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| The Social
Panorama Model |
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To find their way in the social world, people need
a mental map. To be of any use, such a map must be a
simplifyed image of the ever changing events that make
up their social life. But how simplifyed, generalized
and abstract must it be? The word `relationship' denotes
the relevant level of simplification for a usefull social
map. A `relation' is an abstraction of an ongoing series
of interactions. `I have a relationship with you' means,
that I brought permanence and stability into my thoughts
about our ongoing and ever changing contact.
So the question is, how do people represent people on
this level of relationships?
Over the last decade, it appeared that the cognitive
maps people make, are spatial constructions (Fauconnier,
1997, 2002). The same holds for our social maps. These
are structured like an three dimensional inner landscape,
composed of abstracted images of people. The abstraction
is of such a level that we still can recognize who such
an image is representing.
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The self is in the center of this ‘social panorama'; all significant
people are projected on their own locations around it.
The exact locations where the images of others are placed, have proven to be extremely meaningfull.
This laed up to the social panorama's maxim: relation equals
location. Or more precisely: The quality of a social relation
is to a great extend governed by the spot where the image of
the person is projected in mental space.
So, while all the real people in the world crawl around in any
direction, come and go to finaly dissapear, this inner landscape
of social images shows them as stable objects, even bejond their
deaths.
Population modeling
Something like the social panorama falls beyond
the mainstream paradigms in social science. If we want to orient
ourselves on its methodology, we need a new concept. The social
panorama can be seen as the product of what we call `population
modeling', which can be contrasted to the modeling of one single
expert, as it is standard in NLP. A population model is a piece
of quantitative-qualitative research into the characteristics
of some part of subjective experience. The model is not phenomenological
but pragmatic; it aims at a discription that is usefull. It
doesn`t aim at verisimilitude; but, when a model `works' it
nessasaerely neads to represent `reality' (psychological, physical
or statistical) in some way.
The distinctions in a population model are as few as possible,
and they are chosen because of the guidence they offer during
practical applications. Thus such a model aims not at the truth
of the matter, but at maximum orientation in action.
Most often, the population modeler starts with a hypothesis
of how this segment of experience is generally structured within
a group. To further elaborate on that by interviewing a great
number of subjects. These subjects are questioned within the
context of an application: like during negotiations, within
psychotherapy or within a training.
Before the social panorama, the so called `personal timeline'
presented another example of population modeling. In the case
of the personal time line, the hypothesis was, that people represent
time in a liniar an spatial manner. After
working with this hypothesis for several years the reasearchers
could enlist a number of cultural and universal patterns in
the ways people represented time. This model has proven to be
very fruitfull for understanding and changing time related problems
concerning planning and motivation. |
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