[From Rick Marken (2014.11.14.1825)]
BP: This morning, I seized another opportunity to spread the good word about PCT. We have a weekly meeting, and today's guest was from the counseling center (as a fly to the web, in my mind)! Of course, when she started talking about students reacting to environmental stimulus, I cringed. This affects me like chewing on aluminum foil.
Hi Barb
RM: I used to feel the same way when people talked about behavior as a reaction to stimuli. The problem was that I ended up cringing almost all the time, since people are always talking this way. Think about all the times in a day you hear behavior described in this way: "He made him mad", "She made me feel bad", "They acted that way because of the incentives", "You shouldn't encourage that kind of behavior", "He made me do it", "He's driving people away from PCT";-), etc.
RM: I am now much more tolerant of this kind of talk because I know that this is the way the behavior of a control system often looks to an observer (or to oneself!). What we often notice about behavior are responses to disturbances to controlled perceptions and fail to notice that the responses only occur because people are controlling those perception. So we see a person get mad when someone butts in a line but fail to notice (or think it is too obvious to mention) that this happens only because the person has the goal of keeping their place in line. People who don't care about keeping their place in line will not get mad given the same butting in line ("stimulus").
RM: Or we see increased purchases of an item when it is offered with an "incentive" like a reduced price but fail to notice (or ignore the fact) that this only happens if the person has the goal of paying as little as possible. A person who doesn't care about the price of an item will not appear to be caused to buy it given the same incentive ("stimulus"). Just yesterday a digital clock prevented me from opening the oven. Of course, this only happened because I had the goal of waiting until the clock counted down to zero. If I didn't have the goal of opening the the oven only after the clock hit zero I could have opened the oven right then, when I was next to the door, instead of standing there like a dope for 20 seconds until the clock hit zero. I actually felt like the clock was causing my behavior (standing frozen in front of the oven).
RM: The appearance of stimuli causing behavior is similar to the appearance of the sun moving around the earth (as Dag Forssell has pointed out in his writings). Although we now know that it is the earth, not the sun, that moves, the sun does appear to move across the sky. It is actually a lot more difficult to show why it is the earth, not the sun, that moves than it is to show that it is a disturbance to a controlled variable, and not the stimulus (disturbance) itself, that results in the appearance of a stimulus causing the response of a control system. But apparently it will be just as hard to get control view to be the default understanding of the behavior of living systems as it was to get the moving earth view to be the default understanding of the sun's movement across the sky.
RM: And even though the moving earth-stationary sun idea is the default, people still talk about the sun "rising " and "setting". So I imagine that even when the control view of behavior becomes the default we will still hear people talking informally about how such and such stimulus caused such and such response. Of course, when they are really trying to understand what's going on they will evaluate the apparent stimulus-response relationship in terms of the perceptual variables that the person might have been controlling for. Which is what I hope is the understanding your guest at the counseling center can get to.
BP: I respectfully smiled and nodded, then as soon as she left, I jumped on my computer and sent her an email with some links. She responded saying she looked forward to exploring this "new" avenue. At least she was receptive!
RM: Good for you! Let us know what happens, if you can follow up with her. I'd like to see what she makes of the control theory explanation of whatever it was she was interpreting in stimulus-response terms.
Best regards
Rick
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On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 9:56 AM, "<mailto:bara0361@gmail.com>bara0361@gmail.com" <<mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu>csgnet@lists.illinois.edu> wrote:
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Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
Author of <http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Research-Purpose-Experimental-Psychology/dp/0944337554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407342866&sr=8-1&keywords=doing+research+on+purpose>Doing Research on Purpose.
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