# Group control processes;stress;contrast

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/group-control-processes-stress-contrast/4914>\
**Category:** CSG1993\
**Created:** [June 21, 1993, 5:29pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/group-control-processes-stress-contrast/4914 "1993-06-21T17:29:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/c67d28/32.png) [@William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/William_T_Powers2)\
**Post date:** [June 21, 1993, 5:29pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/group-control-processes-stress-contrast/4914/1 "1993-06-21T17:29:35Z")

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[From Bill Powers (930621.0840 MDT)]

Bob Clark (930620.2015 EDT) --

> From me:
> 
> > I guess that as an engineer, I am pained when people cooperate  
> > in an attempt to achieve common goals using means that will  
> > almost certainly, in the end, frustrate the attempt.

You:

> I too, Bill, am concerned when tasks are not well done -- but I  
> still struggle to avoid having my own "perfectionism" interfere  
> with moving ahead.

"Tasks not well done" does not mean the same as "Tasks doomed to  
failure," which is what I was talking about. I don't mind joining  
in tasks that are being done suboptimally. It's the other kind I  
have a hard time getting enthusiastic about.

We're close indeed about social control systems. I've been  
thinking lately about how social cooperation toward controlling  
variables of mutual interest (how's that?) is actually carried  
out. I was musing about a few halcyon weeks in Boot Camp (now you  
have me doing it: I mean boot camp) in the Navy when I suddenly  
became a 17-year-old platoon leader with about 40 people to march  
around in the compound, practicing close-order drills. Boot camp  
is basically boring, so we turned this into a form of  
entertainment. The idea was that the people in the platoon would  
do EXACTLY what I ordered, and I would suffer the consequences  
when I got confused. My commands would go like this (MARCH on one  
foot, execute on the next foot if possible):

FIRST column half-left, MARCH , SECOND column to-the-rear MARCH,  
FOURTH column half-right MARCH ...

At this point all the columns (of 10 men each) would be parallel.  
The outer columns would be moving diagonally left and right, the  
second column would be heading opposite the original direction,  
and the third column would be going straight on. The challenge  
was to get them all back together, marching in four columns again  
in parallel. This means counting off intervals, and then going  
through other commands to direct the columns around the field  
until on the last MARCH they were formed up again. If I goofed it  
up, the guys would happily crash into each other and fall dead  
laughing, or continue marching off into the distance where I had  
forgotten about them. We got very good at this (we had to  
practice every day) and it was a heck of a lot more fun than just  
tromping around in columns. The officers used to come out to  
watch.

I, of course, got a bang out of having control of all these  
people and seeing them do what I wanted. But that soon became  
secondary to thinking up complex series of commands that would  
leave groups scattered all over the field, and then figuring out  
a way of getting them back together. It was sort of like  
programming (which didn't exist then); there is a finite set of  
operations that have to be used to create an infinite series of  
different patterns.

It was interesting, however, that the platoon members thought it  
was great fun, too. We often crashed, but quite often we would go  
through a really involved set of maneuvers that resolved with a  
series of consecutive commands into a perfect final formation,  
and a great cheer would go up: WE DID IT! The best final move was  
when a series of four commands would be issued, one to each  
group, without the final "MARCH." Then, at the last second, the  
command "MARCH!!: would be issued, and on the next step the crash  
would be averted and order be restored. Usually. After a lot of  
practice.

In retrospect, it's clear that none of this would have worked if  
the individuals hadn't had a clear idea of what was going on and  
even predicted my intentions. After an extended set of maneuvers  
involving dozens of commands, there's no way that the columns  
could have remained in proper relationship just by blindly  
following the orders. The individuals in the groups had to be  
making fine adjustements all the time, particularly near the end,  
to keep the lines straight and to be sure that the final step  
wouldn't occur halfway between the positions of people in other  
columns. So while I was nominally in control, I was actually  
delegating detailed control to the individuals.

