Social Influence and PCT

[Kent]

[From Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)]

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is “going after” ideas or people who advocate things you don’t like?
RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to effect change.

BP: Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t thought of any other way. . . .

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing.

The exchange between Bill and Rick in the “Assassins” thread about whether there are any effective ways of inducing change in the perceptions that other people are trying to control reminds me of my dissatisfaction with the way that social-influence processes
have sometimes been described by PCT theorists. I think it may have been Tom Bourbon years ago who asserted that what happens when people interact is that they provide disturbances for each other. Rick’s preferred method of “going after” people seems like
a textbook example of providing disturbances to others in order to change the perceptions that they control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent behavior or that of other onlookers.

To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create for others has never struck me as particularly satisfactory. To anyone not versed in PCT, this theory of influence might even seem counter-intuitive. Does making life harder for other people
by creating disturbances for them really get them to do what you want them to do? Granted, you can threaten other people and thus try to coerce them, and coercion will definitely involve creating big disturbances for variables they are trying to control, but
it’s more likely to succeed as a negative kind of influence—getting them to stop doing whatever they’re doing—rather than a positive influence—getting them to go along with what you’re telling them to do. And if you want instead to influence people without
coercing them, how does making big disturbances for them help?

from a PCT point of view, the disturbance theory of influence doesn’t seem very satisfactory either. PCT suggests that people deal with disturbances to variables they are controlling by counteracting the effects of the disturbances in order to keep their own
perceptions under control. Rick, in the recent “information theory” thread, has been at some pains to demonstrate that “information” about disturbances never even plays a role in the control process. If negative-feedback control has the effect of neutralizing
the impact of disturbances on a person’s perceptions, how can disturbances be said to have any influence on that person’s behavior at all? Furthermore, it’s easy to demonstrate with PCT how two persons can get locked into a positive-feedback spiral of conflict by
providing disturbances for each other—something which we’ve often seen happening on CSGnet.

It seems like we need some fresh thinking about social influence from a PCT point of view. Looking around us, it’s clear that people are in fact capable of influencing each other, usually without any need to resort to coercion. From a sociologist’s point of
view, mutual influence is one of the most important phenomena of social life. I’d like to suggest an alternative way that we can influence other people: not by creating disturbances for them—in effect introducing variation and unpredictability into their physical
environment—but by controlling our own perceptions so as to reduce or eliminate the effects of disturbances in some part of the physical environment that we share with the people we are trying to influence—thus stabilizing that shared environment and making
it easier for them to control the perceptions that we would like them to try to control.

This idea was implicit in the earlier thread that I started about feedback paths. I was trying to describe how the physical impacts on socially shared environments of our own efforts to maintain perceptual control can have an influence other people who are
also using those environments. Perhaps I can best clarify what I’m trying to say earlier by drawing a distinction between the feedback paths that I was talking about and feedback functions, because the two concepts can easily be confused.

A “feedback function,” as I understand it, is the set of physical processes and causal connections by which the effects of the physical actions of the control agent are transmitted through the environment to have an impact on the controlled environmental variable,
when a control system is in active operation. A “feedback path,” as I would like to define it, is a potential set of physical processes and causal connections—a possible path through the physical environment—that a feedback function might take, whether or
not a control system is in active operation.

It might help for me to give a concrete example of a feedback path. When I go walking in the restored tall-grass prairie plots near my Iowa home, I frequently see paths across the fields in which the grass has evidently been beaten down by the deer that are
plentiful in those areas. Once the paths are established, it’s evident that the deer habitually use the same paths over and over to get where they’re going, because one can often see deer tracks in the narrow strips of mud and dirt along the bottoms of these
v-shaped notches in the tall grass. It isn’t just deer who use these paths. One can also see tracks of other animals along the bottoms of the paths, and if my companions and I want to cut across a field ourselves, it’s convenient for us to take a deer path,
because wading through the tall grass can be quite a chore if you set out to break your own trail.

from a PCT point of view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths for controlling the perception of making one’s way across a field of tall grass. By beating down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent basis the potential disturbances
to travel that are offered by grasses that can get taller than a person’s head. Of course, nothing compels either a person or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it’s a whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set
out on a new track. I’d describe these paths as “feedback paths of least resistance,” which then become part of an active feedback function when an animal actually uses a deer path to get across a field.

My argument here is that the deer who have established these local regions of comparative stability in a shared environment have—without really intending to in this case—influenced other members of their herd, as well as other animals, to use the same paths,
simply because they offer the most practical (or disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures to get through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially
shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other people’s behavior, as they perceive it.

For example, when we write an article or a book, or even a post a message on CSGnet, our intention is to influence possible readers to share the ideas and arguments that we want to convey—in other words, for them to control perceptions similar to those that
we ourselves are controlling, as we make artful arrangements of arbitrary symbols appear on computer screens in front of us. These arrangements of words on screens may constitute regions of semi-permanent stability in a shared physical environment, because,
in the case of CSGnet for instance, the magic of the Internet can make corresponding arrangements of symbols appear on screens in front of some undetermined number of other people in many other parts of the world. Moreover, CSGnet messages are logged, so that
others can return to them and read them again and again if they wish.

Now, I’ll concede that there’s no guarantee that our readers will control the same set of perceptions upon reading our words that we were controlling as we wrote them. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that some readers will “misunderstand” or “misinterpret”
(from our own point of view) our messages, something that we also see demonstrated on a daily basis in this forum. Because each person has a uniquely constructed perceptual hierarchy, and because our only possible connections with others are through our shared
physical environments, any perfect sharing of perceptions seems virtually impossible.

But the art in writing is to create “feedback paths of least resistance” for others, arrangements of words so free of unintended disturbances—in the form of unclear statements or unintended connotations—that the perceptions we intended to convey are precisely
the ones that readers are most likely to experience as they read. When we succeed, our words can have influence.

I could say a lot more about how the establishment of feedback paths of least resistance not only allows social influence to take place but also might provide the mechanism leading to the broad patterns of cultural similarity we observe in people’s everyday
habits of behavior. However, this post has gotten too long already, and I can already anticipate some objections: by arguing that regions of stability in shared environments provide the channels for influence from one person to another, is it possible that
I am becoming a Gibsonian, or else that I have once again succumbed to the behavioral illusion? So I’ll stop here and see what others make of this idea.

Season’s greetings to everyone!

Kent

···

On Dec 19, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900) –

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is “going after” ideas or people who advocate things you don’t like?
RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to effect change.

Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t thought of any other way. If you’re convinced there is no other way but confrontation, ridicule, name-calling, and hatred, then of course you will not be looking for one. But I would assume
that you have tried other ways, and the only reason they’re not being used is that they haven’t worked, either.

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing. When a person has been trying for a long time to achieve some
goal, I always wonder first why the person hasn’t succeeded so far, when there are so many different ways to correct almost any error – including giving up the goal.

In most instances where I’ve been invited to demonstrate MOL with a volunteer (who of course doesn’t expect anything dramatic to happen), exploring even small difficulties has quickly led to recognizing much larger ones on which the person has basically given
up because a solution seems impossible. Reorganization has apparently failed.

Persisting a bit leads to a different conclusion: the person has come to a point at which any change that improves some aspect of life makes one or more others worse. This leaves the person stuck with one unsuccessful way of trying to make things better, sort
of a mixture of several opposing ways, like a good cop trying to play the bad cop at the same time. In short, what keeps the person from making any progress is a conflict. The person is in a “local minimum” of error, in that any move in any direction makes
the total error larger. In a way I guess that’s where we all end up, but sometimes there is some better local minimum that we can’t get to because when we go in that direction, everything gets much worse before it starts to get better.

When I suggest that one solution to a problem is to give up the goal of solving it, I am not being serious. I’m just saying that as a way of bringing to attention the instant objection most people would feel to actually giving it up. “But if I gave up wanting
peace, justice, equality, fairness, compassion, and all the rest, I might as well give up living, too!” Then, of course, I would turn the conversation in a different direction, until the person found himself/herself objecting by saying :“But if I give up smashing
the unjust, ridiculing selfish snobs, hating evil-doers, and shaming oppressers, I might as well give up all hope of anything getting better – and give up living, too.” Either way the person loses.

Any attempt on my part to suggest one direction of change in particular will only arouse the opposition, all the reasons for which that change would make matters worse. What’s necessary, I think, is to use methods of directing attention to help a person become
aware not just of one set of ideas or a different opposing set, but of the conflict itself, the self-contradiction.

There is literally no way in which one person can reach inside another and cause any particular change of organization to happen. It can’t be done by force or guile. It can’t be done at all. Reorganization is like digestion; nobody else can do it for you. I
might be able to make your life so painful that you start to reorganize, but once you do I have no way to steer the reorganization in the direction I want it to go. And I can’t erase your memory of what I did to you.

Through all this I’ve been talking to myself more than anyone. What we need is a way to handle people like the shooter. But the more we talk about changing people, the clearer it becomes that we can change only ourselves. I think the solution has to be in the
form of changing how we ourselves deal with people who trouble us because they are in so much trouble themselves.

The question, as it seems to be morphing, is not how to reform or forestall crazy shooters (or bad theorists), but how to reform the way all of us try to deal with crazy shooters and shooters-to-be. If what we just naturally do is increasing the problems the
crazies are facing, we will just naturally get exactly the opposite of the result we want.

People are not going to stop having serious problems that could lead to extreme attempts to solve them. But I think it possible, in principle, for the rest of us to become more aware of their problems and to start trying to find out what they want, and to finds
ways of helping them get it without their descending into what looks like madness to the rest of us.

Best,

Bill P.

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.19.1035 MST)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET) –

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311
MST)

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would
be, how effective is “going after” ideas or people who advocate
things you don’t like?

RM: I think it has been very
effective because it is the only way to effect change.

BP: Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t
thought of any other way. . . .

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about
their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any
need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing.

KM: Rick’s preferred method of
“going after” people seems like a textbook example of providing
disturbances to others in order to change the perceptions that they
control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent behavior or that of
other onlookers.

To describe social influence as
resulting from disturbances we create for others has never struck me as
particularly satisfactory. To anyone not versed in PCT, this theory of
influence might even seem counter-intuitive. Does making life harder for
other people by creating disturbances for them really get them to do what
you want them to do?

