I am overwhelmingly confident that analysis of the kinds of narratives that a particular person spins, including what tropes they evoke—even if you’re not familiar with the tropes previously—would reveal a lot about their worldview, their ethical structure, the assumptions and modelling they have about how people, institutions, and general patterns they believe underlay the world.
A oversimplified example is a person who clearly has a “victim “mentality” and an obsession with the idea of attractiveness because they always use sentence structures (i.e. “they stopped me”) and narratives where other people have inhibited, bullied, envied, or actively sought to stifle the person telling the story and these details disproportionately make reference to people’s faces, figures, and use words like “ugly” “hot” “skinny” etc. It is not necessary to know what films, books, periodicals they read.
I think you would get the set of topics, but not necessarily the right idea about how exactly those topics apply to the current situation. To use your example, if someone’s speech patterns revolve around the topic of “bullying”, it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn’t get over it, or that the person is bullied right now, or perhaps that someone they care about is bullied and they feel unable to help them. (Or could be some combination of that; for example seeing the person they care about bullied triggered some memories of their own experience.)
Or if someone says things like “people are scammers”, it could mean that the person is a scammer and therefore assumes that many other people are the same, or it could mean that the person was scammed recently and now experiences a crisis of trust.
This reminds me of an anime Psycho Pass, where a computer system detects how much people are mentally deranged...
...and sometimes fails to distinguish between perpetrators and their victims, who also “exhibit unusual mental patterns” during the crime; basically committing the fundamental attribution error.
Anyway, this sounds like something that could be resolved empirically, by creating profiles of a few volunteers and then checking their correctness.
To use your example, if someone’s speech patterns revolve around the topic of “bullying”, it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn’t get over it
Yes. Which is invaluable information about how they see the world currently. How is that not the ‘right idea’? If that is how they continue to currently mentally represent events?
Your ‘people are scammers’ example is irrelevant, what is important is if they constantly bring in tropes or examples or imply deception. They may never use the word ‘scammer’ ‘mistrustful’ or make a declaration like ‘no one has integrity’. The pattern is what I’m talking about.
I am overwhelmingly confident that analysis of the kinds of narratives that a particular person spins, including what tropes they evoke—even if you’re not familiar with the tropes previously—would reveal a lot about their worldview, their ethical structure, the assumptions and modelling they have about how people, institutions, and general patterns they believe underlay the world.
A oversimplified example is a person who clearly has a “victim “mentality” and an obsession with the idea of attractiveness because they always use sentence structures (i.e. “they stopped me”) and narratives where other people have inhibited, bullied, envied, or actively sought to stifle the person telling the story and these details disproportionately make reference to people’s faces, figures, and use words like “ugly” “hot” “skinny” etc. It is not necessary to know what films, books, periodicals they read.
I think you would get the set of topics, but not necessarily the right idea about how exactly those topics apply to the current situation. To use your example, if someone’s speech patterns revolve around the topic of “bullying”, it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn’t get over it, or that the person is bullied right now, or perhaps that someone they care about is bullied and they feel unable to help them. (Or could be some combination of that; for example seeing the person they care about bullied triggered some memories of their own experience.)
Or if someone says things like “people are scammers”, it could mean that the person is a scammer and therefore assumes that many other people are the same, or it could mean that the person was scammed recently and now experiences a crisis of trust.
This reminds me of an anime Psycho Pass, where a computer system detects how much people are mentally deranged...
...and sometimes fails to distinguish between perpetrators and their victims, who also “exhibit unusual mental patterns” during the crime; basically committing the fundamental attribution error.
Anyway, this sounds like something that could be resolved empirically, by creating profiles of a few volunteers and then checking their correctness.
Yes. Which is invaluable information about how they see the world currently. How is that not the ‘right idea’? If that is how they continue to currently mentally represent events?
Your ‘people are scammers’ example is irrelevant, what is important is if they constantly bring in tropes or examples or imply deception. They may never use the word ‘scammer’ ‘mistrustful’ or make a declaration like ‘no one has integrity’. The pattern is what I’m talking about.