Characteristics of interpretative repertoires of perceiving other people in individual “images of the world”

Abstract

Various sociocultural, value-related and normative contexts of individual and group existence are simultaneously supported by the postmodern society. Their mismatch is partly responsible for intra- and interpersonal conflicts and crises in the system of relations. Therefore, nowadays researchers stay focused on the problem of systematizing the subject’s ideas about other people and other social phenomena. The problem is always relevant for international and Russian psychologists, since these cognitive formations affect the behavioral strategies of a person in everyday communication with people around him/her. The purpose of this theoretical study was to determine cognitive structures in interpretative repertoires of perceiving other people. The objects of the study were the phenomena of “interpretative repertoire”, “mental representations”, “social representations”, “frames”, mediating perception of communication partners as one’s “own” people and “alien” people. We formulated the hypothesis of the study regarding the interconnections of social representations, mental representations and frames as cognitive formations, which determine the interpretative repertoires in perceiving one’s “own” people and “alien” people, and those embodied in them. The following methods were applied: theoretical socio-psychological analysis of approaches to the phenomena of “interpretative repertoire”, “mental representations”, “social representations” and “frames” in Russian and foreign psychology; analysis of the results of the empirical research. The scientific novelty of the study is that for the first time a theoretical socio-psychological model of cognitive structures was developed in the interpretative repertoires of perceiving another person, as one’s “own” person or an “alien” person. We disclosed the interconnections between interpretative repertoires and social representations, mental representations and frames in social cognition based on the example of empirical studies of the subject’s ideas about one’s “own” people and “alien” people, “enemies” and “friends”. Their results indicate differences in the interpretative repertoires of describing another person in a metaphorical-narrative form.