[Martin Taylor 2017.07.29.08.36]
Bruce and Dag, thank you for pointing resurrecting this issue of
Closed Loop. Re-reading Dick Robertson’s contribution (pages 25-39)
reminded me of his (and Goldstein and others) article in the PCT
issue of IJHCS (1999, 50, 571-580). The point of the experiment was
to test whether “self” was a controlled perception, by contradicting
what people said about themselves. For example, someone might say “I
am a happy person”, which might be contradicted by the experimenter
saying “No you are not”, to which the subject might say “I am so!”.
The third experiment showed fairly convincingly that something
related to that kind of statement was controlled, but I ask myself
whether this “something” actually was a self-perception.
One might guess that what the subjects said about themselves was
what they wanted other people to perceive about them. Maybe it was
how they perceived themselves, but whether it was or not, they
reported a perception of “the way the world is”. Was that perception
the same as its reference value? Did the person who said “I am a
happy person” control for being happy? That is something the
experiment could not show. What it could show is that the person
controlled for the experimenter to perceive that it was the case.
I don't think this has come up on CSGnet, at least I don't remember
it, but it seems to me that there are likely to be two distinct
self-perceptions, which I label “introself” and “exoself”. Their
distinctness is very clear in quite a few politicians, who try to
come across as quite different from the way they perceive themselves
to be. The baby-kissing family man may be a child-hating
philanderer, but controls for the public to perceive something quite
different.
It seems to me that Robertson's study may show control of exoself
perception, but it may also or instead show control of something
quite different, the relationship between exoself perception and
introself perception. To see this, imagine someone who perceives
himself to be a thief, but wishes others to perceive himself as
honest. If the self-description in the experiment was “I am an
honest person” and the experimenter said “No, you re a thief”, the
person would probably say “No, I am honest”, despite the description
agreeing with his introself perception. Is the person controlling a
self-perception of some level of honesty? Is the person controlling
a perceived relationship between exoself and introself perceptions?
Who can tell? Not the experimenter in this experiment.
In this example, the person would be controlling for the introself
“thief” and the exoself “honest” to have different values, control
of a relationship between them. Oliver Cromwell is said to have told
his portraitist “Show me as I am, warts and all.” He was controlling
a relationship between introself and exoself to be equal, or said he
was, which is itself an aspect of an exoself perceptual control of
“transparency”, in contemporary political jargon.
Most politicians seem to control, with varying degrees of success,
to be seen as “authentic” or “transparent”. Other things being
equal, the politician who is most successful in this is the one most
likely to succeed, even if the exoself that includes the property
“authentic” is also repellent in other ways. If voters do not
perceive the politician to be “authentic” – “what you see is what
you get”–, the politician’s introself is an unknown. The popular
phrase is “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t”, and
the one you don’t loses, at least until actions that “speak louder
than words” allow the winner’s lack of correspondence between intro-
and exo-self perceptions to be perceived by voters in the next
election.
Anyway, thanks again to Bruce and Dag.
Martin
···
[From Dag Forssell (2017.07.29.0650 London time)]
Look what I found: [ http://www.pctresources.com/Journals/Files/Closed_Loop/](http://www.pctresources.com/Journals/Files/Closed_Loop/) The "print" version is two-up, suitable for printing on 8.5 x
11 letter size, or A4 paper.
The "read" version is single page, suitable for reading with
zoom set to Page Width or such.
Best, Dag At 02:57 AM 7/29/2017, you wrote:
[Bruce Nevin
(2017.07.28.21:41
ET)]Friends, Rereading Closed Loop 4.1 after 26 years I have the sense that
it has
great worth today for people on CSGnet who are not familiar with
it, and
maybe even for those who, like me, haven’t looked at it for a
long time.
I’ve attached a scan of the table of contents so you can see
what’s in
it. The scan of the whole is too large to send as an attachment
(77MB),
but you can download it fromÂ
http://zelligharris.org/Closed.Loop.4.1.pdfYou can view it on line if your browser supports rotating a PDF
image (or
if you can turn your screen sideways). Each page of the 8.5x11
image has
two pages of the 5.25x8.5 publication. If you download it, you
can rotate
it with the View menu in Adobe Reader.Due to paper sticking, the 'page' with pages 28 and 29 got
skipped, but I
noticed in time and scanned it on the end of the PDF./Bruce
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filename=“Closed.Loop.4.1.ToC.pdf”
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