Hi Bruce
BN: There’s a pedestrian crosswalk from the south to north side of Turkle Street…
This vignette indicates many perceptual variables that are controlled by a number of individual people. The perception “pedestrian crosswalk between the south and north sides of Turkle Street at its intersection with Main Street” is clearly a controlled perception.
RM: Actually, a better description of the controlled perceptual variable would be “the condition of the pedestrian crosswalk…”; we control variables.
BN: In this brief segment of time its deterioration was a disturbance to several people who acted, each by his or her own means, to resist that disturbance. However, we must understand that this perception has been successfully controlled prior to Alfretta’s observation and complaint and that it will be controlled subsequent to Fred’s repair. No one person is the sole controller of this perception. It is collectively controlled.
RM: I agree that the condition of the crosswalk (we can stop calling it a perception once we know that it’s all perception) is collectively controlled; but it is not “collectively controlled” in the way you, Martin and Kent have defined collective control. There is no indication in your story that there is any conflict between the players regarding the desired state of the crosswalk. Indeed, the only players who have a direct effect on the state of the controlled variable (the condition of the sidewalk) are Fred’s crew and they are unlikely to disagree with Fred’s specifications (provided by the City, I presume) for the reference state of that variable.
BN: That said, Kent has preferred ‘stabilize’ for what happens to the corresponding aspects of the environment when a perception ‘of’ them is controlled.
RM: That’s because Kent is making the “theory first” mistake (that I describe in my Behavior IS Control post) of thinking that perceptual variables are an imperfect representation of the aspects of the environment that they represent. In fact, the aspects of the environment that are controlled (or, as they are sometimes called, the “controlled environmental variables”) are controlled variables, which are the basic data of PCT science. Perceptual variables are theoretical constructs that explain the existence of controlled variables. Therefore, perceptual variables correspond exactly to the aspects of the environment that are controlled – controlled variables.
BN: We affirm that aspects of the environment are stabilized because more than one party reports ‘stability’ in their perception of them,
RM: That is unnecessary. The ‘stability’ you are talking about is simply a controlled variable being kept in a virtual reference state. It is possible to objectively determine that a variable is being held in a virtual (rather than actual) reference state by testing to determine whether there is a “dead zone” of no control around it (B:CP, 1973, p255; SLCS, p. 115).
BN: In the vignette above, aspects of the environment which we readers and multiple parties in the story call “pedestrian crosswalk between the south and north sides of Turkle Street at its intersection with Main Street” may be said to be stabilized;
RM: I’d say that the vignette shows that the condition of the crosswalk – specifically the visibility of the painted lines - is a controlled variable that is being brought to a true reference state – painted per the specifications of the City – by the cooperative efforts of several players. I see no evidence of conflict or a virtual reference state in your vignette.
BN: The common aspects of the environment are the ‘one place’ that so troubled you; each has his or her own controlled perception of those aspects of the environment that constitute this ‘one place’…
RM: What troubles me about your analysis is that you are trying to fit observations to a theory (Kent’s model of “collective control”) rather than just fitting theory (PCT) to observations. In your vignette everyone is trying to control the same variable – the condition of the crosswalk – but everyone is using different means of doing that, and these different means allow all parties to produce the desired end result sans conflict.
BN: One place that Kent made the distinction between control of perception and stabilization in the environment is here, for example:
RM: As I noted above, this is not a distinction that is made in PCT.
RM: So the main message I get from descriptions of “collective control” is that it refers to social stability, in the form of stable virtual reference states of collectively controlled variables, that emerges when each and every member of the collective controls the same variable with respect to different reference specifications.
BN: It seems to me more transparent and natural to call this agreement.
RM: Whatever you call it, I haven’t seen any real world examples of social stability that correspond to the “collective control” model described by Kent. The best way to convince me that there are such examples is show how one is explained by Kent’s model – not just verbally but by showing how the model accounts for actual data.
BN: Here’s Bill’s take on this fifteen years ago:
BP: The biggest insight I got out of Kent’s paper was that there is really
nobody in charge of a society, nobody to complain to about it. Each person
has reasons for behaving in certain ways, and when you add up all those
reasons and all those behaviors, you get the resultant, which is the current
form of the society. The only way to change a society is to promulgate ideas
that change a large number of reference signals or ways of perceiving in a
specific way; then the resultant will shift and the society as a whole will
start defending a different set of virtual reference levels.
RM: That was actually 25 years ago! And I agree that some aspects of society could be viewed as being held in virtual reference levels. But whether that is actually the case – or just a metaphor – has to be determined by testing models against actual data. And I haven’t seen that done for what you, Martin and Kent call “collective control”. But I have seen it done for other forms of social behavior (see Chapter 7 in SLCS, none of which involve “collective control” in the sense of keeping variables affected by groups of individuals in virtual reference states. I’m not saying that that kind of “collective control” doesn’t happen; it just hasn’t been demonstrated to me that it does, even in simple tracking tasks.
BN: PCT is a system of ideas that changes reference signals and ways of perceiving in such a way that both individual control and one’s participation in collective control improves. That suggests to me that PCT as a science (a collectively controlled system of perceptions), will prevail because those who comprehend it control better, and people can be taught how to control better by educational and therapeutic means that refer to it. It is up to us to internalize it in practice. This was Bill’s stated belief, too, though not in just those words. Comprehension of collective control is essential.
RM: If PCT is, indeed, a collectively controlled system of perceptions (which it might be) then it can’t be true that “PCT as a science… will prevail because those who comprehend it control better.” This is because PCT would be avirtual reference state that is continuously changing as people with different ideas about it gain and lose the upper hand in arguments about what PCT is. Since the virtual reference state of PCT is continuously changing, there is no correct state of PCT to be comprehended and, thus, to make control better.
RM: This is not to say that PCT is not a collectively controlled perceptual variable. It may be But if PCT is a collectively controlled in the way described by you, Martin and Kent, one should be careful about what they say about the benefits of PCT since one might be talking about a current virtual reference state of PCT that doesn’t produce those benefits.
Best, Rick