Collective Controlled Variables?

CSGnet Archive CSG1993
1

From Kent McClelland (930622)

Tom Bourbon (930622.0817) and Gary Cziko (930622.0323 UTC) have been
involved in an exchange with Rick Marken about the possibility of "collective
controlled variables." As a sociologist, I've been staying on the sidelines
of the recent "social control" debates, partly because I've been out of town
till recently, and partly because I'm still too busy from the remnants of
last semester to give much attention to the net. But the points being raised
are interesting enough that I'd like to jump in.

I'm willing to concede Tom and Rick's point that each human control system
has its own reference levels, and that no super-ordinate social-control
system exists to impose reference signals on independent individuals. Two
individuals cannot literally share the same reference level. However, Gary's
examples of cooperatively accomplished tasks do suggest some ideas that get
lost when we insist too strongly on the independence of each social actor.
Bill Power's recent post about close-order drill in the Navy (930621.0840
MDT) illustrates the issue even more sharply.

Even if two people can't share the same reference levels, social life is only
possible because people can find reference levels that are similar enough to
allow effective cooperation. For "practical purposes" two people's reference
levels can be the same--good enough for government work, in the case of
Bill's Naval comrades. I'm talking about control at the higher levels of the
hierarchy, the programs in one's head for shared cooperative action, or the
system concepts that imply coordination of efforts, or the rules for
producing and interpreting language (to take a page from Bruce Nevin's book).

The term I like to use to designate this practical similarity of reference
levels is "alignment"--a concept that I think is key for doing any kind of
social analysis with PCT. This summer I'm once more trying to rework my
paper on power to argue that in talking about social power we're almost
always talking about the alignment of reference levels of large numbers of
people. To allow cooperation, people's reference levels do not have to be
identical, but they do have to be aligned. In most cases people who
cooperate need to be perceiving themselves as working together on the same
project, and their programs for carrying out the project have to be similar
enough that their joint efforts aren't simply disturbances to each other.

Several interesting questions arise when we think about social interaction in
terms of alignment:

1. How do people succeed in getting their reference levels into alignment?
Sometimes it must be imitation of what the other person seems to be doing;
sometimes verbal exchanges are obviously used; a lot of the time it must be
trial and error, trying something and seeing if the other person resists, a
practical application of "the Test".

2. How good is good enough when it comes to alignment? If the alignment
isn't perfect (which according to PCT it can't ever be), when do cooperative
efforts turn into a tug-of-war? (By the way, Tom, have you ever set your
experiments up so that the human control system and the computer model are
simultaneously trying to do the same thing, both controlling the same cursor?
What happens? How does it feel? How similar do reference levels have to be
for the two to be doing the "same" thing?)

3. What are the consequences when lots of control systems, not just two, are
effectively aligned in some coordinated effort? Do they become
indistinguishable from one "super-powerful" control system? How is the
collectivity different from a single high-gain system?

There's obviously more to say on this, but I'll go back to trying to put it
into a paper.

Kent

Kent McClelland Office: 515-269-3134
Assoc. Prof. of Sociology Home: 515-236-7002
Grinnell College Bitnet: mcclel@grin1
Grinnell, IA 50112-0810 Internet: mcclel@ac.grin.edu

2

From Tom Bourbon (930623.1306)

From Kent McClelland (930622)

Tom Bourbon (930622.0817) and Gary Cziko (930622.0323 UTC) have been
involved in an exchange with Rick Marken about the possibility of "collective
controlled variables."

...

I'm willing to concede Tom and Rick's point that each human control system
has its own reference levels, and that no super-ordinate social-control
system exists to impose reference signals on independent individuals. Two
individuals cannot literally share the same reference level. However, Gary's
examples of cooperatively accomplished tasks do suggest some ideas that get
lost when we insist too strongly on the independence of each social actor.
Bill Power's recent post about close-order drill in the Navy (930621.0840
MDT) illustrates the issue even more sharply.

Even if two people can't share the same reference levels, social life is only
possible because people can find reference levels that are similar enough to
allow effective cooperation.

Kent, I don't think effective social life, with cooperation as an example,
requires that two or more people find, accept, adopt, or create similar
reference signals. What matters is that the participants adopt reference
signals (that they adopt goals which we model as reference signals -- Hans?)
that result in each acting in a way that produces a match between personal
goals and present perceptions. The same constraints apply to my two
hemispheres when "they cooperate" to produce one-person performance of what
can also be a two-person cooperative task: they need not adopt similar
reference signals; all that is necessary is that each adopt reference
perceptions that result in the intended perceptions. Of course, cooperation
between hemispheres, whether in one head, or two, means actions that affect
variables controlled by another entity. (When applied to events inside one
head, the language becomes a bit weird.) Cooperation can, probably always
does, entail some necessarily different reference perceptions in the
participants.

