ABSTRACT
Social science can examine consciousness in a psychocultural form of analysis that systematically explores experience and how humans other than ourselves perceive their social roles. This chapter presents a theoretical paradigm for analysis and understanding at the level of human consciousness that is experiential—not structural. It illustrates a methodological approach that lends itself to the quantification of what is usually considered qualitative data about the experience of self and the social world. A comparison of responses to Card 1 of the Thematic Apperception Test by American and Japanese samples is used to demonstrate the conceptual framework of interpersonal self. In human consciousness as it develops from birth are a number of basic interpersonal concerns that arise out of innate sensations and socialized perceptions that give culturally organized structure to humanity’s basic social nature. In addition to the interpersonal world there are, in humans, varying attitudes or a sense of self-involvement of a positive or negative nature taken toward inanimate objects.
