Conflict and incompetence

[rsmarken]

@bnhpct

The following is quoted from the Collective Control topic:

@MartinT

at the 1993 CSG group meeting in Durango, where McClelland demonstrated that two controllers attempting to influence a single environmental variable that corresponds to a perception they both control produce effects on that variable that would look to an external observer as though a single controller was acting with a reference value that was a weighted average of the two reference values, weighted by their individual gains and a gain that was the sum of their gains. This single controller was a virtual controller, but without perceiving the two individual controllers it would be impossible for any experimenter to distinguish it from a real controller.

Internal conflict could give rise to the appearance that one incompetent control system is controlling when in fact it is a virtual controller emergent from a conflict. This could be relevant to problems in training and education, where the student or trainee appears incapable of learning properly.

RM: Where is the internal conflict in this situation? In the model, none of the agents has an internal conflict. With different references for the same variable each agent is suffering from chronic internal error; but this error is a result of the interpersonal conflict, not any intrapersonal conflict. And since this is the case – since all or many of the agents are suffering chronic error, I can’t imagine the variable being virtually controlled will be so for long. The agents will either start reorganizing or some agents will simnply overpower the others and win the conflict and get the variable to their reference, leaving the rest with their now extremely large errors. Is this supposed to be a model of something other than a tug of war?