When the Map Becomes the Territory: A Model of Interpersonal Meaning-Making

Abstract

Interpersonal experiences do not speak for themselves. We observe what another person does, but we still must make sense of what that behavior means. We remember events while also reconstructing their meaning, and information learned later through conversation, context, or subsequent events can become part of how we understand the original experience.

Research in predictive processing, source monitoring, social transmission of memory, interpersonal expectancy effects, belief updating, and psychological flexibility help explain different parts of this process. These areas of research, however, are rarely brought together into a single framework for understanding how interpersonal meaning develops and changes.

This article proposes the Cartographic Model of Interpersonal Meaning-Making, an integrative framework that conceptualizes interpersonal understanding as a map constructed from direct experience, emotion, memory, inference, prior expectations, and socially acquired information. Once formed, that map influences what we expect and how we behave. Our behavior then affects subsequent interactions, creating new information that may reinforce or revise the original map.

The article also introduces cartographic foreclosure, a provisional construct describing what happens when an established interpersonal map becomes increasingly difficult to revise even when credible new information becomes available. Connections to Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT), clinical practice, and future empirical investigation are considered.

Interpersonal Maps and Meaning-Making

Two cartographers can walk through the same territory and come back with different maps. One may carefully mark a river because crossing it felt dangerous. The other may barely notice the river but spend considerable time documenting the mountain. They may even draw the same bridge differently. One marks it as unstable. The other describes it as passable with care.

Relationships work similarly.

We rarely have complete access to an interpersonal event. We can observe another person’s behavior, but we cannot directly observe what is happening inside that person’s mind. Instead, we build an understanding from what we saw, what we felt, what we remember, what we already know about the person, what we expected to happen, and what we learned later. That understanding becomes an interpersonal map, a working representation of an event, person, relationship, or relational pattern.

A map is not the same thing as objective fact, but neither is it inherently distorted. We need maps. Without them, every interaction would require us to start from scratch. Our maps allow us to recognize patterns, anticipate what may happen next, and decide how to respond.

The Cartographic Model examines how these representations form, shape later interactions, absorb new information, and sometimes resist revision.

Once we have drawn the map, can the territory still change it?

Construction and Revision of Interpersonal Maps

We naturally form expectations about other people. Research on perception suggests that prior expectations can influence how incoming information is processed, while emotional states may further shape perception under conditions of ambiguity (Mares et al., 2024; Siegel et al., 2018). In other words, we do not walk into relationships as blank slates. We bring history with us.

Consider something ordinary. You send someone an important message, and they do not respond. At first, the observable information is limited. You sent a message, and no response has arrived. But the mind begins filling in the rest. Maybe they are angry. Maybe they are ignoring you. Maybe they are overwhelmed, busy, disinterested, or simply unable to respond.

Once we believe we understand what someone’s behavior means, that expectation can influence what information we seek, interpret, remember, and emphasize (Nickerson, 1998). At the same time, established beliefs are not necessarily fixed. Research suggests that people can revise beliefs when sufficiently persuasive contradictory evidence becomes available (Anglin, 2019).

Strong beliefs may be justified. What matters is whether credible new information can still change them.

Can meaningful new information still change the map?

Epistemic Provenance: Where Did This Part of the Map Come From?

Source-monitoring research examines how people identify the origins of memories, beliefs, and knowledge. These judgments are reconstructive, and distinctions among information that was directly perceived, remembered, imagined, inferred, or learned from another person are not always perfectly preserved (Johnson, 1997; Johnson et al., 1993).

Consider four statements:

She did not respond to my message.

I felt ignored when she did not respond.

She knew I would feel ignored.

She intentionally ignored me because she was angry with me.

Each statement concerns the same event but makes a different kind of claim.

The first describes observation; the second, subjective experience; the third and fourth, inferences about knowledge and intention.

Interpersonal maps combine these kinds of information. Alongside “Is this true?” we can ask, “How do I know?”

I use the term epistemic provenance to describe the informational origin of a particular feature of an interpersonal map.

Where did this piece of the map come from? Did I observe it directly? Did I experience it emotionally? Did I infer it? Did someone tell me? Did I remember it later? Did I learn something afterward that changed what the earlier event meant to me? Did several of these sources become combined over time?

