Human Self-Formative Capacity (HSFC): The Human Capacity for Self-Formation

Abstract

This record contains the English and Russian language versions of the same conceptual paper. Both versions present the same theoretical framework and research agenda. This paper proposes Human Self-Formative Capacity (HSFC) as a preliminary integrative framework and as a candidate psychological construct whose independence requires empirical testing. The framework is intended to capture hypothesized individual differences in people's active participation in their own ongoing self-formation. HSFC is defined as a hypothesized capacity to use diverse life material—including knowledge, experience, relationships, opportunities, freedom, comfort, success, mistakes, constraints, and internal contradictions—to develop, enact, and sustain changes in one's system of understanding and action. One of the model's hypothesized central mechanisms involves recognizing the formative significance of life material, relating it to one's own life, autonomous meaning-making, a formative decision, action, consolidation, and transfer. The model does not assume that any of these processes is novel in itself or that their integration already constitutes an independent construct. A targeted differential review indicates substantial overlap between HSFC and Personal Growth Initiative, human agency, Personal Initiative, proactive personality, psychological flexibility, Transformative and Experiential Learning, models of personality development, autobiographical reasoning, Learning Agility, Self-Authorship, and Intentional Change Theory. Accordingly, the main testable hypothesis concerns not the novelty of individual components, but whether the proposed broader capacity and its associated processes form a reproducible, empirically distinguishable structure of individual differences that provides incremental explanatory value beyond neighboring constructs. The paper specifies the boundaries of the framework, hypothesized manifestations, criteria for distinctiveness, and conditions under which its status as an independent construct should be revised or rejected.