Serge Moscovici

Serge Moscovici (1925 to 2014), born Srul Hers Moscovici, was a Romanian-born French social psychologist who co-founded the European Laboratory of Social Psychology at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris in 1974 and directed it. Born in Braila, Romania, to a Jewish family, he was interned in a forced-labor camp during the Second World War, left Romania in 1947 and reached France a year later, where he studied psychology at the Sorbonne. His 1961 doctoral thesis, directed by the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache, explored the social representations of psychoanalysis in France and grew into his theory of social representations, which describes how shared systems of values, ideas and practices let communities orient themselves and communicate. Criticizing American research on majority influence and conformity, he investigated minority influence, showing that a consistent minority can change the opinions of a larger group.