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

  1. Read the nine statements.
  2. Commit to an answer to the question below.
  3. 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.
  4. Watch the evidence board re-weight, and read what the lens backgrounds.
  5. Run at least four lenses, then read the synthesis at the bottom of the result.

Nadia

Twenty-four. Works in a bicycle shop and has done since she was eighteen. Moved cities two years ago. Since September she has been doing an evening course in structural engineering, three nights a week, alongside the job. What follows is everything the activity uses. It is the same for every framework.

    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.

    First, a judgement

    Seven frameworks are about to be applied to these nine statements. What will the differences between them mostly be?

    Challenge - who could have written this?

    Each sentence below could appear in a report about Nadia. Say which framework it belongs to - or whether no framework on the board could support it.

    What this demonstrates

    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.