[From Dag Forssell (960905.15.00)]
<[Bruce Gregory (960904.1205 EDT)]
<People are not complicated. People are really very simple. What
<makes them _appear_ complicated is our continual insistence on
<interpreting their behavior instead of discovering their goals.
Bruce, you may enjoy a replay of Bill's post:
[From Bill Powers (951201.0100 MST)]
People periodically ask why control theory isn't being applied to more
interesting aspects of behavior than stick-wiggling and such elementary
examples of behavior. It occurred to me only now what answer I should have
been giving.
The whole point of PCT experiments is to strip away the complications that
only confuse the picture, and reduce complex-seeming phenomena to the basic
control processes that are going on. Once you understand the basic
principles you can go back to the complex situation and make sense of it,
where before you didn't know what was important and what was only a detail.
So the real answer to the question of why we don't deal with the more
interesting aspects of behavior is that we ARE dealing with them. We're not
giving cookbook instructions for how to analyze the more interesting kinds
of behavior -- there are too many of them. We're pulling out of the mess of
everyday interactions the basic relationships of control that explain their
main features. A person who "isn't interested in the theory" and just wants
to get on with practical matters is missing the whole point. The theory
contains the keys to understanding practical matters.
Consider Kent McClelland's investigations of conflict. The results of these
investigations show up as charts with intersecting lines on them, or plots
of behavior against time that show curves approaching limits and leveling
out. What a bore!
But suppose a man is considering leaving his wife for a girlfriend. He's
thinking of how badly he gets along with his wife and how great his
girlfriend is, never demanding anything and laughing at all his jokes, as
well as doing anything he wants in bed. Of course she's a little tedious
sometimes, but no more so than the wife. Unfortunately, the wife isn't going
to understand and will probably want a divorce and at least half of what
he's making, which is a problem. Also, the girlfriend seems to like
expensive things and places, which might be hard to deal with on a reduced
income. Then there are all the friends, some of whom seem to think the wife
is a great girl, and some of whom think divorce is not nice. And the boss is
always praising a good family life and saying how it makes junior executives
more reliable to have home responsibilities. And the kids -- well, kids are
used to parents splitting up these days, aren't they? He goes around and
around with all the ramifications and side-effects and scenarios, and
nothing happens. He doesn't leave his wife and he doesn't exactly stay with
her. Jeez, this is a really tough problem.
Bullshit. It's a simple problem: you want to leave your wife, pal, and at
the same time you want not to leave her. You can't do both. That's the
problem. All the rest is just thrashing around looking at the _reasons_ for
wanting to leave and also not wanting to leave. The actual problem is the
conflict. If you didn't have a conflict, you'd kiss either the wife or the
girlfriend goodbye, or find some other solution, and get on with your life.
If you want to understand what's going on with you, look at Kent's diagrams.
They show what control processes in conflict do -- not these control
processes or those control processes, but ANY control processes. As Kent
works out all the variations, with different error sensitivities, different
control limits, different degrees of conflict, he is developing charts and
curves showing the results that necessarily happen. Somewhere in those
charts and curves, our friend in conflict will find behaviors that exactly
fit what he is doing while he dithers around in conflict, or remains frozen
in conflict, or makes an all-out effort toward one side of the conflict or
the other and fails, and so forth. He's going to be behaving exactly like a
person wiggling a stick and trying to put the cursor in two different places
at once. It's the same basic problem, with the same basic solution: make up
your mind.
Theorists are very interested in practical problems of everyday life, but
only because they illustrate basic principles. Once the basic principle is
seen, the theorist is done with the practical problem; it's of no further
interest. Of course people will always be tugging at his sleeve and saying,
"But what about MY problem?" Such questions are only a distraction; a
theorist is not a consultant. The theorist will be very willing to teach the
theory, but when it comes to applications, he will say "What's the problem?
You understand the theory now; work it out for yourself. It's obvious."
The only way to make it obvious is to study the basic theory until you
understand it completely. Then you will see what the problem really is, and
what the solution really is. The theorist has done his job; now you have to
do your job.
Best, Bill P.