If the relation found were due to common method bias, similar relational patterns would have been expected for both categories.
Complex relational patterns underlie diverse phenomena across the natural and social worlds.
When explaining positive and negative feedback systems (two examples of complex relational patterns), participants recruited spatial representations in abundance.
They are relational patterns that may sometimes be instantiated in mechanical or concretely spatial systems e.g., a flush valve toilet, which is an example of a negative feedback system but their relational essence transcends any one concrete instantiation.
This strong reading was reinforced in China by indigenous Confucian and Daoist conceptions of a thing's nature (xing, 性) as dispositional and of the world as an auto-poetic or self-creating (ziran, 自然) system of continually-evolving relational patterns (dao, 道)—not a divine creation, an objective determinant of universal physical laws, or a material expression of transcendent principles.
The above observations lead us to a hypothesis about how people reason about complex relational patterns like positive and negative feedback: they may do so, at least in part, by creating abstract spatial models of the relational structures involved that is, spatial analogies.
Often, we find ourselves inadvertently repeating the habitual relational patterns of our family of origin.
Responding to the transparency dilemma will be different for each us, depending on our histories of loss, our childhood dynamics (including the relational patterns we learned), and most important, our willingness to be courageous in stepping out of our comfort zones and taking the risk of relating differently in the future.