Distinguishing sources does not diminish subjective experience, which remains clinically essential.

“I felt frightened” and “she intended to frighten me” are different epistemic claims. A person can be completely certain of the first while remaining less certain of the second.

That distinction does not invalidate experience; it makes the map more precise.

Maps Are Socially Revised

We tell friends what happened. We ask partners what they think. We speak with therapists, supervisors, family members, coworkers, attorneys, physicians, and communities. We encounter information through messages, social media, shared stories, and subsequent events.

At the same time, research on social memory demonstrates that information exchanged between people can become incorporated into individual and collective remembering, including both accurate information and memory distortions (Maswood & Rajaram, 2019). Source-monitoring research similarly suggests that the origin of information may become more difficult to distinguish as information is remembered, reconstructed, inferred, or socially acquired (Johnson, 1997; Johnson et al., 1993).

Socially acquired information is not inherently false. Its origin still matters.

There is a meaningful difference between “I remember observing this,” “Someone later told me this occurred,” and “After discussing the event repeatedly, this became part of how I understood what happened.”

The model asks us to track how information enters the map when possible.

When the Map Changes the Territory

Interpersonal maps do not merely describe relationships; they also influence them.

Suppose I believe someone is angry with me.

The next time I see that person, I may become more guarded. I may speak less. I may monitor their facial expressions more carefully. I may avoid asking a question I otherwise would have asked.

They may experience my guardedness as coldness and withdraw in turn.

Their withdrawal seems to confirm my expectation.

The map has shaped the interaction, producing new evidence that appears to support it.

This is a recursive interpersonal process. Research on interpersonal expectancy effects and behavioral confirmation provides an empirical foundation for this possibility. Expectations can shape how individuals behave toward interaction partners and, under some conditions, influence the responses they subsequently receive (Rosenthal & Rubin, 1978; Snyder & Stukas, 1999).

This does not mean people invent mistreatment, cause another person’s harmful behavior, or should explain away danger.

It means expectations sometimes alter how we enter interactions and what happens next.

The recursive sequence is:

Experience → Meaning → Expectation → Behavior → Interpersonal Response → New Experience → Revised Meaning

Cartographic Foreclosure

Conversation, repeated patterns, and new context often revise our interpersonal maps.

Sometimes, however, revision becomes difficult.

I use the term cartographic foreclosure to describe reduced openness to modifying an interpersonal representation when credible information that does not fit the existing map becomes available.

Foreclosure is not confidence, disagreement, or proof that an interpretation is wrong.

A person may carefully weigh contradictory evidence and reasonably retain a well-supported conclusion.

The question is whether contradictory information is still permitted to count.

This is where the construct may add something to existing ideas such as confirmation bias, belief perseverance, cognitive rigidity, and psychological inflexibility. Confirmation bias describes tendencies to seek or interpret information in ways that favor existing beliefs or expectations (Nickerson, 1998). Belief-perseverance research examines the conditions under which established beliefs persist or change when individuals encounter discrepant evidence (Anglin, 2019). Psychological flexibility more broadly concerns the capacity to respond adaptively to present circumstances rather than remaining dominated by rigid patterns of thought or behavior (Hayes et al., 2006).

Cartographic foreclosure focuses specifically on interpersonal representations after discrepant evidence appears.

Sometimes a map becomes capable of explaining every outcome.

If someone reaches out, we may conclude that they are manipulating us. If they withdraw, we may see that as proof that they never cared. If they apologize, the apology may be interpreted as evidence that they were caught. If they do not apologize, the absence of an apology may be interpreted as evidence that they have no remorse. If they remember an event differently, they may be seen as lying. If they remember it similarly, the agreement may reinforce the existing map.

Any individual interpretation might be correct.

The concern is when every outcome confirms the same conclusion.

Then the map becomes insulated from the territory.

Whether foreclosure predicts anything beyond existing constructs remains an empirical question. Clinically, it prompts a test:

What credible information could change this map?

Radical Openness and the Cartographic Model

This question connects to Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT).

RO-DBT conceptualizes radical openness as involving receptivity to new or unexpected information, flexible responding, and self-enquiry, particularly when internal expectations encounter environmental feedback (Lynch et al., 2015).

