How people familiarize themselves with complex ecological concepts—anchoring of social representations of invasive non‐native species

New terms and frameworks are constantly being incorporated into scientific and public discourses on the management of natural resources and the environment. The idea of invasive non‐native plant and animal species, i.e. of species that enter a new range and spread prolifically, is currently becoming part of the public discourse in Scotland. This constitutes a valuable opportunity to study how people engage with new scientific concepts. We analysed focus group and personal interview data to examine how participants (including the general public, conservation volunteers and scientists) familiarized themselves with the ecological concept of invasive non‐native species. Our analysis draws on the idea of anchoring in the formation of social representations, complemented by concepts from cognitive linguistics and conceptual blending, and defines anchoring as a process of information transfer from source to target domains. Our findings suggest that social representations of invasive non‐native species were constituted to a large degree by perceptions of species' detrimental impacts and the human role in and responsibility for the introduction process. By contrast, the non‐nativeness of a species was not relevant for participants from the general public and conservation volunteers. Three types of anchoring could be distinguished in our participants' discussions that differed with regard to the relations between source and target domain. Whereas participants from the general public and conservation volunteers used all three types of anchoring, scientists did not. The identification of different anchoring types also helped to explain incongruencies in the scientific discourse on invasive non‐native species, and has implications for public information campaigns. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.