BP: When you disturb variables you know the other person is controlling,
the reaction is easy to predict: it will be something that opposes the
effect of your disturbance on that variable.
But as you say this is unsatisfactory, because while it can change the
obvserved actions of the other person, it’s not really actions we want to
change. We want to change the functions that generate actions, because
that’s the only kind of change that will have long-term effects. When you
try to have long-term effects by using disturbances, you find that you
are then stuck with having to keep providing the disturbances, because as
soon as you remove them the behavior will go back to the way it was,
since it’s not needed any more.
So we come back to the main question: how do we get other people to
change?
I’ve been thinking about the pro-gun lobby. Instead of arguing against
them or trying to overcome them with massive disturbances (which is
exactly how they work to get their way), we could ask why there is
such a persistent and strong effort to preserve the unregulated right to
bear arms. We need to listen, because when pro-gun activists are not busy
fending off our disturbances (successfully), they spend a lot of time
telling us why.

One oft-cited reason I keep hearing is that citizens need to have guns to
prevent tyranny by the government. I think that reason carries more
weight than another set of reasons having to do with self-protection
against criminals. Perhaps we should start taking the fear of government
seriously, and start trying to address that problem in a way that will
allay that fear, even if we don’t think there is any such threat. We
could ask the pro-gun supporters to start thinking about measures we
could take, as new legislation or as amendments to the Constitution, that
would very significantly reduce that threat, so guns would cease to be
needed for the purpose of defense against the government. We could
explain that we will not take away defenses as long as large numbers of
people continue to believe they are needed, so we are asking these
questions in good faith. What could be done that would relieve you of the
concern that now drives you to arm yourself against your own government?
Under what conditions would you feel safe in complying with our
preference for reducing the armaments in this country? What if you had
better control of the government?

This might or might not lead to a solution, but it would put the pro- and
anti-gun lobbies on a different footing relative to each other. It would
substitute an attempt to cooperate in solving a problem for an attempt to
force a solution on someone else.

KM: From a PCT point of view,
the disturbance theory of influence doesn’t seem very satisfactory
either. PCT suggests that people deal with disturbances to variables they
are controlling by counteracting the effects of the disturbances in order
to keep their own perceptions under control. Rick, in the recent
“information theory” thread, has been at some pains to
demonstrate that “information” about disturbances never even
plays a role in the control process. If negative-feedback control has the
effect of neutralizing the impact of disturbances on a person’s
perceptions, how can disturbances be said to have any influence on that
person’s behavior at all?

Some care is needed here. When a variable a person is controlling is
disturbed, that person will produce one of the possible behaviors that
will nullify the effect of the disturbance (there may be only one
possible). So that disturbance definitely does influence that person’s
behavior.

But that influence lasts only as long as the disturbance lasts. That’s
what is unsatisfactory about this way of changing behavior. What we
really mean when we speak of “changing” someone’s behavior is
having an effect such that even after the disturbance is gone, the new
behavior pattern will persist. We mean doing something that will result
in the person’s reorganizing, not just temporarily altering some action.
Long-term changes require more than just altering outputs. They can
require changing perceptual functions, goals, and output
functions.

KM: It seems like we need some
fresh thinking about social influence from a PCT point of view.

I think your thread has led us to it. Changes due to disturbances are
temporary and revert back when the disturbance has gone. We need to look
for methods for facilitating reorganization, which has a more lasting
effect.

KM: … From a PCT point of
view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths for controlling the
perception of making one’s way across a field of tall grass. By beating
down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent basis the
potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses that can get
taller than a person’s head. Of course, nothing compels either a person
or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it’s a
whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out on
a new track. I’d describe these paths as “feedback paths of least
resistance,” which then become part of an active feedback function
when an animal actually uses a deer path to get across a
field.

BP: Yes, its the more permanent kind of change we’re after. In the case
of the feedback path, that’s about the only function in the control loop
that an external agency can alter. But if you let Nature overgrow the
deer trail, doesn’t the behavior of the other organisms revert to what it
was before?

KM: My argument here is that the
deer who have established these local regions of comparative stability in
a shared environment have—without really intending to in this
case—influenced other members of their herd, as well as other animals, to
use the same paths, simply because they offer the most practical (or
disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures to get
through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make
intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially
shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other
people’s behavior, as they perceive it.

BP: In Gibson’s terms, the affordances have changed, but there is no
external influence that forces an organism to take advantage of any one
of the differences. A hunter can take advantage of an animal’s unwary
happiness at having an easy path through the grass, but would himself
avoid the path so as not to become too visible. But I don’t think we need
Gibson’s terms; ours are more precise.

Best,

Bill P.

[Bob_Hintz]

bob hintz 12-19-12

I really like your path analogy, Kent. When I think about how paths get formed, it seems to me that one deer breaks trail the first time and is going to an important destination (water, or a food source). The more generally desirable the destination, the more likely a path will be formed because more animals of all sorts will be interested in visiting that destination. I imagine that naturally formed paths have obvious destinations, but not obvious beginnings. Users of the path come across it in their search for the necessities of life. The path becomes more and more pronounced as more and more users follow various portions of the path. It will be most pronounced near the destination and will start to branch out in a variety of directions that go nowhere as they result from users coming from various locations. When a destination ceases to be important (water dries up, food is all consumed) the path will disappear because no one will use it anymore. Does this seem like a PCT explanation of path formation and disappearance?

It seems to me that PCT individuals do not have social relationships and do not perceive themselves as having significant connections to other people. This is no attempt to understand what someone else is doing or wanting or feeling or thinking unless the practitioner is providing an MOL experience. Hence, there is no effort to observe, understand or describe a process of communication that would facilitate cooperation and social control of variables that no individual could control alone, such as almost any of the manufactured items that we use everyday to control variables important to us like hunger, thirst and body temperature.

We survive by using a language that none of us created and that allows us to influence each other in an infinite variety of ways. Even thought CSGnet only exists in language use, it is almost never a topic of that use (with the exception of MOL, but even here it is only assumed). I suspect part of the explanation has to do with the word “information” and related concepts which seems to important if some of our an control systems output is intended to inform some other system about one’s internal operation.

I think this might be a very important direction, but of course I am biased.

bob

···

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.19.1035 MST)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET) –

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311
MST)

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would
be, how effective is “going after” ideas or people who advocate
things you don’t like?

RM: I think it has been very
effective because it is the only way to effect change.

BP: Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t
thought of any other way. . . .

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about
their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any
need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing.

KM: Rick’s preferred method of
“going after” people seems like a textbook example of providing
disturbances to others in order to change the perceptions that they
control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent behavior or that of
other onlookers.

To describe social influence as
resulting from disturbances we create for others has never struck me as
particularly satisfactory. To anyone not versed in PCT, this theory of
influence might even seem counter-intuitive. Does making life harder for
other people by creating disturbances for them really get them to do what
you want them to do?

BP: When you disturb variables you know the other person is controlling,
the reaction is easy to predict: it will be something that opposes the
effect of your disturbance on that variable.
But as you say this is unsatisfactory, because while it can change the
obvserved actions of the other person, it’s not really actions we want to
change. We want to change the functions that generate actions, because
that’s the only kind of change that will have long-term effects. When you
try to have long-term effects by using disturbances, you find that you
are then stuck with having to keep providing the disturbances, because as
soon as you remove them the behavior will go back to the way it was,
since it’s not needed any more.
So we come back to the main question: how do we get other people to
change?
I’ve been thinking about the pro-gun lobby. Instead of arguing against
them or trying to overcome them with massive disturbances (which is
exactly how they work to get their way), we could ask why there is
such a persistent and strong effort to preserve the unregulated right to
bear arms. We need to listen, because when pro-gun activists are not busy
fending off our disturbances (successfully), they spend a lot of time
telling us why.

One oft-cited reason I keep hearing is that citizens need to have guns to
prevent tyranny by the government. I think that reason carries more
weight than another set of reasons having to do with self-protection
against criminals. Perhaps we should start taking the fear of government
seriously, and start trying to address that problem in a way that will
allay that fear, even if we don’t think there is any such threat. We
could ask the pro-gun supporters to start thinking about measures we
could take, as new legislation or as amendments to the Constitution, that
would very significantly reduce that threat, so guns would cease to be
needed for the purpose of defense against the government. We could
explain that we will not take away defenses as long as large numbers of
people continue to believe they are needed, so we are asking these
questions in good faith. What could be done that would relieve you of the
concern that now drives you to arm yourself against your own government?
Under what conditions would you feel safe in complying with our
preference for reducing the armaments in this country? What if you had
better control of the government?

This might or might not lead to a solution, but it would put the pro- and
anti-gun lobbies on a different footing relative to each other. It would
substitute an attempt to cooperate in solving a problem for an attempt to
force a solution on someone else.

KM: From a PCT point of view,
the disturbance theory of influence doesn’t seem very satisfactory
either. PCT suggests that people deal with disturbances to variables they
are controlling by counteracting the effects of the disturbances in order
to keep their own perceptions under control. Rick, in the recent
“information theory” thread, has been at some pains to
demonstrate that “information” about disturbances never even
plays a role in the control process. If negative-feedback control has the
effect of neutralizing the impact of disturbances on a person’s
perceptions, how can disturbances be said to have any influence on that
person’s behavior at all?

Some care is needed here. When a variable a person is controlling is
disturbed, that person will produce one of the possible behaviors that
will nullify the effect of the disturbance (there may be only one
possible). So that disturbance definitely does influence that person’s
behavior.

But that influence lasts only as long as the disturbance lasts. That’s
what is unsatisfactory about this way of changing behavior. What we
really mean when we speak of “changing” someone’s behavior is
having an effect such that even after the disturbance is gone, the new
behavior pattern will persist. We mean doing something that will result
in the person’s reorganizing, not just temporarily altering some action.
Long-term changes require more than just altering outputs. They can
require changing perceptual functions, goals, and output
functions.

KM: It seems like we need some
fresh thinking about social influence from a PCT point of view.

I think your thread has led us to it. Changes due to disturbances are
temporary and revert back when the disturbance has gone. We need to look
for methods for facilitating reorganization, which has a more lasting
effect.

KM: … From a PCT point of
view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths for controlling the
perception of making one’s way across a field of tall grass. By beating
down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent basis the
potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses that can get
taller than a person’s head. Of course, nothing compels either a person
or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it’s a
whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out on
a new track. I’d describe these paths as “feedback paths of least
resistance,” which then become part of an active feedback function
when an animal actually uses a deer path to get across a
field.

BP: Yes, its the more permanent kind of change we’re after. In the case
of the feedback path, that’s about the only function in the control loop
that an external agency can alter. But if you let Nature overgrow the
deer trail, doesn’t the behavior of the other organisms revert to what it
was before?

KM: My argument here is that the
deer who have established these local regions of comparative stability in
a shared environment have—without really intending to in this
case—influenced other members of their herd, as well as other animals, to
use the same paths, simply because they offer the most practical (or
disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures to get
through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make
intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially
shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other
people’s behavior, as they perceive it.

