| Name | “The social analyst” |
| Activated Role | Contextually dependent, but has a reputation in a social community (e.g. student in a club, employee in a social work environment, person in a friend group) or a high stakes social relationship (e.g. a “situationship”). |
| Goal | The social analyst wants to navigate the social world adeptly and wants others to have a positive perception of them. |
| Motivation | Their goal of social acceptance is driven by fears and anxiety related to social rejection. They exhibit the cognitive bias towards loss aversion, and are motivated more by fear of negative outcomes than a desire to achieve positive ones. |
| Conflict | Reducing the risk of social rejection is difficult because it is impossible to know for sure what others think and feel. The social analyst relies on analytical methods to guess the motivations of other people’s feelings and actions; however, communication is noisy and other people do not always communicate truthfully. |
| Attempts to Solve | The social analyst tries to make guesses about others’ true feelings and intentions, calibrating their own behavior and actions accordingly. They try to hypothesize why others may have said certain things, taken certain actions, exhibited certain behaviors, etc. They may also attempt to mirror their counterparts, manipulating signals such as response times, texting styles, etc. to appear more or less committed to certain plans. |
| Setting/environment | They often try to solve the problem over text or detached communication mediums, avoiding higher stakes environments like in-person interaction. |
| Tools | The social analyst often talks to their friends and others that they are close to, using storytelling and digital artifacts like texts to re-process social situations and get outside opinions on what course of action they should take. |
| Skills | Very observant of certain social cues, sensitive to nonverbal signals from others. |
This journey map depicts the timeline of social commitment from left to right, with plan initiation as the first step of the journey on the left and plan outcome as the final step on the right. On the plan initiation side, the two labels of “Initiates invitation” and “Receives invitation” depict the different roles that the social analyst could take in the initial stage, as either the actor or reactor. The two labels on the right depict the ultimate actions that the social analyst might pursue: “Following through on plan” or “Cancels plan.” The arrows and associated post-its depict the corresponding journeys. Post-its are color-coded in an empathy map coding: says (red), thinks (yellow), feels (green), does (blue).
Tyler Abernethy. February 3, 2026. Behavioral-Personas & Journey Maps.
