Roles in groups: where the excluded stabilizes

Family systems research established that groups distribute what they cannot hold: the member who carries the anger, the one who carries the vulnerability, the identified patient who says what the system cannot. This model adds a specific, testable claim about the distribution: excluded capacities stabilize in the members least defended against them — and role assignment should therefore be predictable from the polarity structure of the members’ expressive profiles.

Two predictions follow. First, coding members’ profiles independently of their group roles should predict who carries which excluded capacity. Second — the sharper one — when membership changes, role reassignment should track the new distribution of exclusions, not the traits of the newcomers: the same person should acquire different roles in groups with different collective exclusions.

A confirmation would ground, in measurement, what clinicians have described for decades; a failure would cut one derivation of the model cleanly.

This proposal rests on a structural model of psychological life — the Shared Field Model. The full architecture is here.