RESEARCH & LIMITATIONS
Research notes behind Mirror
Mirror is informed by reflective inquiry, behavioural observation, narrative practice, and systems thinking. It does not claim to be a validated clinical intervention, and it should be evaluated as a product experience with explicit limitations.
Influences, not equivalence claims
Reflective practice has a long history in education, professional learning, and decision-making. Mirror draws on the broad idea that people can learn from examining experience, language, assumptions, and action. Drawing inspiration from a field is not the same as delivering that field's professional practice.
- Reflective practice and experiential learning.
- Behavioural observation and pattern recognition.
- Narrative inquiry: how people organise meaning through language.
- Systems thinking: looking for reinforcing loops, tensions, and alternatives.
Evaluation principles
The relevant question is not whether Mirror can make a diagnosis. It cannot. The relevant questions are whether people experience accurate recognition, whether the system preserves uncertainty where evidence is thin, whether reports remain grounded in the conversation, and whether boundaries are clear.
Known limitations
Language models can miss context, overstate a pattern, or produce fluent interpretations that do not fit. The product should therefore privilege direct evidence, allow rejection, avoid clinical claims, and direct people in crisis to qualified support.
Mirror is not therapy, diagnosis, treatment, coaching, medical advice, or crisis support. It is a bounded self-reflection experience, and its observations are interpretations rather than clinical facts.
Selected reading
Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983); David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning (1984); Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Organizational Learning II (1996); and Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). These works are intellectual context, not clinical validation of Mirror.