Different Interactions and Different Selves: A Mind Genomics Exploration of Social Theory

Abstract

The study presents a cartography of the ‘self’ from the point of view of experimental psychology, applied to social theory. We explore how people describe themselves in their interactions with others, using experimentally designed vignettes of descriptive statements, constructed according to the prescriptions of Mind Genomics. The pattern of deconstructed responses to the vignettes and the weighting factors of the descriptive statement suggest that people divide into three mind-sets one group focusing on people, one group focusing on games, and one group hard to define. The study presents a tool, the six-question PVI, personal viewpoint identifier, which allows the researcher to assign a new person to one of the three mind-sets based upon the pattern of response to the six questions. The study failed to find a strong co-variation of age with membership in the mind-set, but does suggest that response time to the different descriptive statements may show the hypothesized relation of personality to age.