[From Frank Lenk (2014.11.21.15:46 CST)]
Rick – I found your post below very interesting. I have several questions and comments:
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First, where can I find a copy of Tim Carey’s and your paper? I found the explanation of the two different types of problems both exceptionally clear and useful. I am still working on my dissertation and have had to scale back my
original plan to model a simulated economy composed of thousands of PCT agents. Instead, my ambitions are more modest now that I am reaching the ends of the time the university will allow me to finish without starting completely over. My dissertation is now
focused on showing how Institutional Economics, a little practiced branch these days but still the heart of my program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), could benefit by more fully incorporating PCT into it. Institutional economics (as practiced
here) is based upon Dewey’s and Veblen’s concept of people as purposive and comprised of habits. Habits are not repetitive behaviors, according to Dewey. They are dispositions we have learned to accomplish the arts of living. To me, this sounds very much like
people being comprised of control systems to accomplish their goals, especially since once developed or organized, both habits and control systems are resistant to disturbances. But Institutional Economics tends to focus much more on the role of increased
skill (especially technological improvements) and not very much on problems that can only be solved by reorganization.
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I, too, am a big fan of Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments and his idea that a defining characteristic of people is that they have sympathy for each other (although we might call it empathy today).
His opening line still rings true to my ears:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness
necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
It is clear Smith thought the moral sentiment of sympathy would rein in the acquisitiveness of capitalism and that sympathy, not simply self-interest, was required for the successful operation of any “invisible hand.”
Unfortunately, acquisitiveness seems to be winning. I think the concept of control would have helped Smith explain why we have greater sympathy for the rich than the poor, though, since, as you point out, the rich are much better able to control their lives
than the poor. Surely there is advantage to learning from others how to achieve higher levels of control, which may help explain our desire to emulate the rich.
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Veblen conceived of institutions, not as organizations, but as "prevalent habits of thought.” If my analogy of habits and control systems is to hold, how can control systems be shared and become prevalent? Your
comments on cooperation are most illuminating here. I imagine a parent and a child developing a shared reference for household harmony that neither can achieve without the cooperation other. As they organize this system, they get increasingly better at not
making the other mad. Dewey (and many others) suggest that a child learns right from wrong by experiencing the reaction of her parents to her actions (and, in light of the heated discussion going on in the “Demonstration of control of behavior” thread, if
that’s not an attempt by one living control system to control the behavior of another, I’m not sure what is…). But I’m having trouble diagramming out exactly how this would work. Can you offer some suggestions? Does this become a shared control system, or
is it still two isolated control systems simply sharing a reference? Can cooperation, as you defined it, be thought of as creating a shared or joint perceptual control system?
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If so, it would imply this sharing could extend to more people than a household, that there might be such a thing as a shared system for controlling a perception of, say, social harmony, that would involve the cooperation of even people who had never
met. You can see where I’m going. Is the concept of a shared perceptual control system the way society becomes “real” - that is, where society exists as something akin to a physical object – yes, all we know of it is our perception, but it has real force
in our lives and has an existence outside of that of any particular individual. It seems to me that we are born into a set of relationships with other living control systems that help organize our perceptions, and since references are stored perceptions,
help organize and determine our references too.
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I read Kent McClelland’s 1994 paper which also suggests that one way society might have such force is in determining individuals’ references for their highest level perceptions. But also, he says that power is a group phenomenon generated by an alignment
of references and perceptions. While the outputs of individuals in a group aren’t necessarily the same as they have different roles in maintaing perceptions near references, there is a high degree of commonality in those purposes and perceptions among individuals
in the group. To me, this sounds like they are cooperatively participating in a shared (or dare I say, socialized) perceptual control system. Am I wrong in thinking this way?
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What I am really interested in exploring is how, in this kind of setup, “a small committed group of citizens can change the world,” to quote Margaret Mead. What I like about viewing society as being composed of perceptual control systems is that it
opens up the possibility of such a small group banding together to initiate an error perceived by the larger society that results in a reorganization of it. Essentially, I am thinking about how a minority or historically powerless group might go about performing
the Method Of Levels on a societal scale. Like MOL, Institutional Economics also admits that institutional change has to take place in within those who need to change, and that external players can do little directly. But the MOL concepts of going up a level
and helping to initiate a reorganization process resonate with me. What does it mean to help a society to “go up a level”? I’m not sure, but it seems like a fruitful way to think about the problem.
I’m sure I’m not thinking completely clearly about all of this. Comments, suggestions, warnings, outright disagreements, etc. welcome from all.
Frank
Frank Lenk
Director of Research Services
Mid-America Regional Council
600 Broadway, Suite 200
Kansas City, MO 64105
www.marc.org
Ph. 816.701.8237 (direct)
flenk@marc.org
···
From: Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com
Reply-To: “csgnet@lists.illinois.edu” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2014 at 2:18 PM
To: “csgnet@lists.illinois.edu” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Review of “Reconstructing Your World View” by Bart Madden
[From Rick Marken (2014.10.16.1220)]
“Reconstructing Your World View” introduces Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) as one of four “core beliefs” that can help people solve their business problems. While there is a brief but adequate description of PCT in
Chapter 5 it was never clear to me how PCT was relevant to all the proposed solutions to the business problems described in the book. Indeed, many of these proposals seemed to have little to do with an understanding of humans in terms of PCT. One example of
this is the basic premise of the book: that you can solve your problems by “reconstructing your worldview”. This is presented as a matter of disabusing oneself of “faulty assumptions” so that one can perceive things correctly.
