E. Coli

This special issue of PSR focuses on the social representations of SARS or Covid- 19. The first study by Pizarro and colleagues analyzes the prevalence of social representations about the Covid-19 pandemic in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia, their association with perceived risk and their anchoring in sociopolitical beliefs, such as RWA and SDO. The second and third articles comment on the social communication processes around Covid-19 in Brazil and France (Apostolidis, Santos, & Kalampalikis, this issue; Justo, Bousfield, Giacomozzi, & Camargo, this issue), the fourth in Italy and a last one in South Africa (de Rosa & Mannarini, this issue; Sitto & Lubinga, this issue). Three studies (fifth, sixth and seventh) examines the structure of social representations related to Covid-19 using questionnaires, the free-association technique and inductive terms like Coronavirus (Colì, Norcia & Bruzzone, this issue; Fasanelli, Piscitelli & Galli, this issue) and the new normality (Emiliani et al., this issue), analyzed by different techniques like automatic lexical analysis (IRaMuTeQ). Finally, Denise Jodelet makes a final comment and closes this issue with a reflection on Covid-19 “a separate epidemic”. In this introduction, rather than summarizing the articles, we will develop the themes and the questions they raise.
Keywords: social representations, covid-19; anchorage, propaganda, conspiracy, cognitive polyphasia