egocentric predicament

a problematic condition arising from the assumption that each person’s experience is essentially private. The problem is commonly expressed in terms of one or more of the following propositions: (a) It is difficult to explain how any person could know anything about another person’s experience; (b) it is likewise difficult to understand how general knowledge of the external world is possible apart from one’s individual experience; and (c) given that experience is essentially private, it is difficult to understand how genuine communication between two people might be possible, since both the content and symbols of any communication will be similarly private. The egocentric predicament is often said to be an unavoidable consequence of the Cartesian self. See also solipsism.

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Psychology term of the day

November 16th 2024

dendrogram

n. a type of treelike diagram used in hierarchical clustering. It lists all of the participants at one end and then directs branches out from those participants who are similar and connects them with a node that represents a cluster. A dendrogram could be used, for example, to cluster individuals into various categories of HIV risk, depending on their number of sexual partners, their frequency of unprotected sex, and the perceived risk of their partners. Individuals who had few sexual partners with little or no unprotected sex and who perceived little or no partner risk of HIV infection would be branched into a cluster that could be labeled low risk, whereas individuals with high values on these three variables would branch into a high-risk cluster, with other individuals presumably clustering into a medium-risk group.