BP: In Gibson’s terms, the affordances have changed, but there is no
external influence that forces an organism to take advantage of any one
of the differences. A hunter can take advantage of an animal’s unwary
happiness at having an easy path through the grass, but would himself
avoid the path so as not to become too visible. But I don’t think we need
Gibson’s terms; ours are more precise.

Best,

Bill P.

[_Erling_Jorgensen]

[From Erling Jorgensen (2012.12.19.2050 EST)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)

Hi Kent,

I think you’re on the right track with your notion of social influence as “local

regions of comparative stability in a shared environment.�

A “feedback function,” as I understand it, is the set of physical processes and

causal connections by which the effects of the physical actions of the control

agent are transmitted through the environment to have an impact on the controlled

environmental variable, when a control system is in active operation. A "feedback

path," as I would like to define it, is a potential set of physical processes and causal

connections—a possible path through the physical environment ”that a feedback

function might take, whether or not a control system is in active operation.

I like the distinction you are making between a “feedback function,� which is

the one actually utilized by a control system in active operation, and a “feedback

path,� as a potential avenue through the environment which might make for fewer

disturbances, if a control system were to utilize it. It seems a useful conceptual

addition to think in terms of creating “feedback paths of least resistance.�

You speak of:

my dissatisfaction with the way that social-influence processes have sometimes

been described by PCT theorists. I think it may have been Tom Bourbon years

ago who asserted that what happens when people interact is that they provide

disturbances for each other. …

To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create for others

has never struck me as particularly satisfactory.

As a psychotherapist, I think I, too, have had a certain dys-ease with the notion that

disturbance is the only route available. It is certainly a key part of a PCT analysis

of human interaction, & it promotes a decided humility in working with someone

else, to realize that one’s efforts may easily be more of a disturbance than a help.

There is the further caveat that even “help� may still be disturbing, in a technical

PCT sense, by reducing perceptual error for a person, with its attendant risks of

enabling, dependency, resentment, or backlash.

I think there are tools for using the Disturbance vector judiciously. The Method of

Levels is a key one, as is Motivational Interviewing, & Mindfulness-Based approaches.

A large part of my caseload involves what is called Dialectical Behavior Therapy,

in both group & individual formats, where teaching & coaching of skills is a prime

activity.

Then there is a mode that for lack of a better word I tend to call “modeling,� & I’m

not quite sure if it is modeling potential behaviors or potential perceptions, in the

sense of ways of viewing or reframing something. I certainly don’t conceive it in

the reinforcement-based Social Learning terms of Albert Bandura. Yet it seems to

do more than just disturb or disrupt a client’s current perceptions.

In light of your post, I am starting to wonder whether modeling may be one way of

offering a kind of well-worn potential feedback path, for a client to consider using,

that holds promise for fewer disturbances in achieving a given goal of theirs.

These then become “feedback paths of least resistance,� in the way you describe.

And if the other person chooses to use them, there is a bit more of a shared perceptual

world built up between the two parties, or at least the belief that our respective

perceptual worlds may be overlapping in certain ways that are not too disturbing.

I’m not sure where else to take the concept at this point, other than to say that I think

you are on a fruitful line of inquiry here. Thanks.

All the best,

Erling

[_Erling_Jorgensen]

[From Erling Jorgensen (2012.12.20)]

Erling Jorgensen (2012.12.19.2050 EST)

My apologies for the way the formating turned out. If people click on
the [text/html] spot on the bottom, it becomes a little more readable.
Erling

[FredNickols]

[From Fred Nickols (2012.12.19.0639 AZ)]

Well, although I haven’t given the notion of “stabilizing a shared environment” a lot of thought, I have for a long time now given thought to the matter of how to use PCT as a guide for influencing the behavior/performance of others in the workplace. Here are a few things I’ve thought about.

Feedback. In organizations, people are often cut off from information about the variables they are expected to control/influence. Everyone is exhorted to cut costs wherever possible in light of a cost reduction target but only a few are privy to the data. It’s always been important to me to help people figure out how they’re going to track progress and success.

Proximate to Ultimate. Another stratagem here is to work with people to determine just where and how the result for which they are going to be accountable is in fact measured and what is the network of variables through which the target variable can be affected? How do they influence things “over there” as a result of specific actions “over here”?

Contribution. Instead of simply saddling people with tasks, I involve them in establishing the results they will pursue. My aims are (1) to develop ownership in the result and (2) getting them to place that result in the larger scheme of variables they are trying to control, especially their priorities. In other words, I want them to want to control the target variable, not simply go along with my program.

Support. I also work with my people so that they understand I am there to support them and will bring to bear whatever authority and power I have to help them deal with obstacles, barriers, interferences, impedances, etc. In PCT terms, I help them anticipate and cope with disturbances.

Attention and Responsiveness. Finally, I pay attention to what they tell me. Years ago, one of my bosses at ETS collared me one day and said, “I’ve finally figured out your secret. You don’t just listen to people, you actually act on what they tell you.” In PCT terms, I think that boils down to being of assistance to them in controlling whatever it is they’re trying to control, whether it’s getting an issue tended to, influencing me, or whatever.

Don’t know that this helps, Kent, but I hope it does.

Best regards,

Fred Nickols

Distance Consulting LLC

www.nickols.us

···

From: Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) [mailto:CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU] On Behalf Of McClelland, Kent
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 5:49 AM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Subject: Social Influence and PCT

[From Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)]

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is “going after” ideas or people who advocate things you don’t like?

RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to effect change.

BP: Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t thought of any other way. . . .

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing.

The exchange between Bill and Rick in the “Assassins” thread about whether there are any effective ways of inducing change in the perceptions that other people are trying to control reminds me of my dissatisfaction with the way that social-influence processes have sometimes been described by PCT theorists. I think it may have been Tom Bourbon years ago who asserted that what happens when people interact is that they provide disturbances for each other. Rick’s preferred method of “going after” people seems like a textbook example of providing disturbances to others in order to change the perceptions that they control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent behavior or that of other onlookers.

To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create for others has never struck me as particularly satisfactory. To anyone not versed in PCT, this theory of influence might even seem counter-intuitive. Does making life harder for other people by creating disturbances for them really get them to do what you want them to do? Granted, you can threaten other people and thus try to coerce them, and coercion will definitely involve creating big disturbances for variables they are trying to control, but it’s more likely to succeed as a negative kind of influence—getting them to stop doing whatever they’re doing—rather than a positive influence—getting them to go along with what you’re telling them to do. And if you want instead to influence people without coercing them, how does making big disturbances for them help?

from a PCT point of view, the disturbance theory of influence doesn’t seem very satisfactory either. PCT suggests that people deal with disturbances to variables they are controlling by counteracting the effects of the disturbances in order to keep their own perceptions under control. Rick, in the recent “information theory” thread, has been at some pains to demonstrate that “information” about disturbances never even plays a role in the control process. If negative-feedback control has the effect of neutralizing the impact of disturbances on a person’s perceptions, how can disturbances be said to have any influence on that person’s behavior at all? Furthermore, it’s easy to demonstrate with PCT how two persons can get locked into a positive-feedback spiral of conflict by providing disturbances for each other—something which we’ve often seen happening on CSGnet.

It seems like we need some fresh thinking about social influence from a PCT point of view. Looking around us, it’s clear that people are in fact capable of influencing each other, usually without any need to resort to coercion. From a sociologist’s point of view, mutual influence is one of the most important phenomena of social life. I’d like to suggest an alternative way that we can influence other people: not by creating disturbances for them—in effect introducing variation and unpredictability into their physical environment—but by controlling our own perceptions so as to reduce or eliminate the effects of disturbances in some part of the physical environment that we share with the people we are trying to influence—thus stabilizing that shared environment and making it easier for them to control the perceptions that we would like them to try to control.

This idea was implicit in the earlier thread that I started about feedback paths. I was trying to describe how the physical impacts on socially shared environments of our own efforts to maintain perceptual control can have an influence other people who are also using those environments. Perhaps I can best clarify what I’m trying to say earlier by drawing a distinction between the feedback paths that I was talking about and feedback functions, because the two concepts can easily be confused.

A “feedback function,” as I understand it, is the set of physical processes and causal connections by which the effects of the physical actions of the control agent are transmitted through the environment to have an impact on the controlled environmental variable, when a control system is in active operation. A “feedback path,” as I would like to define it, is a potential set of physical processes and causal connections—a possible path through the physical environment—that a feedback function might take, whether or not a control system is in active operation.

It might help for me to give a concrete example of a feedback path. When I go walking in the restored tall-grass prairie plots near my Iowa home, I frequently see paths across the fields in which the grass has evidently been beaten down by the deer that are plentiful in those areas. Once the paths are established, it’s evident that the deer habitually use the same paths over and over to get where they’re going, because one can often see deer tracks in the narrow strips of mud and dirt along the bottoms of these v-shaped notches in the tall grass. It isn’t just deer who use these paths. One can also see tracks of other animals along the bottoms of the paths, and if my companions and I want to cut across a field ourselves, it’s convenient for us to take a deer path, because wading through the tall grass can be quite a chore if you set out to break your own trail.

From a PCT point of view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths for controlling the perception of making one’s way across a field of tall grass. By beating down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent basis the potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses that can get taller than a person’s head. Of course, nothing compels either a person or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it’s a whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out on a new track. I’d describe these paths as “feedback paths of least resistance,” which then become part of an active feedback function when an animal actually uses a deer path to get across a field.

My argument here is that the deer who have established these local regions of comparative stability in a shared environment have—without really intending to in this case—influenced other members of their herd, as well as other animals, to use the same paths, simply because they offer the most practical (or disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures to get through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other people’s behavior, as they perceive it.

For example, when we write an article or a book, or even a post a message on CSGnet, our intention is to influence possible readers to share the ideas and arguments that we want to convey—in other words, for them to control perceptions similar to those that we ourselves are controlling, as we make artful arrangements of arbitrary symbols appear on computer screens in front of us. These arrangements of words on screens may constitute regions of semi-permanent stability in a shared physical environment, because, in the case of CSGnet for instance, the magic of the Internet can make corresponding arrangements of symbols appear on screens in front of some undetermined number of other people in many other parts of the world. Moreover, CSGnet messages are logged, so that others can return to them and read them again and again if they wish.

Now, I’ll concede that there’s no guarantee that our readers will control the same set of perceptions upon reading our words that we were controlling as we wrote them. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that some readers will “misunderstand” or “misinterpret” (from our own point of view) our messages, something that we also see demonstrated on a daily basis in this forum. Because each person has a uniquely constructed perceptual hierarchy, and because our only possible connections with others are through our shared physical environments, any perfect sharing of perceptions seems virtually impossible.

