Social & Critical Psychology · Simplified
Where the File Stops
A real difference between people does not tell you that the cause is inside them, and it certainly does not tell you that the remedy is.
Two conclusions this is not aiming at
This is not an argument that individual support is a con. Two people in this fictional team have a documented gap in their training that no change to a rota will close, and a person who is exhausted now needs something now. Nor is it an argument that structural explanation wins by default: the comparison team was matched with this one at recruitment and is not matched with it today, which is a real weakness in the strongest-looking piece of evidence here. The question is never which level is right. It is what each explanation targets and what it leaves running.
The case
Team B
A fictional fourteen-person team in a fictional public service. Three people resigned in eight months, supervisor ratings have fallen, and an occupational psychologist has been asked what is going on. The evidence arrives in two rounds, which is how it arrives in practice.
Step 1 of 3
The first round
On this evidence, where does the problem mainly lie?
Step 2 of 3
The second round
Nothing in the first round has been withdrawn. All of it is still true.
Now where does the problem mainly lie? You may give the same answer, and what you said the first time is kept either way.
Step 3 of 3
What each explanation would do about it
Three explanations, three interventions. None of them is absurd and none of them is sufficient.
| Explanation | What it would change | Who would have to act | What it would leave running |
|---|
What this shows
The file decided the answer before anybody reasoned
Key idea: Everything in the first round is a measurement of individuals, so an explanation in terms of individuals is what it supports. That is not a failure of reasoning; it is an accurate reading of a file in which only one level was measured. The exhaustion scores are real, the correlation is real, and the three people who left really were the three highest scorers. What the first round contains no way of noticing is that Team A across the corridor was matched with this team at recruitment and now has a mean exhaustion score much lower than it, on nominally the same work, with a different rota and a queue that does not carry every bereavement call in the region. A description of individual differences was turned into a cause, and the cause was turned into a remedy aimed at individuals, and none of those steps was argued for. They followed from what somebody had measured. The last table is the practical form of the lesson: each remedy is worth doing and each leaves something running, and knowing what it leaves running is the whole of the professional judgement.
The strongest-looking item in the second round is also the weakest. Team A was matched with Team B at recruitment and is not matched with it now: three people have left Team B, and whoever remains is whoever remains. A comparison between two teams that were alike four years ago is evidence, and it is not the clean experiment it reads as. Two further cautions. Nothing here says the individual explanation is false; two people do have a documented training gap, and the exhaustion scores describe something that is happening to real people in the fiction. And every figure on this page was written for teaching, so the correlation of 0.61, the exhaustion means and the nineteen-minute sign-off are illustrative and not estimates of anything.
The longer version adds a third round of evidence, tracks how your explanation moves across all three, and closes with an exercise in writing the recommendation you would actually put in a report. It is at Person or Setting: The Workplace Laboratory in the main collection.