The Salience of Otherness

This chapter outlines a qualitative meta-analysis of the analyses of the social representations of three variants of otherness (i.e., immigration, Islam, and LGBT people). The meta-analysis aimed at assessing the level of generalization of the latent semantic structures detected by first-level analyses with the purpose of testing two general hypotheses drawn from Semiotic Cultural Psychology Theory (Salvatore in Psychology in black and white. The project of a theory-driven science. InfoAge Publishing, Charlotte, NC, 2016; Valsiner in Culture in minds and societies. Foundations of cultural psychology. Sage, New Delhi, India, 2007). First, that the social representations of social objects are shaped by affective sense-making. Second, that the higher the degree of exposure to otherness conveyed by the specific object of the social representation, the more the salience of affective sense-making, hence its influence over social representation. The findings were consistent with both hypotheses. (a) The meta-interpretation of the semantic structures in terms of generalized affective meanings reached a high level of coverage: almost four out of five semantic structures identified by the first-level analyses were interpreted as a specimen of more general affect-laden, generalized meaning. (b) The salience of affective sense-making proved to be associated with the degree of exposure to otherness involved in each object. The more the object involved the exposure to otherness, the more similar the semantic structures were. These results suggest that the representation of a specific topic should be regarded as a local expression of the general cultural dynamics.