there is a limit to the unidirectional influence that can be achieved by the other due to his or her social category membership.
Ramifications of the third generation of research for social
representations theory: towards a genetic social psychology
The first and most important implication of the reviewed work concerns the epistemology of social representations. Moscovici stated after Duveen’s untimely death that his work ‘had been able to raise fundamental epistemological questions
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it is not just a description of this situation. It expresses something more general’ (ibid., p. 152). An example of the application of these ideas to the more general processes of societal/sociogenetic change through processes of communication is attempted by Psaltis (2012c), in which I explore the reduction of prejudice through intergroup contact between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots in the context of the post- conflict and divided society of Cyprus. In this work I show how the absence of contact or the presence of negative quality communication which is not based on mutual respect directly relates to adherence to the official narratives of the conflict in both communities, that in turn directly relate with feelings of anxiety, threat, distrust and prejudice. From the present theoretical framework this is expected, since official narratives are characteristic for their partial and ethnocentric nature – functioning as closed systems characteristic for being homogeneous, affective and impermeable to experience or contradiction – and leave little scope for individual variation, similar to ecclesiastical ‘dogma’, a fine example of what Moscovici (1988, 2000) called social representations based on belief. As such, they are based on social relations of unilateral respect, fail to promote true dialogue and reflection (Psaltis and Duveen, 2006, 2007; Duveen and Psaltis, 2008; Psaltis, 2012a), and claim a hegemonic role in society. Their resistance to change comes from their isolation from alternative representations or from the way dialogue with alternative representations is undermined by varying semantic barriers (Moscovici, 1961/1976; Gillespie, 2008) that inoculate against change.
Cognitive polyphasia and social relations
Another theoretical notion that microgenetic research can help clarify is that of Cognitive polyphasia (see Chapter 11 in this volume). In one sense it could be described as the case where both interlocutors agree to disagree and learn to live with dissonance. However, another form of cognitive polyphasia could be extracted from the example I gave earlier of an interaction between a conserver and a non-conserver. As Duveen (20001a, p. 176) argued on the basis of the distinction between social relations of constraint and social relations of cooperation, ‘Piaget himself might have moved towards a notion of cognitive polyphasia. But he remained a committed monophasic.’ It is possible at some point in a social interaction for a person to construct a flexible operational structure in relation to a specific topic, problem, or task that is logically coherent. But communication around these objects can of course take place in different settings, with different individuals, or different groups with considerable variation in their structure, aims and functions. In this respect, the person will evoke and possibly reconstruct his representation in this different context and it is possible that in this second context the form and content of this representation will be different to the one reached earlier. As long as the form of representation constructed serves different goals, more epistemic in
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the first one but more dominated by concerns of group belongingness in the second one, the persons will have in their ‘toolbox’ two ways to react with different people or groups to the same object without the need of exhibiting unitary behaviour across situations. As long as s/he is not required to confront the two contexts simultaneously, s/he can continue in this cognitive polyphasia of applying varying logics indefinitely. On particular ‘developmental’ tasks the pressure towards a more ‘scientific’ point of view is over-determined since the chances of meeting a person with the same representation of conservation of liquids as the conserver is indeed high (e.g. adults, teacher, books), even if this is not really a scientific representation of the task. 4 It is in this sense that Duveen and Lloyd (1990) argued that microgenesis and ontogenesis do not always lead to sociogenesis. The non-conserving children are unlikely to form a group that would make it their life’s project to convince society through a mass-media campaign of the non-conservation of liquids. But this is not the case with tasks and problems such as discussing preferences or attitudes towards immigration or minority rights, for example, when the issues are a matter of ideological contest and struggle in the public sphere between adults. Discussions between adults on these issues, it would seem, are more likely to entail at least the possibility of a transition between microgenesis to ontogenesis and sociogenesis. From the work cited earlier, for example in Cyprus (Psaltis, 2012c; Makriyianni and Psaltis, 2007), we can see how bi-communal civil society organizations 5 dealing with history teaching take joint collective action to produce educational material for both communities that will facilitate decentring from ethnocentric narratives at the societal level, premised on communicative forms based on mutual respect that facilitate all three types of genetic change.
Avoiding the reification of culture
Another field of application of the findings from the third generation of research was apparent in Duveen’s discussion of the notion of culture through the lenses of social representations (see Psaltis, 2012a) when he discussed hegemonic, polemical and emancipated representations (Moscovici, 1988). In the last paper he wrote, Duveen (2008) expanded on this thinking, revisiting the second part of the original work of Moscovici (1961/1976) on psychoanalysis, making a call for heterogeneity in social psychology. He argued that we need to recognize that there is an intimate relation between the values and attitudes of a group and the characteristic patterns of communication which sustain it (Duveen, 2008). In particular, he likened diffusion as a form of communication with a specific form of affiliative bonds linking the members of this group of people who are engaged in sceptical the exchange of ideas as a form of sympathy where the out-group become
4 A more correct scientific representation of the task would be that the two glasses (pre-transformation and transformation) actually do not have the same amount of water since some droplets are always left without the experimenter’s will in the pre-transformation glass. 5 An example of such an NGO is the intercommunal Association for Historical Dialogue and Research.
