[From Rick Marken (960610.1330)]
Jeff Vancouver (960610.13:40 EST) --
it really does not matter what I think about all behavior, for I am just
interested in certain kinds of behavior, which I think are controlled (or
attempts to control).
You can do more than just "think" behavior is an "attempt to control". You
can test it;-)
Read my Psych bull article and then we can talk.
So I'll get a preprint? Or do we talk next year;-)
Bruce Gregory (960610.1255 EDT) --
From _my_ perspective, Powers discovered that a model based on PCT allows us
to predict behavior.
That's true, though Bill was not really the first to apply control theory to
behavior. He was just the first one to apply it _correctly_.
PCT in turn is based on Powers's insight that behavior makes sense if me
assume that living systems act in order to control their perceptions.
I think that the importance of this insight was not recognized, even by Bill
himself, until Bill realized that behavior -- the consistent results produced
by organisms -- is a process of control, not in theory but in fact.
You must understand that Bill did something that conventional psychology
never did -- he took a careful look (through the eyes of a physicist) at
behavior itself. What he saw was organisms producing consistent results --
pressed bars, spoken words, lifted books, etc. -- under circumstances where
such consistency was not expected; highly variable circumstances where the
orientation with respect to the bar, the contents of the mouth or mass of the
book are different each time. These "disturbances" were never noticed in
conventional psychology; all that was noticed was the variables means used to
produce the results. This observation was glossed over by saying that
behavior is "variable" . What psychologists didnUt see (that Bill DID see) is
that the variability they observed was NOT random; it was systematic. Actions
vary in just the way they should to compensate for changing circumstances and
allow consistent production of what can now be see as the _intended_
(purposeful) result - - a bar press, a spoken word, a lifted book.
Bill discovered that what psychologists had been looking at (without seeing
it) was _control_ (also known as purposeful behavior); these psychologists
didn't see control (mainly) because they didn't see the disturbances (varying
circumstances) that would prevent the organism's ability to produce
the same result cosistently. These disturbances are hard to see because, when
control is good, they usually have little effect on the result: the bar goes
down every time, for example. It look like a bar press is just "emitted".
It's hard to see that the organism is actually pressing in a slightly
different way each time _in order to_ get the bar down.
So PCT is a model of a phenomenon (control) that most psychologists don't
even know exists. When you say "PCT is a great new model of behavior" they
assume you mean it is a model of what they think of as behavior. What they
think of as behavior is ANY measurable (operationally definable) result
of an organism's actions. Psychologists spend their time looking for the
"causes" of these behaviors; this is the goal of what I call conventional
IV-DV methods. First you pick a behavior, like a rating of how much a person
likes themselves (the DV). Then you put people in different situations (the
IV) and see if the situations affect the value of the DV. This is "bread and
butter" research psychology.
When you say that PCT is a great new model of behavior, a conventional
psychologist will assume that it can explain these IV-DV relationships.
That's why people ask things like "can PCT explain why people have a better
self-image when they are with friends rather than enemies?". Besides the fact
that such "facts" are useless because they are based on weak statistical
relationships averaged over many subjects, they also imply that behavior is
any result of action that you can measure (like a rating of self) and that
such behaviors have an external or internal cause; that the behavior is the
last step in a causal chain.
Because conventional psychologists think of "beahvior" as caused output it
is VERY hard to get them to see the value of PCT. PCT does explain, in
principle, why it _looks like_ certain behaviors are caused (statistically)
by various circumstances (the disturbance-output relationship). But it can
only explain such causal relationships for individual cases -- and after
testing for the controlled variable that is influenced by both the organism's
output and the disturbance.
I used to be a conventional psychologist. It took me quite a while to realize
why my colleagues were not jumping with excitement when I told them about
PCT. I finally realized that PCT is about a phenomenon that many of my
buddies didn't know existed: control. So now I try to start off any
discussion of PCT be saying that PCT is a model of CONTROL. I then try
explain what control is. My goal is to help people see that, what needs to be
explained by a behavioral theory, is not why variable X causes behavior Y;
what needs to be explained (and what PCT explains) is 1) what variables are
controlled 2) how are they controlled and 3) why.
I hope this _doesn't_ satisfy your apparently well-developed masochistic
inclinations, Bruce;-)
Best
Rick