Social and Critical Psychology

The Self Through Different Lenses

Nine things Nadia said about herself, and seven frameworks that each make two or three of them central and most of the rest invisible. None of them is a diagnosis, and one of the nine has almost nowhere to go.

Fictional case - Nadia and everything she says were written for this activity

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to say which question each framework for the self asks, and what each one makes central or invisible.

About 30 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.

Seven questions, not seven verdicts

These frameworks are not rivals competing to say what Nadia is really like. They ask different questions, and a question can only be answered with evidence that counts as evidence for it. That is why the same nine statements light up differently under each one - and why the tool never announces which lens is correct. There is no correct lens, and there is no hidden fact about Nadia to find.

How to use this

Read the nine statements.
Commit to an answer to the question below.
Choose a framework, then work out which of four accounts belongs to it. All four are real accounts; three of them belong to other lenses on the list.
Watch the evidence board re-weight, and read what the lens backgrounds.
Run at least four lenses, then read the synthesis at the bottom of the result.

Nadia is fictional and so is everything she says. No real person, interview or case record is reproduced, and nothing here is an assessment of anybody.

This part needs JavaScript

The lens board re-weights the evidence in your browser as you choose a framework, so it cannot run with JavaScript switched off. The statements, the debrief and the limitations are readable without it.

Seven frameworks are about to be applied to these nine statements. What will the differences between them mostly be? Small - they are all describing the same self in different words Large - some of them will turn out to fit Nadia better than others They will ask different questions, so different statements will count as evidence They will disagree about whether the self is in Nadia at all

Key terms

Framework: A way of asking about the self that fixes what will count as evidence. The frameworks here ask different questions rather than returning competing verdicts on one.
Backgrounding: What an account leaves aside in order to put something else at the centre. Backgrounding something is not denying it.
Social identity: Self-understanding derived from group membership — which is not the same as an inventory of the groups somebody belongs to.

What this framework can see

Frameworks you have applied

For each framework applied: the question it asks, what it makes central and what it backgrounds
Framework	Question it asks	Makes central	Backgrounds

A framework decides what counts as evidence

The nine statements never change. What changes is which of them a framework can do anything with. A self-discrepancy account needs a gap between an actual and an ought; if Nadia had not said "I should be further on by now", it would have had nothing to work with, and the statement about the fees would not have helped it. This is not bias. It is what having a theory is: a specification, in advance, of what would count.

Different questions, not competing verdicts

"Is her self-concept well organised in this domain", "against whom is she comparing herself", "what is the gap between who she is and who she thinks she ought to be", "what does she expect to become and to avoid becoming", "what does she believe she can do in this specific situation", "which groups is she being placed in and placing herself in", and "who is she with, and does that change her" are seven questions. Answering one of them well does not make the others wrong; it makes them unanswered.

Some of the frameworks are about relations, not contents

Social comparison and social identity are only partly about what is inside Nadia: both require other people to be specified before anything can be said. The relational account goes further and treats the question "which is the real Nadia" as badly formed. That is a genuine disagreement about what a self is, not a difference of emphasis, and it is worth marking as such.

What is left over

After all seven have had their turn, the course fees have gone up and Nadia's hours have been cut, and almost nothing on the board can use that as central evidence. Five frameworks mark it as outside their scope entirely; two, possible selves and the relational account, can gesture at it indirectly, as a future self or a relationship, but neither treats it as central. Notice what happens next in a real service: because the assessment instruments are built from frameworks like these, the thing that changed in September becomes, administratively, not part of the case. The critical point is not that psychologists are indifferent to money. It is that a discipline whose object of study sits inside a person will systematically produce accounts in which the rent is background.

Nadia is not exhausted by any of this

Seven accounts, each defensible, each partial, and the person is still not on the page. That is not a failure to be corrected by an eighth framework. It is what it is like to describe somebody from the outside using a vocabulary designed for populations.

What this does not demonstrate

Matching is not being right. What is marked is whether you matched an account to the framework that generated it. Nadia is fictional, and no fact about her was written down for a framework to be right about.
These are not the only frameworks. Narrative, psychodynamic, dialogical, cultural and neurocognitive accounts of the self are all absent, and each would light up the board differently again.
The salience codings are authored. Which statements a framework treats as central is a judgement made for teaching. A specialist in any one of these traditions could reasonably argue with several of the codings, and that argument is a good seminar.
"Backgrounds it" is not "denies it". No self-efficacy researcher thinks money is irrelevant. The claim is about what the framework's own concepts can represent, not about what its users believe.
Nobody is assessed. The tool asks nothing about the person using it and produces no score for anyone. Nothing here is a method for analysing a real person you know.
Partial is not useless. A framework that makes two statements central and seven invisible has told you something precise about those two. Precision and scope trade against each other, and neither is a virtue on its own.

Nadia

First, a judgement

The lens board

One person, seven questions