Notice what shaped every account, including the neutral one

Ask how background, role, culture and setting shaped your view, their view and the observer’s view alike.

Por qué funciona

In O’Fallon’s model the fourth-person perspective brings awareness of contexts and systems — the ability to "zoom out" and see that a view is produced by its setting. The characteristic confusion she describes at the start of that perspective is not yet telling apart what has been socially conditioned from one’s own individuality. Applying the question to the third-person account, which feels most neutral, is what makes this step different from the previous three.

Cómo hacerlo

1. Lay out your first-, second- and third-person accounts of one conflict.
2. For each, list what shaped it: family norms, profession, culture, gender, money, the room it happened in, who else was listening.
3. Circle the assumptions the observer’s account shares with yours. Those are the ones you could not see from the third person.
4. Write one sentence on how the conflict would look in a setting where those assumptions did not hold.

Evidencia

O’Fallon (2020) describes the fourth-person capacity as awareness of sub-personalities, contexts and complex adaptive systems, and its entry confusion as being unable to separate social conditioning from one’s own individuality; at the later 4.5 stage she describes awareness of contexts in both self and other and of projections. These descriptions come from her qualitative analysis of sentence completions in the STAGES database. O’Fallon et al. (2020) define each person perspective as able to observe the prior one as an object. (anecdotal)

The fourth-person description is the model author’s theory, drawn from her own research database, and has not been independently tested. Naming influences is not the same as being free of them.

Fuentes

• O’Fallon, T. (2020). States and STAGES: Waking up Developmentally. Integral Review, 16(1).
• O’Fallon, T., Polissar, N., Neradilek, M. B., & Murray, T. (2020). The validation of a new scoring method for assessing ego development based on three dimensions of language. Heliyon, 6(3), e03472.

Error común

Using context to dissolve every disagreement into "it’s all just conditioning." Seeing what shaped each view is meant to widen the conversation, not to excuse yourself from it.