Generalizing about behavior

[From Bill Powers (931201.1830 MST)]

Preoccupied with programming, so I'll just make some general
comments. Martin Taylor: I greatly appreciated your analysis of
psychophysical experiments. I think you have found a natural way
of seeing them in the context of PCT. And Jan Talmon, I am very
gratified to see that there are people who can grasp the
principles of PCT and apply them systemically and sensibly
without dragging in a lot of b.s..

RE: how "people" behave.

One reason I get a little testy about analyzing stories, and have
nothing to say about how good or poor people are at walking in
the dark, is that I think there's almost no value in generalizing
about behavior. Organization and organizing principles, yes:
behavior, no.

I spent a few years of my mid-20's in close daily contact with a
wide variety of people in trouble, a good many of whom would
definitely have been called psychotic. Every one of them was
different. The only effective way I ever found for working with
them was to get into their lives and help them find out what went
wrong, as nearly as I could. I didn't know much about categories
of mental illness and rejected what I had learned about. I had no
standard diagnoses and no knowledge of standard treatments. There
were no magical cures, but each person gradually found some way
to function better, some understanding of how to cope with what
was wrong, and they all -- nearly all -- got better. Not perfect,
but better enough to manage their own lives. All that prevented
me from being of more help was my belief in a system called
dianetics, which overlaid a set of generalizations about behavior
on the actual interactions, and prescribed standardized
interactions as if certain symptoms always indicated the same
problems.

In my high school days, my mother worked as a Gray Lady in the
mental wards of the V. A. Hospital in Hines, Illinois. From time
to time she would bring me along to entertain the customers with
my enthusiastic boogie-woogie piano playing. I was quite
frightened at first, but my mother assured me that they were just
like anyone else, just a little weird sometimes like in our own
family. I got to know some of them, and soon got over any
apprehensions. I kind of liked the weird ones; they knew they
were weird, but there was a kind of underlying message that there
was really somebody home, just like me, underneath it all. They
were very nice to me. That prepared me, I think, to deal with
some really far-out types later on, when I got into dianetics.
Psychotics just didn't bother me. Probably I recognized that my
status wasn't a great deal different from theirs. They were just
people who had somewhat more pressing problems than mine.

If I had been a scientist then, and had kept careful records of
every case, no doubt someone would have been able to detect
patterns in the problems people presented, and in the way they
found their way out of them. But all that would have been after
the fact. Such generalizations wouldn't have helped the actual
process, because as I said, each person was completely different
from each other person I met. What worked for one person would
have been irrelevant to any other -- even if someone could have
identified an "average" way of solving an "average" problem.

Now we have PCT as a guide to understanding human organization.
It would be very easy to turn it into a series of generalizations
about behavior. But even though we understand the principle of
conflict, no two people are going to have the same conflicts, and
there's no way to predict how they will reorganize their way out
of them. And there's no benefit in generalizing about the kinds
of problems people get into. The human system is too complex, too
vast in its ramifications, to fit into a few easily-memorized
categories, or even a few hundred.

One of the great temptations that PCT offers is that of
concluding that now you really understand "people." At one level
this may be reasonably true; we can recognize control when we see
it, and even see conflicts that are not obvious. But the
temptation takes a different form: the temptation to generalize
about behavior. The temptation to say "people who act in such and
and such a way have such and such a problem, and can solve the
problem by taking such and such steps." This is the approach of
the medical profession and those who try to imitate its methods.

In fact, this approach leads to a serious delusion. You get the
sense of knowing a great deal more than you actually know. What
happens is that you lose the ability to see the person in front
of you, and see instead a stereotype, a mythical "typical case."
And if you're charged with helping that person, you will fail to
do so: instead, you will apply the typical treatment, which is
almost invariably the wrong treatment by a small to large margin.
I know. I fell into this toward the end of my dianetics days.
This is a grief case. This is an apathy case. This is a birth
engram. This is a pain engram. I had lost my innocence, and along
with it I lost my effectiveness. Fortunately, something --
perhaps a series of unsatisfactory outcomes -- woke me up to the
fact that I had lost the knack and was starting to apply formulas
instead of getting to know each person. That's when I got out,
and started my education over, with PCT as the outcome. I
realized that I didn't know a damned thing about people. I was a
quack.

It's a great ego-builder to say "I understand people." That's
what leads to generalizing, because understanding "people" is
very different from understanding "a person." When you can say,
"Oh, yes, that's the way people like that act," you put on an air
of omniscience that impresses others. You deal with thousands of
people with a single pithy sentence. You see through the external
facade to the heart of the problem, like the doctor who delivers
a diagnosis 30 seconds after meeting the patient. This is very
impressive to all concerned, particularly to the person
delivering the judgment. But it's false, it's a delusion.

To understand a person you have to understand that person's
world, which means understanding that person's perceptions. When
you understand that person's perceptions, you understand what in
the environment amounts to a disturbance for that person, and
when you understand what amounts to a disturbance, you understand
why the person acts as he or she does. PCT is, I think, a
tremendous help in seeing the logic of behavior, but it can't
predict what a particular person's world will be, or what
constitutes a disturbance; therefore it can't predict the actions
that person will take. The only way to discover anything true
about the person is to treat the case before you as if you have
never met anyone else. The principles of PCT can tell you what to
look for, but they can't tell you what you will find.

So I'm unimpressed when someone says "Oh, yes, I've met many
people with problems like that." All that tells me is that they
are no longer able to see an individual and realize that there
are no problems "like that." They're looking at a stereotype, a
category, and overlooking the person in front of them.

The time to generalize is after, not before, you have the data.
Nobody using PCT has the data yet. And when we do justifiably
generalize, the generalizations should be of a new kind: the kind
that is actually general -- that is, that applies in every case
with a high likelihood. This means that PCT will NEVER lead to
generalizations about the way people act. The generalizations
will be about whatever is true of the internal organization of
homo sapiens wherever the species is encountered, whatever the
circumstances. If you want any more detail than that, there's no
choice but to interact with individuals, and find out what THIS
person has done with the structure common to all people.

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Best to all,

Bill P.