A Technique for Comparing Mental Maps.

The article presents a technique that allows mental maps of the world to be drawn from data on people's cognition about network relations. The technique produces both a holistic reproduction as well as specific elements that can be strictly (that is, numerically) compared. The study has produced two social network maps so far, one based on networks within the U.S., and the other based on informants' world networks. The U.S.-based network picture strongly resembles a geographic map of the U.S. Similarly, the world network map, to be discussed in this note, looks like a Mercator projection. Both maps are distorted. But the technique the article presents permits the systematic study of distortion in mental maps. That is, the difference between any mental map and any objective map (a Mercator projection, for example), or the difference between two or more mental maps (where both, presumably are distorted) may be observed. This opens the way to a systematic, cross-cultural study of how people store their complex social networks in their minds.