...For "practical purposes" two people's reference
levels can be the same--good enough for government work, in the case of
Bill's Naval comrades. I'm talking about control at the higher levels of the
hierarchy, the programs in one's head for shared cooperative action, or the
system concepts that imply coordination of efforts, or the rules for
producing and interpreting language (to take a page from Bruce Nevin's book).

Here, to be sure, for people to knowingly cooperate, each must agree to
cooperate. But in itself that kind of agreement says nothing about the
specific contents of the participants' heads. The socially affected and
approved options all reside in individual heads, as products of individual
interpretations or understandings. Necessary and important, to be sure; the
same in each person, probably not.

The term I like to use to designate this practical similarity of reference
levels is "alignment"--a concept that I think is key for doing any kind of
social analysis with PCT. This summer I'm once more trying to rework my
paper on power to argue that in talking about social power we're almost
always talking about the alignment of reference levels of large numbers of
people. To allow cooperation, people's reference levels do not have to be
identical, but they do have to be aligned. ...

I understand your meaning and I appreciate the practicality, for you, of
employing this terminology in some settings. For me, the problem comes when
people who speak of aligning references or perceptions begin to believe
that is what really happens. What we are talking about is seeing people act
so that they all perceive what they intend and that (in the applications
you describe) they should all intend certain kinds of experiences of the
world. (And a lot of the "intendng" is in the head of someone who is trying
to modify, or create, a particular social interaction or system so that it
suits their own ends.)

... In most cases people who
cooperate need to be perceiving themselves as working together on the same
project, and their programs for carrying out the project have to be similar
enough that their joint efforts aren't simply disturbances to each other.

By definition, for them to cooperate they *must* do that (perceive
themselves working together); but their programs could be wildly different
-- the various roles assigned to and adopted by members of the crew of a
large ship, plane, or other installation come to mind. If everyone had
similar programs, they would fail. I know that is not the sense in which
you mean similar programs, but that is a meaning that falls out very easily,
and some people who "use" control theory as a "framework for viewing" social
phenomena appear to think of it that way.

In the cooperative tracking tasks, each person or chunk of brain is best
modeled as a system that independently controls part of the "big picture."
At the level of effective control, each system is independent. That means
the operative reference perceptions in each must be different, at that level
of control. This fact raises some interesting and vexing questions about
which persons, or which brain parts, must know what during effective
interactions. Your next questions also acknowledge that fact.

Several interesting questions arise when we think about social interaction in
terms of alignment:

1. How do people succeed in getting their reference levels into alignment?
Sometimes it must be imitation of what the other person seems to be doing;
sometimes verbal exchanges are obviously used; a lot of the time it must be
trial and error, trying something and seeing if the other person resists, a
practical application of "the Test".

I will say more about imitation in a later post, in which I will reply to
both you and Bruce Nevin.

2. How good is good enough when it comes to alignment? If the alignment
isn't perfect (which according to PCT it can't ever be), when do cooperative
efforts turn into a tug-of-war? (By the way, Tom, have you ever set your
experiments up so that the human control system and the computer model are
simultaneously trying to do the same thing, both controlling the same cursor?
What happens? How does it feel? How similar do reference levels have to be
for the two to be doing the "same" thing?)

I have. So has Rick. And so has a thesis student of mine -- the very
last one, Michelle Duggins, who will be at CSG to talk about her thesis work
on "helping." More on this then.

3. What are the consequences when lots of control systems, not just two, are
effectively aligned in some coordinated effort? Do they become
indistinguishable from one "super-powerful" control system? How is the
collectivity different from a single high-gain system?

The answers to all of your questions depend on from whose perspective you
define alignment and effectiveness. If from the vantage point of a social
engineer who wants to create certain patterns of social interaction (a
position analogous to that of the control engineer who designs an artificial
control system), the answer can be quite different than from the position of
the persons, or PCT models, who do the acting.

In none of the cases I have modeled did a quartet take on super powers,
different from those seen with a dyad, or with a two-fisted human
controller --or with two or four PCT models. In all cases, the different
combinations simply got the job done. Under various conditions, the job
could only be done by one, two, or four systems acting in concert, but that
was because of the way I parceled out access to the physical devices that
could influence the different independently controllable variables in the
experiment.

Until later,
   Tom Bourbon