But the art in writing is to create “feedback paths of least resistance” for others, arrangements of words so free of unintended disturbances—in the form of unclear statements or unintended connotations—that the perceptions we intended to convey are precisely the ones that readers are most likely to experience as they read. When we succeed, our words can have influence.

I could say a lot more about how the establishment of feedback paths of least resistance not only allows social influence to take place but also might provide the mechanism leading to the broad patterns of cultural similarity we observe in people’s everyday habits of behavior. However, this post has gotten too long already, and I can already anticipate some objections: by arguing that regions of stability in shared environments provide the channels for influence from one person to another, is it possible that I am becoming a Gibsonian, or else that I have once again succumbed to the behavioral illusion? So I’ll stop here and see what others make of this idea.

Season’s greetings to everyone!

Kent

On Dec 19, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900) –

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is “going after” ideas or people who advocate things you don’t like?

RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to effect change.

Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t thought of any other way. If you’re convinced there is no other way but confrontation, ridicule, name-calling, and hatred, then of course you will not be looking for one. But I would assume that you have tried other ways, and the only reason they’re not being used is that they haven’t worked, either.

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing. When a person has been trying for a long time to achieve some goal, I always wonder first why the person hasn’t succeeded so far, when there are so many different ways to correct almost any error – including giving up the goal.

In most instances where I’ve been invited to demonstrate MOL with a volunteer (who of course doesn’t expect anything dramatic to happen), exploring even small difficulties has quickly led to recognizing much larger ones on which the person has basically given up because a solution seems impossible. Reorganization has apparently failed.

Persisting a bit leads to a different conclusion: the person has come to a point at which any change that improves some aspect of life makes one or more others worse. This leaves the person stuck with one unsuccessful way of trying to make things better, sort of a mixture of several opposing ways, like a good cop trying to play the bad cop at the same time. In short, what keeps the person from making any progress is a conflict. The person is in a “local minimum” of error, in that any move in any direction makes the total error larger. In a way I guess that’s where we all end up, but sometimes there is some better local minimum that we can’t get to because when we go in that direction, everything gets much worse before it starts to get better.

When I suggest that one solution to a problem is to give up the goal of solving it, I am not being serious. I’m just saying that as a way of bringing to attention the instant objection most people would feel to actually giving it up. “But if I gave up wanting peace, justice, equality, fairness, compassion, and all the rest, I might as well give up living, too!” Then, of course, I would turn the conversation in a different direction, until the person found himself/herself objecting by saying :“But if I give up smashing the unjust, ridiculing selfish snobs, hating evil-doers, and shaming oppressers, I might as well give up all hope of anything getting better – and give up living, too.” Either way the person loses.

Any attempt on my part to suggest one direction of change in particular will only arouse the opposition, all the reasons for which that change would make matters worse. What’s necessary, I think, is to use methods of directing attention to help a person become aware not just of one set of ideas or a different opposing set, but of the conflict itself, the self-contradiction.

There is literally no way in which one person can reach inside another and cause any particular change of organization to happen. It can’t be done by force or guile. It can’t be done at all. Reorganization is like digestion; nobody else can do it for you. I might be able to make your life so painful that you start to reorganize, but once you do I have no way to steer the reorganization in the direction I want it to go. And I can’t erase your memory of what I did to you.

Through all this I’ve been talking to myself more than anyone. What we need is a way to handle people like the shooter. But the more we talk about changing people, the clearer it becomes that we can change only ourselves. I think the solution has to be in the form of changing how we ourselves deal with people who trouble us because they are in so much trouble themselves.

The question, as it seems to be morphing, is not how to reform or forestall crazy shooters (or bad theorists), but how to reform the way all of us try to deal with crazy shooters and shooters-to-be. If what we just naturally do is increasing the problems the crazies are facing, we will just naturally get exactly the opposite of the result we want.

People are not going to stop having serious problems that could lead to extreme attempts to solve them. But I think it possible, in principle, for the rest of us to become more aware of their problems and to start trying to find out what they want, and to finds ways of helping them get it without their descending into what looks like madness to the rest of us.

Best,

Bill P.

[Kent]

[From Kent McClelland (2012.12.20.1200 CET)]

Bill Powers (2012.12.19.1035 MST)
bob hintz 12-19-12
Erling Jorgensen (2012.12.19.2050 EST)

Thank you, Bill, Bob, and Erling for your encouraging replies to my post on creating feedback paths as a way of influencing others.

Let me reply to each of you individually, starting with Bill:

KM: To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create for others has never struck me as particularly satisfactory. To anyone not versed in PCT, this theory of influence might even seem counter-intuitive. Does making life harder for other people by creating disturbances for them really get them to do what you want them to do?

BP: When you disturb variables you know the other person is controlling, the reaction is easy to predict: it will be something that opposes the effect of your disturbance on that variable.

But as you say this is unsatisfactory, because while it can change the obvserved actions of the other person, it's not really actions we want to change. We want to change the functions that generate actions, because that's the only kind of change that will have long-term effects. When you try to have long-term effects by using disturbances, you find that you are then stuck with having to keep providing the disturbances, because as soon as you remove them the behavior will go back to the way it was, since it's not needed any more.

KM: Yes, I agree entirely, just trying to apply disturbances to get rid of annoying actions can get old fast, because you have to keep doing it and doing it. The higher-level perceptions that "motivate" the observed actions (your term "generate" is much more precise) are usually the ones we hope to change.

BP: So we come back to the main question: how do we get other people to change?

I've been thinking about the pro-gun lobby. Instead of arguing against them or trying to overcome them with massive disturbances (which is exactly how they work to get their way), we could ask why there is such a persistent and strong effort to preserve the unregulated right to bear arms. We need to listen, because when pro-gun activists are not busy fending off our disturbances (successfully), they spend a lot of time telling us why.

One oft-cited reason I keep hearing is that citizens need to have guns to prevent tyranny by the government. I think that reason carries more weight than another set of reasons having to do with self-protection against criminals. Perhaps we should start taking the fear of government seriously, and start trying to address that problem in a way that will allay that fear, even if we don't think there is any such threat. We could ask the pro-gun supporters to start thinking about measures we could take, as new legislation or as amendments to the Constitution, that would very significantly reduce that threat, so guns would cease to be needed for the purpose of defense against the government. We could explain that we will not take away defenses as long as large numbers of people continue to believe they are needed, so we are asking these questions in good faith. What could be done that would relieve you of the concern that now drives you to arm yourself against your own government? Under what conditions would you feel safe in complying with our preference for reducing the armaments in this country? What if you had better control of the government?

This might or might not lead to a solution, but it would put the pro- and anti-gun lobbies on a different footing relative to each other. It would substitute an attempt to cooperate in solving a problem for an attempt to force a solution on someone else.

KM: Sounds like a promising approach. Working together to solve a mutual problem is almost always a better way to deal with a social conflict than simply opposing anything the opponent is trying to do.

My two-cents-worth on the pro-gun lobby is that people arm themselves because they feel fearful. Acquiring a personal store of armaments is one way of dealing with the individual's perception of a serious lack of personal security.

I suspect that the insecurity and fear take many different forms from individual to individual. A good many gun proponents, as you suggest, may be genuinely afraid that the federal government will take away their liberty, not only their freedom to own guns, but in other ways as well.

Another group of gun owners may be genuinely afraid of crime and thus acquire their guns as a form of protection from robberies on the street or intruders into their own houses. (Criminological research has turned up the interesting pattern that the segments of the population most fearful of crime�like older people�are often the ones statistically least likely to be victimized. Research has also shown that a firearm kept in the house is statistically more likely to kill a member of the family than an intruder. Fears, of course, develop from operation of the perceptual hierarchy in "imagination mode" and are not necessarily rational.)

A third possible source of fearfulness, which I infer from the fact that gun proponents are disproportionately white, Southern, and rural, is an unspoken fear of the racial other�the Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, Arabs, and other "aliens" who form an increasingly large proportion of the American population. Many whites may feel that they are losing control of the social environment in which they live, as nonwhites play larger roles in their own lives. Television and the movies tend to feed these unspoken racial fears by often casting whites as heroes struggling against nonwhite criminals or terrorists (and the media constantly portray the glamorous option of using firearms to efficiently and effectively deal with "the enemy").

So I would say that fear is the problem, and creating feedback paths to a greater sense of personal security might offer some approaches to solutions. I don't have any quick suggestions on what the best option might be, however. The cooperative approach you suggest in your post, Bill, seems like a good one, although not very likely to be implemented politically.

Before attempt to ban whole classes of weapons, gun-control advocates, and I'm inclined to one of them, might do well to consider the sad history of previous attempts at prohibition. I'm thinking especially about the war on drugs over the last 40 years, the early 20th-century prohibition of alcohol, and late 19th-century effort to outlaw abortion and contraception, none of which can be said to have been successful, perhaps because none offered alternative feedback paths for controlling the higher-level perceptions that had generated the actions deemed to be harmful.

A focus on reducing the likelihood of harm, for instance by making gun owners responsible for the harm caused by their weapons, whether or not they pull the trigger, might be one plausible way to go. It would take a better system of gun registration and identification of individual weapons, however, which would just feed into the fears of those who are paranoid about the federal government.

KM: ... From a PCT point of view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths for controlling the perception of making one's way across a field of tall grass. By beating down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent basis the potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses that can get taller than a person's head. Of course, nothing compels either a person or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it's a whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out on a new track. I'd describe these paths as "feedback paths of least resistance," which then become part of an active feedback function when an animal actually uses a deer path to get across a field.

BP: Yes, its the more permanent kind of change we're after. In the case of the feedback path, that's about the only function in the control loop that an external agency can alter. But if you let Nature overgrow the deer trail, doesn't the behavior of the other organisms revert to what it was before?

KM: Yes, I would agree, if a feedback path disappears the behavior reverts to something else, perhaps to what it was before. (Bob Hintz's post in his post to this thread has a nice discussion of the formation and disappearance of feedback paths.) If a feedback path is constructed of relatively durable stuff, like a concrete highway instead of a dirt path through the grass, it may last longer before it begins to deteriorate. But feedback paths always require continued maintenance, which in the deer path example comes simply from the repeated actions of the animals using the path, but in human examples usually the results from someone's efforts to control the perception of keeping the feedback path in good order, for example, the efforts of a repair crew fixing the potholes in a highway. In fact, I would argue that from this perspective all of the various kinds of activities that we label as "work," from collecting trash to deciding cases in the Supreme Court, might be analyzed as efforts to create or maintain feedback paths for other people to use.

