Social and Business Problems through the Lens of Projective Iconics: Introducing a New Systematics to Understand and Quantify Perceptions of Social Issues

Abstract

We introduce a new approach to understanding the mind of people regarding the solution of social issues, an approach we title Projective Iconics. The objective is to understand the ‘mind’ of the respondent regarding the solution of a problem, using a projective technique incorporating Mind Genomics. Respondents were presented with a social problem: securing affordable access to medical help. The objective was to understand how they responded to the problem, based upon their reactions to test vignettes, combinations of names of 16 individuals. The names represented different positions of authority, personality, and behaviors. The vignettes were constructed by combining names to create a group of individuals tasked with the job of solving the issue. Each respondent rated 24 unique vignettes. Experiment 1 instructed the respondent to evaluate the likelihood that the group of individuals in a test combination could cooperate to discover a solution. The experimental design enabled the discovery between success and each of the 16 individuals, suggesting three clear mind-sets of respondents, respectively; those who believed that everyday individuals would solve the problem, those who believed that people in power would solve the problem, and those who believed that celebrity personages would solve the problem. When the dependent variable in Experiment 1 was ‘cooperate’, the segmentation into mind-sets was not as clear. Respondents in Experiment 2 estimated the likely total