…Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler

Albert Einstein

…I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.

Mark Twain

Where do we, the general public, sit between these two truths?  In the modern age we have no time – or no will – to read lengthy explanations.  We prefer lowest common denominator, headline grabbing, click bait.

If there is honest intent to maintain truth in explaining cause and effect, psychology might call this stripped bare version “Social Representation”.

Although it must be said even the summaries of theory hardly get us closer to what this represents.  From my text book we have these two summaries to help us:

…collective elaborative explanations of complex phenomena that transform them into familiar and simple form

Hogg and Vaughn 2018 pp105.

Their second attempt was:

…simplified causal theories of complex phenomena that are socially constructed through communication contextualised by intergroup relations.  Rumour and gossip may play a key role in social representations.

(ibid pp113)

My homework tonight was to explain this in less than 200 words.  I think Social Representation is simply:

…what science looks like once filtered through Twitter

author’s own

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199 words