KM: My argument here is that the deer who have established these local regions of comparative stability in a shared environment have�without really intending to in this case�influenced other members of their herd, as well as other animals, to use the same paths, simply because they offer the most practical (or disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures to get through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other people's behavior, as they perceive it.

BP: In Gibson's terms, the affordances have changed, but there is no external influence that forces an organism to take advantage of any one of the differences. A hunter can take advantage of an animal's unwary happiness at having an easy path through the grass, but would himself avoid the path so as not to become too visible. But I don't think we need Gibson's terms; ours are more precise.

KM: Yes indeed, nothing compels a person or animal to take a "path of least resistance" if some other action gets it more expeditiously to where it wants to go. It's all about the individual's own perceptions and goals.

Bob Hintz's post (12-19-12) develops some similar themes.

BH: When I think about how paths get formed, it seems to me that one deer breaks trail the first time and is going to an important destination (water, or a food source). The more generally desirable the destination, the more likely a path will be formed because more animals of all sorts will be interested in visiting that destination. I imagine that naturally formed paths have obvious destinations, but not obvious beginnings. Users of the path come across it in their search for the necessities of life. The path becomes more and more pronounced as more and more users follow various portions of the path. It will be most pronounced near the destination and will start to branch out in a variety of directions that go nowhere as they result from users coming from various locations. When a destination ceases to be important (water dries up, food is all consumed) the path will disappear because no one will use it anymore. Does this seem like a PCT explanation of path formation and disappearance?

KM: Nicely put, Bob. An important thing that you point out in this post, and something I failed to discuss in my earlier post, is that a possible feedback path is only useful and attractive to the individual when it provides an avenue for satisfying some higher-level goal that the individual is trying to control (the function generating the action, in Bill's terms). If the animal isn't thirsty, there's no need to go to the watering hole. And if the things on the path that might satisfy those higher goals disappear, chances are good that the path won't be used as much and will disappear too.

This line of thinking suggests that offering feedback paths to other people is more likely to influence their behavior when those paths can serve as the means for them to reach their own goals, than when the paths are offered as ends in themselves. In other words, convenient feedback paths are more likely to influence HOW people do things than WHAT they are doing. If we don't like what they are doing, simply offering a path for doing something different is not going to work (unless, of course, the means they have chosen are objectionable to us and shifting the means is all we care about).

To get people to pursue different goals at a higher level probably requires that they start reorganizing their own perceptions, as Bill suggests. New feedback paths won't necessarily jumpstart that process, unless the adoption of a new way of doing things leads to other conflicts in the person's hierarchy, making the "local minimum of error" unsustainable (Bill Powers, Assassins thread, 2012.12.18.1311 MST).

BH: It seems to me that PCT individuals do not have social relationships and do not perceive themselves as having significant connections to other people. This is no attempt to understand what someone else is doing or wanting or feeling or thinking unless the practitioner is providing an MOL experience. Hence, there is no effort to observe, understand or describe a process of communication that would facilitate cooperation and social control of variables that no individual could control alone, such as almost any of the manufactured items that we use everyday to control variables important to us like hunger, thirst and body temperature.

KM: I'm not quite sure what you're driving at here, Bob. Who are these PCT individuals? Do you mean the PCT model of a generic individual who appears to lack any social or cultural moorings?

I think that a feedback-path analysis might help us to add some social and cultural moorings to the generic PCT model of the individual. The argument would go something like this:

1. When an individual uses the same feedback path over and over for controlling one kind of perception, this use of the path becomes habitual and thus built into the individual's perceptual hierarchy.

2. Individuals who have developed habitual ways of doing things will begin to perceive and relate to the objects in their familiar surroundings in terms of their utility as feedback paths. (Deer: That path will take me to the watering hole.) (Person: That object with a horizontal surface attached to a vertical surface and four legs is a chair, which means that it's useful for sitting down. That particular chair over there is not just any chair, it's the place that I normally sit down when I want to read a book.)

3. An Individual who sees others using a particular feedback path will imitate them by trying out the same feedback path, if the individual wants to control the perceptions that the others appear to be controlling. Children are particularly likely to imitate others in their use of feedback paths. Because of imitation, habitual use of a particular feedback path or a particular type of feedback path may become widespread in a given population (and thus built into lots of people's perceptual hierarchies, especially children's). This spread by imitation is particularly likely to happen if the feedback path is a path of least resistance, easy to use and relatively free of disturbances.

4. Feedback paths that come into widespread use in a given population may eventually be regarded as normative, that is, the way we do things around here. When that occurs, one of the disturbances likely affecting a person who deviates from using the "normal" feedback path is likely to be resistance from other people who find it disturbing that the individual isn't doing things the right way (the way we do things around here).

5. This kind of analysis applies equally well to social and cultural "objects" that can be used as feedback paths (even to a theory like PCT), as well as physical objects.

BH: We survive by using a language that none of us created and that allows us to influence each other in an infinite variety of ways. Even thought CSGnet only exists in language use, it is almost never a topic of that use (with the exception of MOL, but even here it is only assumed). I suspect part of the explanation has to do with the word "information" and related concepts which seems to important if some of our an control systems output is intended to inform some other system about one's internal operation.

I think this might be a very important direction, but of course I am biased.

KM: Yes, language is an important set of feedback paths that are particularly useful for influencing the behavior of other people, and we should be taking about language more explicitly into our analyses. It's complicated, though, because language depends on some pretty high-level perceptions that may not be easy to model.

And on to Erling Jorgensen's post . . .

ER: As a psychotherapist, I think I, too, have had a certain dys-ease with the notion that
disturbance is the only route available. It is certainly a key part of a PCT analysis
of human interaction, & it promotes a decided humility in working with someone
else, to realize that one�s efforts may easily be more of a disturbance than a help.
There is the further caveat that even �help� may still be disturbing, in a technical
PCT sense, by reducing perceptual error _for_ a person, with its attendant risks of
enabling, dependency, resentment, or backlash.

I think there are tools for using the Disturbance vector judiciously. The Method of
Levels is a key one, as is Motivational Interviewing, & Mindfulness-Based approaches.
A large part of my caseload involves what is called Dialectical Behavior Therapy,
in both group & individual formats, where teaching & coaching of skills is a prime
activity.

KM: Yes, I wouldn't want to assert that the application of disturbances isn't sometimes useful or that creating feedback paths is the only way to influence someone. Neither method is 100% reliable.

ER: Then there is a mode that for lack of a better word I tend to call �modeling,� & I�m
not quite sure if it is modeling potential behaviors or potential perceptions, in the
sense of ways of viewing or reframing something. I certainly don�t conceive it in
the reinforcement-based Social Learning terms of Albert Bandura. Yet it seems to
do more than just disturb or disrupt a client�s current perceptions.

In light of your post, I am starting to wonder whether modeling may be one way of
offering a kind of well-worn potential feedback path, for a client to consider using,
that holds promise for fewer disturbances in achieving a given goal of theirs.

These then become �feedback paths of least resistance,� in the way you describe.
And if the other person chooses to use them, there is a bit more of a shared perceptual
world built up between the two parties, or at least the belief that our respective
perceptual worlds may be overlapping in certain ways that are not too disturbing.

KM: Sounds very plausible to me. The only thing I would note is that well-worn feedback paths can "take up space" in a shared environment, so that the participants' degrees of freedom are reduced for playing other games than the habitual ones or seeing the world in other ways than familiar modes.

Best to all!

Kent

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)--

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)
Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is "going after" ideas or
people who advocate things you don't like?

KM: The exchange between Bill and Rick in the "Assassins" thread about whether
there are any effective ways of inducing change in the perceptions that
other people are trying to control reminds me of my dissatisfaction with the
way that social-influence processes have sometimes been described by PCT
theorists.

RM: And this reminds me of how odd it is for us to be thinking of how
PCT can provide more effective ways to do social influence. For my
part, I have never been particularly interested in finding more
effective ways of inducing changes in other people. There are several
reasons for this.

First, finding effective ways to do social influence does not seem
very different to me from finding more effective ways to arbitrarily
control other people. Looking for an effective way to get people to
agree with me about gun control or information theory in PCT or
whatever (when they don't already agree) seems to me a lot like
finding an effective way to control their behavior, is it not? I'm
trying to find an effective way to get them to do what they currently
don't want to do (vote for strict gun control laws, stop wasting time
on information theory and start doing PCT). And PCT teaches me that
arbitrary control is not a good way to deal with people. It's just
going to lead to more conflict. There is, in fact, no effective way to
arbitrarily influence other people. I argue for my point of view, not
in the hopes of effectively influencing people to change their mind
but, rather, to keep the arguments in favor of my position alive so
that when (and if) people are ready to change they will know where to
go. That's why I say that my methods have been effective; those
methods have kept ideas (like oxygen, plate tectonics, anti-slavery)
alive until the people who opposed those ideas eventually died off and
people willing to accept the other point of view were born.

Second, if it were really possible to develop more effective ways to
change people's minds (influence them socially) then other people
could also use them on you to adopt their ideas just as you could use
them on them. So what one ultimately believes about, say, gun control
would depend, not on the quality of the arguments or on data but on
who got to who first with their effective social influence
methodologies. Fortunately, I don't think such methodologies exist
(although there are certainly effective social influence methods that
work in the short run -- advertisers know all about them already).

Third, we already know how to effectively do social influence; by
training our kids to follow what are considered the agreed on rules
in society. To the extent that people end up controlling for following
those rules then we can very effectively influence (control) each
other;. The examples are endless: we move aside on a stairway to let
faster people go by, pay the waiter when handed the check, get change
when we pay more than the amount of the check, help make dinner when
asked, say "Hello" when we answer the phone, etc etc. This is all
control by disturbance, of course; you pay the check, for example,
only if you are controlling for having paid for your meal and the
check is a disturbance that is corrected by paying, etc.

So I guess I think seeking more effective ways to influence people is
not a project I would sign up for. Seeking ways to present arguments
more politely might be nice but I think that's something we could
learn more about from Miss Manners(or a Kindergarten teacher) than
from PCT;-)

Best

Rick

···

----

I think it may have been Tom Bourbon years ago who asserted that
what happens when people interact is that they provide disturbances for each
other. Rick's preferred method of "going after" people seems like a textbook
example of providing disturbances to others in order to change the
perceptions that they control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent
behavior or that of other onlookers.

To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create for
others has never struck me as particularly satisfactory. To anyone not
versed in PCT, this theory of influence might even seem counter-intuitive.
Does making life harder for other people by creating disturbances for them
really get them to do what you want them to do? Granted, you can threaten
other people and thus try to coerce them, and coercion will definitely
involve creating big disturbances for variables they are trying to control,
but it's more likely to succeed as a negative kind of influence�getting them
to stop doing whatever they're doing�rather than a positive
influence�getting them to go along with what you're telling them to do. And
if you want instead to influence people without coercing them, how does
making big disturbances for them help?