One example given in the book of the benefits of disabusing oneself of “faulty assumptions” is Walmart’s success due to Sam Walton’s ability to see that the perception “big stores in small towns” was correct while
Kmart’s failure resulted from its inability to get past the idea that “big stores in big towns” is correct. But there is nothing in PCT that says that one way of perceiving the world is more correct than another. The “correctness” of a perception makes sense
only in terms of whether controlling it achieves the controller’s higher order goals – all of them. So controlling for “big stores in small towns” may have been “correct” for Walton inasmuch as it achieved all of his higher level goals but controlling that
perception may not have been correct for Kmart because it would not have achieved all of Kmart’s higher level goals.
How you solve problems (from a PCT perspective) depends on the type of problem you have. A problem, in PCT, is simply an inability to control a perception you want to control. There are basically two kinds of problems
from a PCT perspective: lack of control due to lack of skill (such as inability to solve a math problem due to lack of knowledge of the rules of algebra) and lack of control due to conflict (such as lack of control of eating due to a conflict between wanting
nourishment and wanting to be thin). Tim Carey and I discuss the difference between these two types of problems and how to solve them in our recent paper
Understanding the Change Process Involved in Solving Psychological Problems: A Model-Based Approach to Understanding How Psychotherapy Works (2014). The solution to both of these types of problems involves what could be called “reconstructing your worldview”;
but the reconstructing is quite different in each case. If the problem results from lack of skill then the solution is education; teaching the person the perceptions to control to achieve the desired result. If it’s a conflict-based problem then the solution
can only be achieved through reorganization; there is no way to teach the person the perceptions to control that will achieve the desired result. If the ”complex business problems” addressed in the book are lack of skill problems then they can be readily solved
by simply teaching the correct way to achieve the desired results. If, however, these problems are conflict-based – as they seem to be since they are described as involving resistance to change of “worldview” – then the only solution is random reorganization,
perhaps assisted by MOL; an outsider cannot tell the person with the problem what the correct solution to their problem is.
PCT is simply a model of how purposeful behavior (control) works; it supports no particular political point of view or value system. But it does show what a properly functioning living
system is: it’s a system that is in control. So if one’s idea of a “good” society is one where everyone is in control of their lives – that is, if one is controlling for the perception of a society made up of individuals who are able to control the perceptions
they need and want to control (as mine is) – then “Reconstructing Your World View” is particularly disappointing forum for “promulgating PCT”. This is because the book seems to accept the idea that competition is a good thing; that "society benefits from
business firms competing”. Competition is just another word for conflict and if PCT teaches us anything it’s that conflict is the enemy of control. So I think that an understanding of PCT leads to a very different conclusion about the merits of competition
in society, more like the conclusion so beautifully articulated by Powers in his paper “Degrees of freedom in social interaction”( reprinted in LCS I). In particular, see the section on “Freedom in Social Interactions” (starting on p. 229) for the PCT view
of the supposed benefits of competition in a society.
Complementing the lack of understanding of the debilitating effects of conflict is a lack of understanding of the nature of cooperation. One of the “Key points” at the end of the chapter on PCT is the following: “When
people working together have sharply different high-level goals, conflict is to be expected. When their high-level goals are similar, expect cooperation.” What is being described is not necessarily cooperation. If the simultaneous control of the same perception
is simply coincidental then there was no cooperation involved; it’s just two systems that happen to be controlling the same variable at the same time. Either system could have controlled the variable on its own; there was no need for the other system to be
controlling as well. The only benefit of simultaneous control of the variable is that each system needs to produce less output to produce the desired result than it would have if it were on its own. This would be an example of cooperation if the two systems
had agreed in advance to control the same perception so that each would have to expend less effort at controlling it individually. Cooperation involves two or more control systems achieving a result that could not be achieved by either system acting on its
own. Real cooperation requires that each system give up some control (give up some “personal freedom”) in order to achieve control of some variable that the systems involved could not achieve individually (so that they are all “freer”). Cooperation does not
“just happen” when people adopt (coincidentally) similar goals (although adopting similar goals can be part of what is agreed to as part of being cooperative).
Cooperation is the basis of civilized human society. And I think it is the failure to understand the nature of cooperation from a PCT perspective that I find most problematic about this book. A business is a cooperative
venture between employees and employers. So any problems in the business are control problems for both employees and employers. But this book presents PCT as a solution to the problems the employer only (with even the small nod toward improving “worker satisfaction”
being aimed at making business better for the employer). I find this focus on solving business problems only from the employers perspective to be almost obscene in the context of an economy where over the last 30 years CEO remuneration has gone from 50 to
over 300 times that of the average employee while employee wages have remained stagnant or actually declined in real terms. Since money is what gives people a great deal of their ability to control (in a society based on specialized production) it’s pretty
clear that over the last 30 years the problems of employers have declined considerably while those of their employees have increased substantially. It seems to me that what we need are more books on how employers can better cooperate with employees to give
employees better control of their lives.
Ultimately I think this book suffers from a “worldview” that is well described in these quotes from two of my favorite economists:
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…[is] the great and
most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments… We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies
of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. (Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments I.III.28).
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
I look forward to someday seeing a truly PCT-based book on economics and business. I think it would describe an economy organized a lot more like those of the the Nordic countries than that of the US.
RSM
–
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
Author of Doing Research on Purpose.
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble