Serge Moscovici

Serge Moscovici (June 14, 1925 as Srul Herş Moscovici – November 15, 2014) was a Romanian-born French social psychologist, director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale ("European Laboratory of Social Psychology"), which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris.

He was a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Officer of the Légion d'honneur, as well as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Moscovici's son, Pierre Moscovici, was European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs.

Born in Brăila to parents who were grain merchants, His uncle was Ilie Moscovici, a leading Romanian socialist.

Moscovici frequently relocated, together with his father, spending time in Cahul, Galaţi, and Bucharest.

(Later he would indicate that his stay in Basarabia had contributed to his image of a homeland. ) From an early age Moscovici suffered the effects of antisemitic discrimination: in 1938, he was expelled from a Bucharest high school on the basis of newly-issued antisemitic legislation.

In later years he commented on the impact of the Iron Guard, and expressed criticism for intellectuals associated with it (Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade).

Moscovici trained as a mechanic at the Bucharest vocational school Ciocanul.

Faced with an ideological choice between Zionism and communism, he opted for the latter, and, in 1939, joined the then-illegal Romanian Communist Party, being introduced by a clandestine activist whom he knew by the pseudonym Kappa.

During World War II, Moscovici witnessed the Iron Guard-instigated Bucharest Pogrom in January 1941.

Later the Ion Antonescu régime interned him in a forced-labor camp, where, together with other persons of his age, he worked on construction teams until freed by the Soviet Red Army in 1944.

During those years he taught himself French and educated himself by reading philosophical works (including those of Baruch Spinoza and René Descartes).

Subsequently, Moscovici travelled extensively, notably visiting Mandatory Palestine, Germany and Austria.

During the late stages of World War II he met Isidore Isou, the founder of lettrism, with whom he founded the artistic and literary review Da towards the end of 1944 (Da was quickly censored).

Refusing promotion on the basis of political affiliation at a time when the Communist Party participated in Romania's governments, he became instead a welder in the large Bucharest factory owned by Nicolae Malaxa.

Initially welcoming Soviet occupation, Moscovici grew increasingly disillusioned with communist politics, and noted the incidence of antisemitism among Red Army soldiers.

As the communist regime was taking over and the Cold War started, he helped Zionist dissidents cross the border illegally.

For this, he was involved in a 1947 trial held in Timișoara, and decided to leave Romania definitively.

Choosing clandestine immigration, he arrived in France a year later, having passed through Hungary and Austria, and having spent time in a refugee camp in Italy.

In Paris, helped by a refugee fund, he studied psychology at the Sorbonne while employed by an industrial enterprise.

At the time, Moscovici became close to Paris-based writers, including the Romanian-born Jewish Paul Celan and Isac Chiva.

In reference to himself, Celan, and Moscovici, Chiva later recalled: "'For us, people on the Left, but who had fled communism, the first period in Paris, in a capital where the intellectual environments were developing under full-scale Stalinist enthusiasm, was very harsh. We were caught between a rock and a hard place: on one side, the French university environment who saw us as «fascists». [...] On the other, the Romanian exiles, most of all the nationalist students, when not outright on the far right, who did not shy away from denouncing us as communist «moles» in the pay of Bucharest or Moscow.'"

In 1955, he married Marie Bromberg who he met at the Institute de Psychologie.

They had two sons, Pierre and Denis.

During the 1960s Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study invited him to the United States; he worked at Stanford University and at Yale before returning to Paris to teach at the École pratique des hautes études.

He served as a visiting professor at the New School in New York City, at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, as well as at the Université catholique de Louvain and at the University of Cambridge.

In 1961, he completed His doctoral thesis (La psychanalyse, son image et son public).

It was directed by the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache and explored the social representations of psychoanalysis in France.

Moscovici also studied epistemology and history of sciences with philosopher Alexandre Koyré.

By 1968, together with Brice Lalonde and others, he became involved in green politics, and ran in elections for the office of Mayor of Paris for what later became Les Verts.

He died in Paris in 2014.

His research focus was on group psychology and he began his career by investigating the way knowledge is reformulated as groups take hold of it, distorting it from its original form.

His theory of social representations is now widespread in understanding this process of cultural Chinese whispers.

Influenced by Gabriel Tarde, he later criticized American research into majority influence (conformity) and instead investigated the effects of minority influence, where the opinions of a small group influence those of a larger one.

He also researched the dynamics of group decisions and consensus-forming.

Moscovici developed the theory of social representations which he defined as: "'a system of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function: first to establish an order which will enable individuals to orient themselves in their material and social world and to master it; and secondly to enable communication to take place among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history'."

Moscovici claimed that majority influence in many ways was misleading – if the majority was indeed all-powerful, we would all end up thinking the same.

Drawing attention to the works of Gabriel Tarde, he pointed to the fact that most major social movements have been started by individuals and small groups (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, the Suffragette movement, Nazism, etc.) and that without an outspoken minority, we would have no innovation or social change.

The study he is most famous for, Influences of a consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a colour perception task, is now seen as one of the defining investigations into the effects of minority influence:

In commemoration of his elaborate and significant contribution to the world of psychology and society in general, several awards, medals, lectures have been established.