From a PCT point of view, the disturbance theory of influence doesn't seem
very satisfactory either. PCT suggests that people deal with disturbances to
variables they are controlling by counteracting the effects of the
disturbances in order to keep their own perceptions under control. Rick, in
the recent "information theory" thread, has been at some pains to
demonstrate that "information" about disturbances never even plays a role in
the control process. If negative-feedback control has the effect of
neutralizing the impact of disturbances on a person's perceptions, how can
disturbances be said to have any influence on that person's behavior at all?
Furthermore, it's easy to demonstrate with PCT how two persons can get
locked into a positive-feedback spiral of conflict by providing disturbances
for each other�something which we've often seen happening on CSGnet.

It seems like we need some fresh thinking about social influence from a PCT
point of view. Looking around us, it's clear that people are in fact capable
of influencing each other, usually without any need to resort to coercion.
From a sociologist's point of view, mutual influence is one of the most
important phenomena of social life. I'd like to suggest an alternative way
that we can influence other people: not by creating disturbances for them�in
effect introducing variation and unpredictability into their physical
environment�but by controlling our own perceptions so as to reduce or
eliminate the effects of disturbances in some part of the physical
environment that we share with the people we are trying to influence�thus
stabilizing that shared environment and making it easier for them to control
the perceptions that we would like them to try to control.

This idea was implicit in the earlier thread that I started about feedback
paths. I was trying to describe how the physical impacts on socially shared
environments of our own efforts to maintain perceptual control can have an
influence other people who are also using those environments. Perhaps I can
best clarify what I'm trying to say earlier by drawing a distinction between
the feedback paths that I was talking about and feedback functions, because
the two concepts can easily be confused.

A "feedback function," as I understand it, is the set of physical processes
and causal connections by which the effects of the physical actions of the
control agent are transmitted through the environment to have an impact on
the controlled environmental variable, when a control system is in active
operation. A "feedback path," as I would like to define it, is a potential
set of physical processes and causal connections�a possible path through the
physical environment�that a feedback function might take, whether or not a
control system is in active operation.

It might help for me to give a concrete example of a feedback path. When I
go walking in the restored tall-grass prairie plots near my Iowa home, I
frequently see paths across the fields in which the grass has evidently been
beaten down by the deer that are plentiful in those areas. Once the paths
are established, it's evident that the deer habitually use the same paths
over and over to get where they're going, because one can often see deer
tracks in the narrow strips of mud and dirt along the bottoms of these
v-shaped notches in the tall grass. It isn't just deer who use these paths.
One can also see tracks of other animals along the bottoms of the paths, and
if my companions and I want to cut across a field ourselves, it's convenient
for us to take a deer path, because wading through the tall grass can be
quite a chore if you set out to break your own trail.

From a PCT point of view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths
for controlling the perception of making one's way across a field of tall
grass. By beating down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent
basis the potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses that
can get taller than a person's head. Of course, nothing compels either a
person or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it's a
whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out on a
new track. I'd describe these paths as "feedback paths of least resistance,"
which then become part of an active feedback function when an animal
actually uses a deer path to get across a field.

My argument here is that the deer who have established these local regions
of comparative stability in a shared environment have�without really
intending to in this case�influenced other members of their herd, as well as
other animals, to use the same paths, simply because they offer the most
practical (or disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures
to get through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make
intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially
shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other people's
behavior, as they perceive it.

For example, when we write an article or a book, or even a post a message on
CSGnet, our intention is to influence possible readers to share the ideas
and arguments that we want to convey�in other words, for them to control
perceptions similar to those that we ourselves are controlling, as we make
artful arrangements of arbitrary symbols appear on computer screens in front
of us. These arrangements of words on screens may constitute regions of
semi-permanent stability in a shared physical environment, because, in the
case of CSGnet for instance, the magic of the Internet can make
corresponding arrangements of symbols appear on screens in front of some
undetermined number of other people in many other parts of the world.
Moreover, CSGnet messages are logged, so that others can return to them and
read them again and again if they wish.

Now, I'll concede that there's no guarantee that our readers will control
the same set of perceptions upon reading our words that we were controlling
as we wrote them. In fact, it's pretty much guaranteed that some readers
will "misunderstand" or "misinterpret" (from our own point of view) our
messages, something that we also see demonstrated on a daily basis in this
forum. Because each person has a uniquely constructed perceptual hierarchy,
and because our only possible connections with others are through our shared
physical environments, any perfect sharing of perceptions seems virtually
impossible.

But the art in writing is to create "feedback paths of least resistance" for
others, arrangements of words so free of unintended disturbances�in the form
of unclear statements or unintended connotations�that the perceptions we
intended to convey are precisely the ones that readers are most likely to
experience as they read. When we succeed, our words can have influence.

I could say a lot more about how the establishment of feedback paths of
least resistance not only allows social influence to take place but also
might provide the mechanism leading to the broad patterns of cultural
similarity we observe in people's everyday habits of behavior. However, this
post has gotten too long already, and I can already anticipate some
objections: by arguing that regions of stability in shared environments
provide the channels for influence from one person to another, is it
possible that I am becoming a Gibsonian, or else that I have once again
succumbed to the behavioral illusion? So I'll stop here and see what others
make of this idea.

Season's greetings to everyone!

Kent

On Dec 19, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900) --

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is "going after" ideas or
people who advocate things you don't like?
RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to effect
change.

Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven't thought
of any other way. If you're convinced there is no other way but
confrontation, ridicule, name-calling, and hatred, then of course you will
not be looking for one. But I would assume that you have tried other ways,
and the only reason they're not being used is that they haven't worked,
either.

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about
their customary ways is that it's hard to persuade them that there is any
need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing. When a person has been
trying for a long time to achieve some goal, I always wonder first why the
person hasn't succeeded so far, when there are so many different ways to
correct almost any error -- including giving up the goal.

In most instances where I've been invited to demonstrate MOL with a
volunteer (who of course doesn't expect anything dramatic to happen),
exploring even small difficulties has quickly led to recognizing much larger
ones on which the person has basically given up because a solution seems
impossible. Reorganization has apparently failed.

Persisting a bit leads to a different conclusion: the person has come to a
point at which any change that improves some aspect of life makes one or
more others worse. This leaves the person stuck with one unsuccessful way of
trying to make things better, sort of a mixture of several opposing ways,
like a good cop trying to play the bad cop at the same time. In short, what
keeps the person from making any progress is a conflict. The person is in a
"local minimum" of error, in that any move in any direction makes the total
error larger. In a way I guess that's where we all end up, but sometimes
there is some better local minimum that we can't get to because when we go
in that direction, everything gets much worse before it starts to get
better.

When I suggest that one solution to a problem is to give up the goal of
solving it, I am not being serious. I'm just saying that as a way of
bringing to attention the instant objection most people would feel to
actually giving it up. "But if I gave up wanting peace, justice, equality,
fairness, compassion, and all the rest, I might as well give up living,
too!" Then, of course, I would turn the conversation in a different
direction, until the person found himself/herself objecting by saying :"But
if I give up smashing the unjust, ridiculing selfish snobs, hating
evil-doers, and shaming oppressers, I might as well give up all hope of
anything getting better -- and give up living, too." Either way the person
loses.

Any attempt on my part to suggest one direction of change in particular will
only arouse the opposition, all the reasons for which that change would make
matters worse. What's necessary, I think, is to use methods of directing
attention to help a person become aware not just of one set of ideas or a
different opposing set, but of the conflict itself, the self-contradiction.

There is literally no way in which one person can reach inside another and
cause any particular change of organization to happen. It can't be done by
force or guile. It can't be done at all. Reorganization is like digestion;
nobody else can do it for you. I might be able to make your life so painful
that you start to reorganize, but once you do I have no way to steer the
reorganization in the direction I want it to go. And I can't erase your
memory of what I did to you.

Through all this I've been talking to myself more than anyone. What we need
is a way to handle people like the shooter. But the more we talk about
changing people, the clearer it becomes that we can change only ourselves. I
think the solution has to be in the form of changing how we ourselves deal
with people who trouble us because they are in so much trouble themselves.

The question, as it seems to be morphing, is not how to reform or forestall
crazy shooters (or bad theorists), but how to reform the way all of us try
to deal with crazy shooters and shooters-to-be. If what we just naturally do
is increasing the problems the crazies are facing, we will just naturally
get exactly the opposite of the result we want.

People are not going to stop having serious problems that could lead to
extreme attempts to solve them. But I think it possible, in principle, for
the rest of us to become more aware of their problems and to start trying to
find out what they want, and to finds ways of helping them get it without
their descending into what looks like madness to the rest of us.

Best,

Bill P.

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

[Bob_Hintz]

bob hintz 12-20-12

When a person enters a restaurant, is that a disturbance to the waiter, cook, owner, etc? What might we call such an event? Is a restaurant like a path to the water hole? If no one enters and is willing to pay for a meal, the restaurant and the people who provide the services will disappear from that place. Might their entering be considered an opportunity to achieve a reference that none of the participants could achieve or control without the cooperation of the other persons sharing the space. It would be pretty difficult for the cook to do the waiter’s activity and the cooking activity and neither of them has anything to do if there are no customers.

Maybe I should specify that a PCT perspective almost never examines how various persons might benefit from working together and how they go about fitting their control outputs to achieve control of variables that are beyond any individual’s control. Even slaves must understand what variable a master wants them to control and a master can only kill a slave who does not understand if there is no means of communication and he is unwilling to teach/learn some method. I would suggest that communication requires that an observer examines the output of the other for clues about what that other is perceiving and valuing so that their output makes sense (reduces uncertainty ala Martin’s description in another topic). All output has some message value if an observer is seeking to understand the other. Some output has almost nothing but message value such as verbal language behavior which can only make a difference to other people who hear and understand the language. If I have a good idea of what you are controlling, I can more easily avoid disturbing you, but I can also actively contribute to your ability to control your variables, i. e., I can pass the salt to you because I value the relationship that I perceive between you and me and I want to send that message as well as the salt.

I believe a social PCT perspective would be very useful and different from an individual PCT perspective.

bob

···

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)–

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is “going after” ideas or

people who advocate things you don’t like?

KM: The exchange between Bill and Rick in the “Assassins” thread about whether
there are any effective ways of inducing change in the perceptions that

other people are trying to control reminds me of my dissatisfaction with the

way that social-influence processes have sometimes been described by PCT

theorists.

