... to explore the way each individual personally constructs the world (Kelly, 1955.) From this, we can construct a model of social representation. According to Moscovici (1981) social representation is a result of shared knowledge about the world. In 1989, Begin et al did a study to find how students compared to the unemployed, attributed poverty. Unexpectedly, the unemployed tended to attribute their dispositional attributes to the situation of poverty, whereas students viewed poverty as being situational. This contradicts the theory of self-serving bias, whilst supporting the social representation theory. It was argued that the students had a different perspective of poverty because of their subjects- and perhaps the social environment of university. Our social representation also contributes to what we see as a just world (the individuals tendency towards panglossia.) How we view human rights and justice is partly due to cultural upbringing. Bond et al (1985) found that the ...

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