Ontogenesis of social representations of justice: individual conceptualization and social constraints

BARREIRO, ALICIA

Évora

Simposio; 11a Conférence Internationales sur les Représentations Sociales; 2012

Universidade de Évora

This paper presents results from a research study which principal aim is to understand the relationships between the process of individual conceptualization and the ontogenesis of social representations of justice. It was carried out from the theoretical and methodological contributions of social psychology and genetic psychology. In this study participated 216 children and adolescents, aged between 6 and 17-years, from different socioeconomic backgrounds and attending school in Buenos Aires. The instrument utilized for data collection was an interview, which inquired participant´s associations about justice in their daily life. In the responses of the interviewees it was possible to distinguish three representations of justice: utilitarian, retributive and distributive. Those representations integrated each other from 9 years old, putting forward a dialectical process of integration and differentiation, which accounts for a cognitive process that constructs novelties. Furthermore, the retributive representations of justice had the highest frequency in all age groups. Such representation integrates itself with the utilitarian, conforming a new representation according to which justice is happiness for everyone and the method to achieve it is retribution. Those results challenge the genetic psychology’s classical model of development, because it is not possible to identify passages from lowest to highest knowledge validity. Similarly, they point the need to abandon the conception of an epistemic, abstract and ahistorical subject, to a psychosociological approach, that considers his identity and the specific common sense knowledge from his social group that operates constraining his conceptualization processes.