[From Rick Marken (951221.1200)]
Dennis Delprato (951218) --
I am requesting you to say something to students as they begin their course
in Experimental Psychology. I would like to e-mail all students a file with
what you see above followed by your appended messages "TO STUDENTS BEGINNING
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY" (or however YOU head YOUR message).
OK. Here's my comments.
Experimental psychology is an attempt take a scientific approach to
understanding the behavior living organisms. How you actually do experimental
psychology, however, depends a great deal on what you think behavior is. For
many years, psychologists have thought that behavior is anything you could
measure about an organism's visible activities; the rate at which it pecked a
key, the number of questions it answered correctly on a test, the number of
shocks it gave to another person, etc. This view of behavior led to a
particular approach to doing experimental psychology -- one that was aimed at
finding the _causes_ of behavior. This approach to experimental psychology
results in experiments aimed at determining things like: whether
increased reinforcment rate causes increased key peck rate, whether increased
study causes better test scores and whether instructions from an authority
figure can cause people to shock other people.
In 1973, William T. Powers published _Behavior: The control of perception_.
As the title implies, Powers' book introduced a completely new view of what
behavior is. Behavior is _not_ an organism's visible activities: these are
just side-effects of the process of keeping perceptions (which are visible
only to the behaving organism) in desired states: behavior is the control of
percpetion. This view of behavior has led to a new approach to experimental
psychology, one aimed a determining what perceptions an organism is
controlling -- and how. You can determine what perceptions and organisms is
controlling using a methodology called The Test for Controlled Variables; you
determine how these perceptions are being controlled by developing models
of control and comparing the behavior of the model to that of the actual
organism.
Dr. Delprato's course in experimental psychology is based on the new approach
to doing experimental psychology; it is aimed at teaching you how to
determine the _purpose_ rather than the _cause_ of behavior. The purpose
of behavior is to keep certain perceptions under control. You determine the
purpose of behavior by testing to determine which perceptions an organism is
controlling. Thus, you will learn how to do the Test for Controlled
Variables, a formal method for determining the purpose of behavior. You will
learn to use the Test to determine very simple purposes, like the
purpose of keeping a line in a certain location or of keeping some coins in
a particular arrangement, but the principle you are learning is very
powerful; you are learning how to determine what an organism _intends_ to
experience. You are learning how, in principle, to make visible mental
events -- purposes -- that are typically private and invisible; you are
learning how to do a kind of "mind reading". You will also learn how to build
simple models that control in the way actual organisms do; these models will
show you how organisms regularly manage to achieve their purposes.
You will also learn why many experimental psychologists persist in their
search for the causes (rather than the purposes) of behavior. You will see
that purposeful behavior, when viewed from the wrong perspective, looks like
it is caused. You will see that control involves protecting perceptions from
disturbances that would move these perceptions from their desired state; it
_looks like_ disturbances _cause_ the organism to act in certain ways,
although these disturbances actually have no causal influence on the
organism's actions. The approach to experimental psychology that is aimed at
looking for the causes of behavior is based on a very compelling illusion of
causality -- an illusion that results from ignoring the fact that organisms
are controlling their own perceptions.
What you will learn in this class is how to understand the behavior of living
systems. What you will not learn is what the people next door in the other
experimental psychology course are learning, how to determine whether event
A causes behavior B, because event A doesn't cause behavior B, even if it
looks like it does (with some probability). What you will learn is what it
means for a living system to carry out a purpose, how its purposes can change
-- and why-- and how to determine and monitor those purposes. You won't
learn how to control organisms but you will learn how organisms (including
yourself) control.
Best
Rick