Dynamical Cognitive Models Of Social Issues In Russia

We examine and model dynamics in three areas of social cognition: (1) political transformations within Russia, (2) evaluation of political trends in other countries by Russians, and (3) evaluation of Russian stereotypes concerning women. We try to represent consciousness as vectorfields and trajectories in a cognitive state space. We use psychosemantic techniques that allow definition of the state space and the systematic construction of these vectorfields and trajectories and their portrait from research data. Then we construct models to fit them, using multiple regression methods to obtain linear differential equations. These dynamical models of social cognition fit the data quite well. (1) The political transformations were modeled by a spiral repellor in a two-dimensional space of a democratic–totalitarian factor and social depression–optimism factor. (2) The evaluation of alien political trends included a flow away from a saddle toward more stable and moderate political regimes in a 2D space, of democratic–totalitarian and unstable–stable cognitive dimensions. (3) The gender study showed expectations (attractors) for more liberated, emancipated roles for women in the future.