Serge Moscovici - Biography#

Serge Moscovici (Srul Herş Moscovici) is a Romanian-born French social psychologist who founded and currently directs the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and an Officer of the Légion d'honneur.

Moscovici began his research career by studying the way that groups reformulate and distort the information they receive. He also explored the dynamics of group decisions and consensus-forming. Moscovici's most famous experiments focused on minority influence. In this work, Moscovici showed how a consistent minority could get members of a majority group to alter their responses on a color perception task, even when the minority was not unusually high in social status. With these findings, Moscovici added a new and important perspective to research on group behavior.

In the late 1960s, Moscovici became involved in green politics and campaigned to become Mayor of Paris. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities, and in 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for Social Psychology. For more about his life, see his 1997 autobiography "Chronique des années égarées" (Chronicle of the Mislaid Years).