Last Words

Last words

(Das Spiel Sozialer Beziehungen 2000)

By Lucas Derks 1999

Next week I will fly to New Zealand to present a seminar about the subject matter of this book. Some friends say that this trip symbolises, that the Social Panorama has conquerred the world, as it reaches the other side of the globe from where it orginated. This sounds even more dramatic, if they add to that, that this seminar will be the first activity of this kind in the new Millennium, since it will be held on januari 5th and 6th of the year 2000. But beside this type of 'milestones', I myself often wonder what the real contribution of the Social Panorama project will be. So some final considerations about this.

If one wants to find orientation points to estemate the Social Panorama's contribution to social science, the best place to look is the modern social cognition approach. This field is recently captured in Ziva Kunda book 'Social Cognition, making sense of people' (Kunda, 1999). In Kunda's very well written book, one reads about research that couvers many of the same topics as we went over in this volume. Besides this shared interest, one finds serprisingly little statements that contradict the assertions of the Social Panorama. Although the philosophical background of Kunda bears haevily on emperism and statistics while the Social Panorma reflects a more constructivistic and pragmatic hue.

But Kunda, to the pleasure of all NLP-ers, dedicates a full 35 pages chapter to the unconscious (automatic) nature of social cognition. Also she writes about the function of social catagorization and on how social attitudes are influenced; the latter being still a major topic in social psychology today. And just like in this book, over ten percent of the pages of her book deal with 'The self'. And although one easely spots many topics that are totally unrelated, on a general level most of this subject matter is in accordance.

Although this suggests that academic social psychology is on the same road as we were following in this book, the method and the purpose of the ride is quite different. First of all, academic social psychology drives a different carriage. It is a vehical that resembles an prestegious limosine, a car that drives around to be admired. It allways strives towards total perfection; its wants to manifest itself as the only true genuine car in the entire universe. And it looks very critical at herself and the other cars that surround it.

In contrast, NLP drives this road with a simple light lorry; just with the aim to go somewhere to get a job done. It is low in prestige but higly effective in moving things from point A to point B on this road. Academic psychology, on the other hand, drives its glorious machine, as it were just for the sake of driving it: The road itself seems to be her goal. However outside this metaphor, in the subject domain these differences can take many shapes.

For instance, social cognition psychologists tend to focus on verbal utterances about social life; descriptions as they follow from its popular measuring instruments: observational tools and questionaires. This language filter has in a way blindfolded researchers for the kinesthetic, auditory and visual sides of social cognition. That is propbably why there is no clue in Kunda's work of the spatial nature of social experience. To Kunda and her colleques, social cognition seems to consist of words and numbers and a huge amount of correlations between behavioral and cognitive dimesions that are catagorised by topic. To see social cognition as something that is primaraly a phenomenon of spatial representation, takes a different angle of approach. An approach that takes the sensory qualities of thought into account; an approach like NLP.

For the ideas in this book to become part of mainstream social psychology, a lot of new research must be undertaken. The many hypothesis that are included here, must be tested inan experimental setting. To begin with, the stucture of personifications must be better underpinned. Are the nessasary constituents of a personification indeed the ones we discused in the first chapter of this book? Next, the level of generality of the basic structure of the self experience must be traced down. But for all we need to establish a sound statistical base for the claim that location is the main organizing principle in social experience at large and in all cultures.

But as soon as we leave the emperical-statistical paradigm, and regard the outcomes of repeated clinical experiments as our data, the contribution of the Social Panaorama project to the field of social cognition seems obviously significant. And it will be only a matter of how many people start acting on it's ideas, to acertain the extend of its contribution to the field. Will it indeed revolutionize social psychology as some of my 'fans' believe?

A book like this, once for sale, is like the introduction of a new breed of fish into a pond. One may sit at its side and wonder what will happen to the ones just dropped in to it. Will they be eaten by other, bigger or more numerous fish? Will they die silently of a lack of nutrition? Or will they stay alive hidden somewhere at the bottom of the deeper waters? Ofcouse one hopes that they will reproduce. And if so, that they spread at a considerable rate. However, in an era where we were confronted with many unexpected and undesired effects of the introduction of new and alien species -like the disasterous explosion of the possum in New Zealand- a key question will be: Will their offspring live harmoniously beside the creatures that were already swimming in this pond?

Kunda, Z. (1999) Social Cognition: Making sense of people. MIT Press, Camebridge, Massachusetts, London, England.