AIM Framework glossary
Reflection Problem
Canonical definition
The Reflection Problem is the identification result that in observational data an endogenous social effect, in which an Individual's behaviour changes because others' behaviour changed, cannot be separated from correlated effects, in which Individuals behave alike because they share an environment, or from exogenous effects (Manski, 1993), homophily and contagion being generically confounded in observational social-network studies (Shalizi and Thomas, 2011). The AIM Framework reads the result not as a failure of econometric identification but as an accurate observation of relationally constituted desire: wherever the Mimetic weight wM is non-zero, the partition between an Individual's own preference and social influence on that preference, which Individualism assumes, does not exist in the data to be recovered, so the Reflection Problem is the empirical signature of Relationalism.
Explanation
Economists have long found that they cannot tell, from watching people, whether friends act alike because they influence one another or because like attracts like and they share the same surroundings. Better data and cleverer statistics have not closed the gap. The framework's reading is that the gap is not a flaw in the tools: much of what a person wants was taken up from others without their knowing, so there is no clean line between their own preference and the social influence on it waiting to be found.
Epistemic status
Validated Empirical Pattern (Manski, 1993; Shalizi and Thomas, 2011); the relational reading is Framework-Specific.