Radical openness does not mean assuming the map is wrong. It means being willing to look again.

Radical openness is not radical uncertainty.

We do not have to walk through life distrusting everything we know. We can trust our perception. We can learn from experience. We can recognize patterns. We can draw boundaries based on those patterns. We can conclude that a person or environment is unsafe.

An accurate danger map should protect us; we need not repeatedly enter dangerous territory to test it.

Can I hold what I know while remaining capable of learning something new?

Clinical Application: Surveying the Map

Clinically, the Cartographic Model helps clients and therapists examine interpersonal events without immediately deciding who is right.

What happened? What did you experience? What did you observe? What did you believe it meant at the time? What do you believe it means now? What did you learn later? What are you inferring about the other person’s knowledge or intention? Where did that information come from? How confident are you in each part? What credible information, if any, would change your mind?

These questions should not become a cross-examination.

Their purpose is precision, not self-distrust.

A client might say, “He humiliated me.”

A therapist might ask what was said, what the client experienced, and what they inferred about intent.

The client might conclude: “I know what happened and how it affected me. I am less certain why he did it.”

That is epistemic precision.

Clinicians Have Maps Too

Clinicians also construct maps; training does not make those maps automatically objective.

A clinician may develop a thoughtful and well-supported formulation and still become increasingly likely to interpret subsequent information through it. Once I conceptualize a client as avoidant, I may notice avoidance more readily. Once I conceptualize someone as reassurance seeking, I may begin interpreting ambiguous questions as reassurance seeking. Once I understand a relational pattern through attachment, trauma, overcontrol, personality structure, dissociation, or another framework, subsequent behavior can begin fitting surprisingly neatly inside that framework.

Sometimes the formulation is accurate.

Sometimes it explains too much.

Consultation and supervision can serve an important function by introducing perspectives that are not already organized by the clinician’s existing map.

What would make me revise my map?

If nothing could change it, the formulation may no longer be functioning as a clinical tool.

Limitations, Safeguards, and Future Directions

The model must never be used to discredit reports of harm.

People accurately perceive abuse, coercion, discrimination, betrayal, exploitation, manipulation, and danger. Psychological flexibility is not a credibility test, and confidence supported by substantial evidence should not be reframed as pathology simply because someone remains confident.

Recursive influence does not make someone responsible for another person’s harmful behavior.

Sometimes the territory is dangerous.

A good map should say so.

Epistemic humility must not become self-invalidation. Uncertainty about another person’s private intentions does not negate what happened.

We can know that behavior was harmful while acknowledging limits to our knowledge of another person’s mind.

Revisability does not require equal weight for unequal evidence. Contradiction alone does not make new information credible.

Radical openness invites consideration, not automatic abandonment of a well-supported conclusion.

The model also raises questions that require empirical study. Research could examine whether explicitly separating observation, subjective experience, memory, inference, and socially acquired information improves awareness of informational source. Future work could test whether established interpersonal maps predict interpretation and behavior during later ambiguous interactions and whether psychological flexibility or radical openness predicts incorporation of credible discrepant information.

Cartographic foreclosure requires particular scrutiny. If it is to be useful as more than a metaphor, it will need to be operationalized and tested against established constructs such as confirmation bias, belief perseverance, cognitive rigidity, and psychological inflexibility.

Its contribution is placing familiar processes onto the same map.

It integrates construction, interpersonal feedback, information sources, and openness to revision.

It is a conceptual psychotherapy framework. It is not intended to determine the factual accuracy of disputed interpersonal accounts, assess credibility, adjudicate allegations, or establish responsibility.

Conclusion

Relationships require maps.

We need previous experience to tell us what matters. We need memory. We need prediction. We need to make inferences about other people’s behavior because we will never have complete access to another person’s mind.

The problem begins when we forget the map is a representation.

Even a careful, evidence-based map is not the territory itself.

Flexibility does not mean discarding a map whenever someone disagrees.

Sometimes a new survey confirms that the map was accurate.

Can I trust what I know while remaining capable of discovering something I do not?

A useful map can guide us and warn us about danger while remaining open to credible revision.

The task is not to stop making maps. It is to remain willing to survey the territory again.