Human nature is something that interests me. Although I have read a number of books about human psychology and have attended classes and seminars on behavior modification and even had a short stint teaching about interpersonal communication (a great deal of which depends on one's human nature), still, human complexity and everything that contributes to how we function and why we function the way we do still remains a topic worth learning and re-learning for me.
Perhaps that's the reason why I was a bit excited when we attended a seminar on personality development a couple of weeks ago, an activity, which was hosted by our local church. I just wanted to be refreshed and observe how attendees in the seminar would respond to the lecture and the sharing after the presentation.
The Structural Analysis of Social Behavior or SASB, was employed by the speaker in exploring this topic. SASB is a model that can be used to assess interpersonal and intrapsychic interactions in terms of three underlying dimensions: (a) focus (other, self, introject), (b) affiliation-hostility (love-hate), and (c) interdependence-independence (enmeshment-differentiation). It recognizes that internalized, relationship representations are essentially interpersonal in nature. As such, there are three possible perspectives (or vantage points) from which to view the relational dynamic. The first is an inward-facing perspective of the self judging itself or what we normally call the self-concept. The second, is an outward-facing perspective of the self judging other people. The third is the introject which is a judgment one makes about oneself but from the perspective of another person, rather than from one's own perspective. Thus, a person can be focused on another person, they can be focused on themselves, or they may take on the focus of the introject. In SASB terms, a person's internal representations are thought to be multi-faceted, and containing within them, each of these three perspectives. Thus, the two dimensions of affiliation and interdependence are plotted three times; once for each of these three self-perspectives. Because a social interaction looks differently depending on which perspective is doing the judging, the plots on each of these three different graphs may end up being different. To illustrate this complicated scheme, consider a situation where a parent tells a child, "You never do anything right." This interaction can be viewed and coded from each of the three perspectives described above. These three different perspectives are illustrated in Diagram below, which may aid the reader's understanding of the following rather
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