RM: And this reminds me of how odd it is for us to be thinking of how

PCT can provide more effective ways to do social influence. For my

part, I have never been particularly interested in finding more

effective ways of inducing changes in other people. There are several

reasons for this.

First, finding effective ways to do social influence does not seem

very different to me from finding more effective ways to arbitrarily

control other people. Looking for an effective way to get people to

agree with me about gun control or information theory in PCT or

whatever (when they don’t already agree) seems to me a lot like

finding an effective way to control their behavior, is it not? I’m

trying to find an effective way to get them to do what they currently

don’t want to do (vote for strict gun control laws, stop wasting time

on information theory and start doing PCT). And PCT teaches me that

arbitrary control is not a good way to deal with people. It’s just

going to lead to more conflict. There is, in fact, no effective way to

arbitrarily influence other people. I argue for my point of view, not

in the hopes of effectively influencing people to change their mind

but, rather, to keep the arguments in favor of my position alive so

that when (and if) people are ready to change they will know where to

go. That’s why I say that my methods have been effective; those

methods have kept ideas (like oxygen, plate tectonics, anti-slavery)

alive until the people who opposed those ideas eventually died off and

people willing to accept the other point of view were born.

Second, if it were really possible to develop more effective ways to

change people’s minds (influence them socially) then other people

could also use them on you to adopt their ideas just as you could use

them on them. So what one ultimately believes about, say, gun control

would depend, not on the quality of the arguments or on data but on

who got to who first with their effective social influence

methodologies. Fortunately, I don’t think such methodologies exist

(although there are certainly effective social influence methods that

work in the short run – advertisers know all about them already).

Third, we already know how to effectively do social influence; by

training our kids to follow what are considered the agreed on rules

in society. To the extent that people end up controlling for following

those rules then we can very effectively influence (control) each

other;. The examples are endless: we move aside on a stairway to let

faster people go by, pay the waiter when handed the check, get change

when we pay more than the amount of the check, help make dinner when

asked, say “Hello” when we answer the phone, etc etc. This is all

control by disturbance, of course; you pay the check, for example,

only if you are controlling for having paid for your meal and the

check is a disturbance that is corrected by paying, etc.

So I guess I think seeking more effective ways to influence people is

not a project I would sign up for. Seeking ways to present arguments

more politely might be nice but I think that’s something we could

learn more about from Miss Manners(or a Kindergarten teacher) than

from PCT;-)

Best

Rick

---

I think it may have been Tom Bourbon years ago who asserted that

what happens when people interact is that they provide disturbances for each

other. Rick’s preferred method of “going after” people seems like a textbook

example of providing disturbances to others in order to change the

perceptions that they control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent

behavior or that of other onlookers.

To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create for

others has never struck me as particularly satisfactory. To anyone not

versed in PCT, this theory of influence might even seem counter-intuitive.

Does making life harder for other people by creating disturbances for them

really get them to do what you want them to do? Granted, you can threaten

other people and thus try to coerce them, and coercion will definitely

involve creating big disturbances for variables they are trying to control,

but it’s more likely to succeed as a negative kind of influence—getting them

to stop doing whatever they’re doing—rather than a positive

influence—getting them to go along with what you’re telling them to do. And

if you want instead to influence people without coercing them, how does

making big disturbances for them help?

From a PCT point of view, the disturbance theory of influence doesn’t seem

very satisfactory either. PCT suggests that people deal with disturbances to

variables they are controlling by counteracting the effects of the

disturbances in order to keep their own perceptions under control. Rick, in

the recent “information theory” thread, has been at some pains to

demonstrate that “information” about disturbances never even plays a role in

the control process. If negative-feedback control has the effect of

neutralizing the impact of disturbances on a person’s perceptions, how can

disturbances be said to have any influence on that person’s behavior at all?

Furthermore, it’s easy to demonstrate with PCT how two persons can get

locked into a positive-feedback spiral of conflict by providing disturbances

for each other—something which we’ve often seen happening on CSGnet.

It seems like we need some fresh thinking about social influence from a PCT

point of view. Looking around us, it’s clear that people are in fact capable

of influencing each other, usually without any need to resort to coercion.

From a sociologist’s point of view, mutual influence is one of the most

important phenomena of social life. I’d like to suggest an alternative way

that we can influence other people: not by creating disturbances for them—in

effect introducing variation and unpredictability into their physical

environment—but by controlling our own perceptions so as to reduce or

eliminate the effects of disturbances in some part of the physical

environment that we share with the people we are trying to influence—thus

stabilizing that shared environment and making it easier for them to control

the perceptions that we would like them to try to control.

This idea was implicit in the earlier thread that I started about feedback

paths. I was trying to describe how the physical impacts on socially shared

environments of our own efforts to maintain perceptual control can have an

influence other people who are also using those environments. Perhaps I can

best clarify what I’m trying to say earlier by drawing a distinction between

the feedback paths that I was talking about and feedback functions, because

the two concepts can easily be confused.

A “feedback function,” as I understand it, is the set of physical processes

and causal connections by which the effects of the physical actions of the

control agent are transmitted through the environment to have an impact on

the controlled environmental variable, when a control system is in active

operation. A “feedback path,” as I would like to define it, is a potential

set of physical processes and causal connections—a possible path through the

physical environment—that a feedback function might take, whether or not a

control system is in active operation.

It might help for me to give a concrete example of a feedback path. When I

go walking in the restored tall-grass prairie plots near my Iowa home, I

frequently see paths across the fields in which the grass has evidently been

beaten down by the deer that are plentiful in those areas. Once the paths

are established, it’s evident that the deer habitually use the same paths

over and over to get where they’re going, because one can often see deer

tracks in the narrow strips of mud and dirt along the bottoms of these

v-shaped notches in the tall grass. It isn’t just deer who use these paths.

One can also see tracks of other animals along the bottoms of the paths, and

if my companions and I want to cut across a field ourselves, it’s convenient

for us to take a deer path, because wading through the tall grass can be

quite a chore if you set out to break your own trail.

From a PCT point of view, these deer paths offer potential feedback paths

for controlling the perception of making one’s way across a field of tall

grass. By beating down the paths, the deer have removed on a semi-permanent

basis the potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses that

can get taller than a person’s head. Of course, nothing compels either a

person or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but it’s a

whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out on a

new track. I’d describe these paths as “feedback paths of least resistance,”

which then become part of an active feedback function when an animal

actually uses a deer path to get across a field.

My argument here is that the deer who have established these local regions

of comparative stability in a shared environment have—without really

intending to in this case—influenced other members of their herd, as well as

other animals, to use the same paths, simply because they offer the most

practical (or disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged creatures

to get through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can make

intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially

shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other people’s

behavior, as they perceive it.

For example, when we write an article or a book, or even a post a message on

CSGnet, our intention is to influence possible readers to share the ideas

and arguments that we want to convey—in other words, for them to control

perceptions similar to those that we ourselves are controlling, as we make

artful arrangements of arbitrary symbols appear on computer screens in front

of us. These arrangements of words on screens may constitute regions of

semi-permanent stability in a shared physical environment, because, in the

case of CSGnet for instance, the magic of the Internet can make

corresponding arrangements of symbols appear on screens in front of some

undetermined number of other people in many other parts of the world.

Moreover, CSGnet messages are logged, so that others can return to them and

read them again and again if they wish.

Now, I’ll concede that there’s no guarantee that our readers will control

the same set of perceptions upon reading our words that we were controlling

as we wrote them. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that some readers

will “misunderstand” or “misinterpret” (from our own point of view) our

messages, something that we also see demonstrated on a daily basis in this

forum. Because each person has a uniquely constructed perceptual hierarchy,

and because our only possible connections with others are through our shared

physical environments, any perfect sharing of perceptions seems virtually

impossible.

But the art in writing is to create “feedback paths of least resistance” for

others, arrangements of words so free of unintended disturbances—in the form

of unclear statements or unintended connotations—that the perceptions we

intended to convey are precisely the ones that readers are most likely to

experience as they read. When we succeed, our words can have influence.

I could say a lot more about how the establishment of feedback paths of

least resistance not only allows social influence to take place but also

might provide the mechanism leading to the broad patterns of cultural

similarity we observe in people’s everyday habits of behavior. However, this

post has gotten too long already, and I can already anticipate some

objections: by arguing that regions of stability in shared environments

provide the channels for influence from one person to another, is it

possible that I am becoming a Gibsonian, or else that I have once again

succumbed to the behavioral illusion? So I’ll stop here and see what others

make of this idea.

Season’s greetings to everyone!

Kent

On Dec 19, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900) –

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is “going after” ideas or

people who advocate things you don’t like?

RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to effect

change.

Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven’t thought

of any other way. If you’re convinced there is no other way but

confrontation, ridicule, name-calling, and hatred, then of course you will

not be looking for one. But I would assume that you have tried other ways,

and the only reason they’re not being used is that they haven’t worked,

either.

One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about

their customary ways is that it’s hard to persuade them that there is any

need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing. When a person has been

trying for a long time to achieve some goal, I always wonder first why the

person hasn’t succeeded so far, when there are so many different ways to

correct almost any error – including giving up the goal.

In most instances where I’ve been invited to demonstrate MOL with a

volunteer (who of course doesn’t expect anything dramatic to happen),

exploring even small difficulties has quickly led to recognizing much larger

ones on which the person has basically given up because a solution seems

impossible. Reorganization has apparently failed.

Persisting a bit leads to a different conclusion: the person has come to a

point at which any change that improves some aspect of life makes one or

more others worse. This leaves the person stuck with one unsuccessful way of

trying to make things better, sort of a mixture of several opposing ways,

like a good cop trying to play the bad cop at the same time. In short, what

keeps the person from making any progress is a conflict. The person is in a

“local minimum” of error, in that any move in any direction makes the total

error larger. In a way I guess that’s where we all end up, but sometimes

there is some better local minimum that we can’t get to because when we go

in that direction, everything gets much worse before it starts to get

better.

When I suggest that one solution to a problem is to give up the goal of

solving it, I am not being serious. I’m just saying that as a way of

bringing to attention the instant objection most people would feel to

actually giving it up. "But if I gave up wanting peace, justice, equality,

fairness, compassion, and all the rest, I might as well give up living,

too!" Then, of course, I would turn the conversation in a different

direction, until the person found himself/herself objecting by saying :"But

if I give up smashing the unjust, ridiculing selfish snobs, hating

evil-doers, and shaming oppressers, I might as well give up all hope of

anything getting better – and give up living, too." Either way the person

loses.

Any attempt on my part to suggest one direction of change in particular will

only arouse the opposition, all the reasons for which that change would make

matters worse. What’s necessary, I think, is to use methods of directing

attention to help a person become aware not just of one set of ideas or a

different opposing set, but of the conflict itself, the self-contradiction.

