Effective conduct of influence operations is impossible without fundamental research into reflexive control and management.

In psychology and sociology, as well as in political science, military affairs, and many other fields, influence operations require describing in objective terms not only the material, physical aspect of a system, but also its internal, subjective aspect, related to the fact that among its components there are living people.

Methods for objectively describing systems together with their subjective inner worlds constitute the subject of our research. The specifics of such studies can be illustrated by the following metaphorical example.

In Fig. 1, a house is shown, with a person X on the left and a person Y on the right. The reality observed by an external observer who looks at this house with the two people will be denoted by the letter T. Using the methods of natural sciences, the observer can provide an arbitrarily complete description of this reality. However, such a description will not satisfy a psychologist, a sociologist, or especially a specialist in influence operations, since we are interested not only in the physical description, but also in how exactly the house is perceived by X and Y, who observe it from different sides. Their view of this object may fundamentally differ from that of the external observer.

Let us denote the images perceived by X and Y as Tx and Ty. Then the reality A1, which is of interest to a specialist in influence operations, can be represented as a symbolic sum: T + Tx + Ty. This is the combination of the physical aspect and subjective representations.