All this does give some notion of how a social control project  
could be set up to work. The control isn't arbitrarily imposed  
the way it is inside a person. It requires all the people  
involved to understand most of what is going on, at least to the  
extent that it affects something they can perceive and control by  
themselves. It was up to me to think up the pattern and the  
strategy in the marching drill, but it was up to the individuals  
to make it work.

Also, the speed of control is very slow in such a group effort.  
The marching cadence and the fixed meaning of the commands,  
thoroughly understood by each individual and translated reliably  
into shift of directional reference levels, left a minimum time  
resolution of four steps, about two to three seconds depending on  
the pace (one thing that the platoon and I often disagreed about;  
I ended up following them on that point). The commands had to be  
issued over a period of at least four counts in advance of the  
actual execution, even so, to allow for processing time. "First  
column tatharear HAR!" takes four steps, and is executed on the  
fifth step (assuming I started on the correct foot for the  
direction of pivot). Some commands like "First column column-  
half-left MARCH" were too long to do in four steps and had to be  
started another step in advance to be understood. At each word,  
all the people had to (a) recognize that they were in the group  
to which the command applied, (b) interpret exact technical  
meaning of the term and turn it into a reference level for an  
actual physical act, and finally (c) wait for the MARCH command  
and execute the procedure already set up with a delay of one step  
(if correctly given) or two steps (if issued on the wrong foot,  
blush). At the same time, each individual was maintaining a  
cadence in synchronism with the nearest visible people,  
maintaining spacing and line straightness, and imagining the move  
that would result in the correct perception when the MARCH  
occurred. Furious mental activity in each person.

I'm impressed with how much practice is needed to create a  
precise group control process, and how simple it has to be to  
work at all.

