[From Bill Powers (961003.0715 MDT)]
Avery Andrews 961003 --
I'm still not to happy with Kent's treatment of `conflictive control',
for various reasons.
Kent isn't _advocating_ conflictive control, he's merely describing it as a
phenomenon of real social behavior. Consider the adversary system in trials,
or competition in business (for money) or academia (for prestige) or sports
(for ascendency) or politics (for advantage). Even when people try to
cooperate, their goals and their perceptions are always somewhat different,
and there is always pushing and pulling against each other in spite of the
fact that they are supposed to be aligning their efforts and aims.
2) If Cindy and Avery are conflictively controlling, say, the position
of a table, they are doomed to stand there forever tugging at it.
They may not stand there forever tugging at a table, but I'll wager that
they are standing there tugging in opposite directions at other controlled
variables, and have done so for some time, and will continue to do so for
some time. There's an effective reference level that is different from both
of the actual reference levels, and the result, while not exactly what
either one alone would prefer, is not totally unacceptable to either one.
And the variable does get controlled: if an outsider said "Cindy is
perfectly right, and her way should prevail," Cindy would relax and Avery
would gear up for action, and the variable would stay where it is: minimum
total error, although not minimum error in each person. What is it? Socks
dropped where Avery took them off? Hairspray on the bathroom mirror? Who
gets the car on Thursdays? Whose friends come to dinner? How much they talk
together versus working at something separately? Lots of problems like these
never get settled; they just come to some equilibrium condition. But it's
not exactly passive equilibrium, because any deviation will cause one side
to relax and the other to try harder, and the effective control can be
pretty tight.
Your suggestions about physical linkages among perceptions, and of
strategies for minimizing conflict, are OK with me. But it's hard to work
out such things in a whole society, with hundreds or thousands or millions
of people at the same time. I think what happens is that you seek out people
with whom you have the least conflict and the most success at resolving
conflicts, and limit your interactions mainly to that small group. The
groups avoid conflict with other groups mainly by not having much contact
with them. When they do come into conflict, look to the Middle East for an
example of the result.
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.
Best,
Bill P.