The Self Map
A structured interview that replaces your assumed self-model with a recorded one. It works from evidence you have already produced rather than from self-description, because self-description is the least reliable instrument you own.
A protocol cannot ship without this file. The build checks that it exists, that it rates the strength of its evidence, that it carries citations, and that it contains a section stating what the protocol does not claim.
Where the support is weak, it says weak. Where a decision was invented rather than derived, it says that too.
Every design decision in this protocol is listed below with the strength of its support. Where the support is weak, this file says so. Where a decision is a judgment call with no literature behind it, this file says that too.
Strength is rated on three levels:
- strong — replicated effect, meta-analytic support, broad consensus.
- moderate — consistent findings, but limited replication, narrow populations, or contested effect sizes.
- weak — plausible, thinly supported, or extrapolated from adjacent findings. Included because the failure mode it addresses is common and the cost of the design choice is low.
1. Self-report is treated as a weak instrument
Strength: strong.
The protocol's governing rule — prefer dated evidence to self-description — rests on a durable finding: people have limited introspective access to the causes of their own behaviour, and will confidently produce explanations that are constructed rather than recalled.
- Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259.
- Wilson, T. D., & Dunn, E. W. (2004). Self-knowledge: Its limits, value, and potential for improvement. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 493–518.
What this does not license. These findings show introspective reports are unreliable about causes. They do not show that people are wrong about everything they say about themselves. The protocol still relies on self-report for the raw material of the record — it simply refuses to accept interpretation without an instance attached.
2. Attention windows are drawn from the calendar, not from memory
Strength: moderate.
Retrospective estimates of how time was spent diverge substantially from logged time, and the divergence is systematic rather than random. Time-use research consistently finds recall estimates inflate socially valued activities and compress the rest.
- Robinson, J. P., & Godbey, G. (1997). Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. Pennsylvania State University Press. (Diary versus estimate divergence.)
- Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The Day Reconstruction Method. Science, 306(5702), 1776–1780.
Honest limit. A calendar is not a time diary. It records what was scheduled, which is only a proxy for what happened. This protocol uses it because it is the artifact people actually have. Treat the resulting windows as better than memory, not as measurement.
3. Capability claims carry an evidence tier
Strength: moderate, and partly a design judgment.
The literature this leans on is the work on illusions of competence: fluency during learning is mistaken for durable capability, and confidence tracks familiarity more closely than it tracks performance.
- Koriat, A., & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 187–194.
- Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2012). Overconfidence produces underachievement: Inaccurate self-evaluations undermine students' learning and retention. Learning and Instruction, 22(4), 271–280.
Honest limit. These studies concern knowledge of study material, not professional
capability, and the four-tier scale used here (demonstrated / practised / studied /
claimed) is not from the literature. It is an invented instrument. Its justification
is that it forces an instance to be named, and that requirement is what does the work. The
tier labels themselves are a convenience.
The related finding often cited here — Kruger & Dunning (1999) — is deliberately not relied upon. The effect is real as described but its standard interpretation is contested, with statistical artifact accounts explaining a meaningful share of it. Nothing in this protocol needs it.
4. Drives are inferred from behaviour rather than asked for directly
Strength: moderate.
Stated attitudes and values predict behaviour weakly and inconsistently; the gap between what people report valuing and what they do is one of the more reliable findings in social psychology.
- Wicker, A. W. (1969). Attitudes versus actions. Journal of Social Issues, 25(4), 41–78.
- Sheeran, P. (2002). Intention–behavior relations: A conceptual and empirical review. European Review of Social Psychology, 12(1), 1–36. (Intentions predict behaviour, but leave most variance unexplained.)
Honest limit. Inferring a drive from a pattern of finished work is interpretation, and
interpretation can be wrong. The protocol handles this by stating inferences back as
inferences and recording the subject's counter-argument in contested.
5. The point of abandonment is treated as informative
Strength: weak.
The claim that people abandon projects at a characteristic point, and that this point is stable across projects, is not established in the literature. It is included because it is cheap to record, and because the adjacent findings on goal disengagement and the planning fallacy make it plausible that abandonment clusters rather than scattering.
- Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Miller, G. E., Schulz, R., & Carver, C. S. (2003). Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(12), 1494–1508.
Treat abandonment_signature as a hypothesis the subject can test, not as a finding. If
running this protocol at scale produces no clustering, the field should be removed.
6. Constraints are recorded before any planning occurs
Strength: strong, by way of the planning fallacy.
Plans built without an explicit accounting of available time overrun predictably. The planning fallacy is one of the better-replicated biases, and taking the outside view — grounding estimates in what comparable past cases actually cost — measurably reduces it.
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. TIMS Studies in Management Science, 12, 313–327.
- Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381.
- Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). From Nobel Prize to project management: Getting risks right. Project Management Journal, 37(3), 5–15.
This is also the bridge to P-002, where the subject's own overrun ratio becomes a measured quantity rather than a general bias.
7. Naming contradictions rather than resolving them
Strength: weak to moderate, and the riskiest choice in this protocol.
Confronting someone with evidence that contradicts their self-concept can produce defensive rejection rather than updating. The literature on feedback is genuinely mixed: a large meta-analysis found that roughly a third of feedback interventions decreased performance, with feedback directed at the self rather than the task among the likelier culprits.
- Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284.
- Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006). The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 183–242.
How the protocol responds. Contradictions are stated as discrepancies between a claim and a record — task-level, dated, specific — rather than as characterisations of the person. The subject resolves them; the agent does not. This follows the Kluger & DeNisi recommendation to keep feedback at the task level, but it is an application of a principle, not a tested intervention.
Adversary mode carries this risk at higher intensity and is off by default. If it turns out to produce disengagement rather than accuracy, it should be restricted rather than softened — a diluted adversary is worse than none.
What this protocol does not claim
- It does not predict performance. It records state.
- It does not diagnose anything. It is not an assessment, a test, or a clinical instrument, and no part of it has been validated as one.
- It does not identify a "learning style". Matching instruction to a preferred style has no support in controlled tests and appears nowhere in this library. (Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119.)
- It has not itself been tested. No efficacy claim is made for the protocol as a whole. The components rest on the literature above; the assembly does not.
Open questions
- Does the four-tier evidence scale improve accuracy over an unstructured inventory, or does it merely feel more rigorous?
- Does the abandonment signature cluster across people, or is section 5 recording noise?
- Does adversary mode increase accuracy, or increase dropout?
These are answerable with data this library will eventually have. Until then they stay open, in writing.