> **···**
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------  
> Your comments on defining levels of control are noted. I'm not  
> satisfied with them, not because because I disagree that the  
> things you mention are controlled, but because I'm trying to get  
> beneath the surface manifestations to basic controlled variables.  
> When you speak of controlling "interpersonal relations", I  
> immediately wonder what basic capacities of perception and  
> control are required in order to control that sort of thing. I  
> see controlling interpersonal relations as an empirical  
> classification, but not as one that defines the underlying  
> control structure that makes it possible. Your category just  
> doesn't seem general enough. In my attempt to define levels, I  
> tried to define them so it didn't matter what particular things a  
> person was controlling. Control of relationships occurs in all  
> contexts, whether involving other people or not. Ditto, I hope,  
> for all my other levels. Also, each of my levels involves a type  
> of perception, independent of modality, that, when analyzed into  
> its components, proves to be made of elements of the next lower  
> level. And control of one level of perception REQUIRES varying  
> perceptions of the next lower level. My levels are supposed to  
> meet all these criteria. And they're all supposed to be context-  
> free.
> 
> Well, I can't spend all day at the keyboard. The rest can wait.  
> -------------------------------------------------------------  
> Oh, one last thing. I don't think any cells in the body are  
> merely passive participants. Kidney cells control independently  
> for concentrations of many substances in the blood by varying the  
> rate of their removal; one kidney cell contains many control  
> systems. Liver cells control the sensed level of glycogen;  
> raising the circulating glycogen has a negative feedback effect  
> on glycogen production. Liver cells also control for the  
> circulating concentration of cholesterol. If the concentration  
> falls below the current reference level, the liver cells begin  
> manufacturing it. This is why attempts to alter the cholesterol  
> level are so ineffective; it takes rather violent means to change  
> it by as much as 15 percent, and the means have undesired side-  
> effects. If there is a problem, it's in the reference level, not  
> the production machinery or the circulating level. As doctors  
> found out after only about 20 years of effort, trying to alter a  
> controlled variable like circulating thyroxin is no answer to any  
> problem. The body fights any attempt to alter variables it has  
> under control, and in the attempt can damage itself (atrophy of  
> the thyroid gland, for example, when thyroxin is administered  
> over a long period). I haven't yet seen any evidence of cells  
> that are purely passive. It seems safest to assume that  
> everything is under active control.  
> ----------------------------------------------------------------  
> Greg Williams (930621) --
> 
> I don't want to get into another long war of words, but it seems  
> to me that "stress" is treated as if it's like a measles germ  
> that gets into you and causes internal problems. It seems to me  
> that stress is merely the condition of the system when it's  
> trying to resist a large disturbance. Mental stress, I think, is  
> largely caused by internal conflict. External events can seem to  
> produce it when they bring a person's conflicts strongly into  
> play: when the person is prevented from doing something about an  
> external situation by an internal conflict that prevents any  
> effective action from being carried out.
> 
> What seems stressful depends on what your goals are and how  
> effectively you can maintain control. Stressful sexual  
> harrassment for one person is a titillating sexual game for  
> another. Of course in my ethical system, you don't play mind-  
> games with emotional cripples anymore than you go around making  
> life difficult for paraplegics. But the law is a pretty blunt  
> instrument for enforcing ethics.  
> ---------------------------------------------------------------  
> Bruce Nevin (Mon 930621 09:44:18 EDT) --
> 
> It would help if we could just focus on one issue. I'm raising a  
> question as to whether "contrast" is the right perceptual  
> variable to be thinking of, while you're continuing to miss my  
> question and answer other ones.
> 
> Contrast itself can be a perception that is specifically under  
> control, as in adjusting the contrast on a TV set (the difference  
> in brightness between highlights and the darkest areas). Here you  
> are perceiving several different inputs at the same time and  
> perceiving a relationship between them, right now in present  
> time.
> 
> When you speak of a contrast between words, you're not talking  
> about that kind of situation. The words aren't being perceived  
> simultaneously, while some higher system judges the difference  
> between them. Only one word is being perceived; its contrast with  
> a rather large set of other words is hypothetical, not actual.  
> The other words are not actually being perceived; there is no  
> basis for detecting a contrast.
> 
> I think that this usage of "contrast" is erroneous. The same  
> effect can be obtained from a model in which separate systems  
> emit signals when inputs satisfy their input criteria for  
> recogizing a word. You seem to think that such a perceptual  
> function would require an exact match, so that one and only one  
> set of phomeme signals would result in a perception of a given  
> word. There's no such requirement on an input function. Input  
> functions can be as sharply or broadly tuned as is required to  
> fit the facts.
> 
> Your comments on the grape and the elephant seem to assume that  
> the grape and the elephant are distinguished because they REALLY  
> ARE different, whereas phonemes are distinguished because they  
> only SEEM different. This is a spurious argument, because in  
> either case, the perceptions are generated out of lower-order  
> perceptions of sensations. The only difference between the two  
> situations is that for the grape and the elephant, the two  
> responding perceptual functions would probably NEVER respond at  
> the same time except under very unusual circumstances (a  
> distorted grape with a bit of stem hanging from it that makes the  
> grape look a little like an elephant). In the case of the  
> phonemes, more than one detector can respond to a given set of  
> sensations, and there can be interactions among the detectors  
> that cause the recent presence of one detector's signals to  
> affect the operation of other detectors. The detectors may accept  
> a rather broad range of input sensations as sufficient excuse to  
> produce a perceptual output signal. In no case is it necessary to  
> propose that the detectors are responding to something called  
> "contrast." The idea of contrast in this connection is a  
> dormitive principle: we detect the difference between words  
> because they contrast; a contrast is that which enables us to  
> detect a difference between the words.
> 
> In fact, we don't detect differences between words, we detect the  
> words. "Differences" exist only for a difference-detector. In  
> order for a difference or contrast to be detected, the things  
> that differ or contrast must already have been separately  
> discriminated. So difference or contrast has nothing to do with  
> the fact that one system responds maximally to one condition,  
> while another responds maximally to another condition. Both  
> conditions may actually be present at the same time, so we get  
> both signals. Then it's up to higher-level systems to sort them  
> out by context.
> 
> Am I getting across at all?  
> -------------------------------------------------------------  
> Best to all,
> 
> Bill P.