The concept of social representations, which was developed by Moscovici in 1984, suggests new ways of understanding the social processes that underlie communication between individuals. A social representation is a set of concepts, statements, and explanations originating in daily life in the course of inter-individual communication. The purpose of all representations is to make something that is unfamiliar, or the unfamiliarity itself, familiar. Communication between individuals that involves the use of social representations makes those representations increasingly more similar and thus facilitates future communication. Therefore, an analysis of the communication process should reveal more similar representations among persons belonging to the same social group or class, and more differences between the representations of persons belonging to different social groups or classes. This phenomenon would explain the relative ease of communication between similar individual and social groups and the difficulty of effective communication between dissimilar individuals and social groups. Findings of a variety of studies support this hypothesis. Fifty-two references are appended. (SRT)