Behaviour is claimed to shift between three states: learned parental responses, rational appraisal, and childhood emotional patterns.
Berne's model diagnoses interactions by which state each party is addressing: a crossed transaction, where one speaks adult to adult and the other answers parent to child, predicts friction. The diagnostic use is where the value has proved to be. The claim that these are real structures in the personality has not been substantiated.
In practice
- A colleague who answers a factual question with a reprimand has crossed the transaction, whatever we call it.
- A model whose categories anyone can apply to any exchange is not thereby measuring anything.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is developmental: responses learned from parents and responses formed in childhood persist alongside adult appraisal and are triggered by situations that resemble their origin.
- In its favour
- The interactional pattern it describes, where one party addresses another as a parent addresses a child, is recognisable and useful in training, and it gives people a vocabulary for what went wrong in an exchange.
- Against it
- The three-state structure has no adequate empirical support, the states are identified from the behaviour they are meant to explain, and no measure has established them as distinct.
- Standing
- Researchers have found no adequate empirical support for the three-state structure. The vocabulary remains widely used in training because it makes an interactional pattern easy to name, which is a different claim.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop