Abstract
It is argued that local cultures have much more influence on the cognitive, affective and behavioural functioning of humans than many representatives of social psychology want to admit. Among the few culturally oriented and constructivist approaches, I take up the framework of social representation theory to take a position against claims of universalism in social psychological phenomena. I discuss forms of interaction among people that can be understood as re-constructing a representation's meaning underlying the co-ordinated actions; this is being called ‘cooperational meaning'. Putting the strings together, I consider social representations not only as encompassing members of the in-group, but also as including certain elements of the out-group's representations as a group-overarching meaning. This is seen as a necessary prerequisite when representatitives from different groups or even cultures meet.