There is literally no way in which one person can reach inside another and

cause any particular change of organization to happen. It can’t be done by

force or guile. It can’t be done at all. Reorganization is like digestion;

nobody else can do it for you. I might be able to make your life so painful

that you start to reorganize, but once you do I have no way to steer the

reorganization in the direction I want it to go. And I can’t erase your

memory of what I did to you.

Through all this I’ve been talking to myself more than anyone. What we need

is a way to handle people like the shooter. But the more we talk about

changing people, the clearer it becomes that we can change only ourselves. I

think the solution has to be in the form of changing how we ourselves deal

with people who trouble us because they are in so much trouble themselves.

The question, as it seems to be morphing, is not how to reform or forestall

crazy shooters (or bad theorists), but how to reform the way all of us try

to deal with crazy shooters and shooters-to-be. If what we just naturally do

is increasing the problems the crazies are facing, we will just naturally

get exactly the opposite of the result we want.

People are not going to stop having serious problems that could lead to

extreme attempts to solve them. But I think it possible, in principle, for

the rest of us to become more aware of their problems and to start trying to

find out what they want, and to finds ways of helping them get it without

their descending into what looks like madness to the rest of us.

Best,

Bill P.

–

Richard S. Marken PhD

rsmarken@gmail.com

www.mindreadings.com

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.20.1208 MST)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)]

RM: And this reminds me of how odd it is for us to be thinking of how
PCT can provide more effective ways to do social influence. For my
part, I have never been particularly interested in finding more
effective ways of inducing changes in other people. There are several
reasons for this.

First, finding effective ways to do social influence does not seem
very different to me from finding more effective ways to arbitrarily
control other people. Looking for an effective way to get people to
agree with me about gun control or information theory in PCT or
whatever (when they don't already agree) seems to me a lot like
finding an effective way to control their behavior, is it not?

BP: Yes, these are all good points in this post and we need to find answers to them.

First, there's the "please pass the salt" problem, which is arbitrary control of another person's behavior (but just the behavior -- no permanent changes in controlled variables or reference levels needed and only temporary changes in the visible actions). I think we agree that this is commonplace and harmless, if it's really just a request that can be refused.

RM: I'm trying to find an effective way to get them to do what they currently
don't want to do (vote for strict gun control laws, stop wasting time
on information theory and start doing PCT). And PCT teaches me that
arbitrary control is not a good way to deal with people.

BP: Now we're talking about longer-lasting or permanent changes. I had to think about this for a while. What I found was that I assume that the only reason a person might be against gun control laws or in favor of promoting information theory is that they haven't resolved all the conflicts and perhaps haven't really looked into their own higher-order reasons. In other words, I assume that what I want is correct, natural, and totally justified, while what they want is an aberration. I don't need therapy, but they do.

Interesting. Do I really want to step back and see both sides from a detached point of view? No, I do not. What if I discovered that I was wrong? We can't have that.

Ah, another difference between "pass the salt" and "ban the guns." In the salt case, it is unlikely that the other person has any reason not to pass the salt. But I know some people who might say to me, "Your doctor said to cut down on the salt. Do you like high blood pressure?" So they might refuse for that reason, and consider that they're taking care of me.

So is there a problem only if there is already some kind of conflict?

RM: It's just
going to lead to more conflict. There is, in fact, no effective way to
arbitrarily influence other people.

BP: Yes, you got there before I did. But as it happens, we both want to arbitrarily influence other people, don't we? Well, let's put that a different way. We both would like people to change what they perceive, want, and do IF AND ONLY IF that would make them more capable and happier, and in addition IFF it fits the way we think things ought to be.

The therapist's dilemma. Here is this poor mixed-up burglar, made incompetent and prone to getting arrested because his internal conflicts cripple his control systems. Do I as a therapist just want to help him remove his conflicts, so he will not be crippled any more and thus become a really competent, confident, and happy burglar? Or do I also hope he will see that being a burglar works against his own self-interest so he can now find something else to do? Of course I would hope he will stop being a burglar, wouldn't you?

Well, the basic oath of loyalty to PCT says "No organism ever produces a behavior except for the purpose of making its experiences more like the way it wants them to be." So no therapist does therapy except to produce the results he wants to see. Can I stop wanting to cure burglars? I suppose I could, except for the case in which the place burgled is my house, or the house of someone I care about. Or the house of a poor starving widow, or newlyweds, or a kid at Christmas -- unfortunately there are too many people I can empathise with, so I'm stuck with wanting to cure the burglar. Actually, he would be happier, too -- the pay for burglary is lousy and the retirement communities have bars on the windows. On the inside.

RM: I argue for my point of view, not
in the hopes of effectively influencing people to change their mind
but, rather, to keep the arguments in favor of my position alive so
that when (and if) people are ready to change they will know where to
go. That's why I say that my methods have been effective; those
methods have kept ideas (like oxygen, plate tectonics, anti-slavery)
alive until the people who opposed those ideas eventually died off and
people willing to accept the other point of view were born.

BP: Who was it who said that progress in science or society is just a matter of waiting for the right funerals?

This is the free-market approach: lay out your wares and wait for people to select themselves as customers. I guess I have used this approach, too -- when it comes right down to selling PCT in a proactive way, I always shrink from the challenge. Why can't people just see that PCT works better? I can't go grab them out of their homes and push them protesting to the marketplace. I can't pry their minds open with a can-opener. Sometimes I'd like to try, but it wouldn't work.

RM: Second, if it were really possible to develop more effective ways to
change people's minds (influence them socially) then other people
could also use them on you to adopt their ideas just as you could use
them on them. So what one ultimately believes about, say, gun control
would depend, not on the quality of the arguments or on data but on
who got to who first with their effective social influence
methodologies. Fortunately, I don't think such methodologies exist
(although there are certainly effective social influence methods that
work in the short run -- advertisers know all about them already).

BP: That's a persuasive point. It makes clear that we don't want some high-efficiency irresistible way to change people's minds. That would lead instantly to misuse. And it wouldn't lead to an appreciation of truth any more than teaching by using reinforcements would.

I seem to be coming around more toward your view. You say that about all we can do is to keep working on the theory and the experiments that define it. Either this will attract a lot of people, or it won't. We aren't going to persuade the unwilling, and we don't need to persuade the willing. PCT speaks for itself, directly to the learner. To paraphrase Tim Carey, we have to figure out "how to teach PCT without getting in the way."

RM: So I guess I think seeking more effective ways to influence people is
not a project I would sign up for. Seeking ways to present arguments
more politely might be nice but I think that's something we could
learn more about from Miss Manners(or a Kindergarten teacher) than
from PCT;-)

BP: This gets us to the basics: "Just the facts, ma'am." Without fear or favor. If we can figure out what the facts are, which we can to some extent. How dull.

Now my pendulum begins to swing back. Every good story, every story that people want to hear more of, has conflict in it. A little spice, a little excitement. Good guys and bad guys. A dash of justified outrage. Truth overcoming falsehood. Not too much like Saturday Night Wrestling, but just a little of the flavor. Maybe what we need is a really good self-righteous villian, like Galileo's Pope Urban VIII.

Of course we don't want to overdose on the spices. Too much spice leaves a bad taste that's hard to get rid of.

Well, I never did come to an ending point, so I declare that this is it.

Best,

Bill P.

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1330)]

bob hintz 12-20-12

BH: When a person enters a restaurant, is that a disturbance to the waiter,
cook, owner, etc?

RM: It depends on what these people are controlling for. A disturbance
is something that influences the state of a controlled variable. So
if any of these people are controlling variables to which a person
entering is a disturbance then the person entering is a disturbance.
If no one is controlling a perception that is disturbed by a person
entering, then the person entering is not a disturbance; it's just a
person entering the restaurant.

BH: Might their entering be considered an opportunity to achieve a
reference that none of the participants could achieve or control without the
cooperation of the other persons sharing the space.

RM: OF course. If the person entering the restaurant controlling for
food and a nice ambiance then it will take the cooperative efforts of
everyone involved in the restaurant to make this happen.

BH: Maybe I should specify that a PCT perspective almost never examines how
various persons might benefit from working together and how they go about
fitting their control outputs to achieve control of variables that are
beyond any individual's control.

RM: Actually, Tom Bourbon did some studies showing how two interacting
people cooperated to control a variable that neither could control on
their own. So there has been some work on cooperative control but not
nearly enough.

BH: I believe a social PCT perspective would be very useful and different from
an individual PCT perspective.

RM: I think it would be very useful, indeed, but different from an
individual PCT perspective only inasmuch as more than one individual
involved. The social aspects of PCT, as evidenced in Tom's work,
Bill's CROWD program and Kent's simulations, are readily derived from
putting several individual control models together, in the right way,
of course.

Best

Rick

···

bob

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Richard Marken <rsmarken@gmail.com> wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)]

> Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)--
>
> Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)
> Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)
>
> BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is "going after" ideas
> or
> people who advocate things you don't like?

>KM: The exchange between Bill and Rick in the "Assassins" thread about
> whether
> there are any effective ways of inducing change in the perceptions that
> other people are trying to control reminds me of my dissatisfaction with
> the
> way that social-influence processes have sometimes been described by PCT
> theorists.

RM: And this reminds me of how odd it is for us to be thinking of how
PCT can provide more effective ways to do social influence. For my
part, I have never been particularly interested in finding more
effective ways of inducing changes in other people. There are several
reasons for this.

First, finding effective ways to do social influence does not seem
very different to me from finding more effective ways to arbitrarily
control other people. Looking for an effective way to get people to
agree with me about gun control or information theory in PCT or
whatever (when they don't already agree) seems to me a lot like
finding an effective way to control their behavior, is it not? I'm
trying to find an effective way to get them to do what they currently
don't want to do (vote for strict gun control laws, stop wasting time
on information theory and start doing PCT). And PCT teaches me that
arbitrary control is not a good way to deal with people. It's just
going to lead to more conflict. There is, in fact, no effective way to
arbitrarily influence other people. I argue for my point of view, not
in the hopes of effectively influencing people to change their mind
but, rather, to keep the arguments in favor of my position alive so
that when (and if) people are ready to change they will know where to
go. That's why I say that my methods have been effective; those
methods have kept ideas (like oxygen, plate tectonics, anti-slavery)
alive until the people who opposed those ideas eventually died off and
people willing to accept the other point of view were born.

Second, if it were really possible to develop more effective ways to
change people's minds (influence them socially) then other people
could also use them on you to adopt their ideas just as you could use
them on them. So what one ultimately believes about, say, gun control
would depend, not on the quality of the arguments or on data but on
who got to who first with their effective social influence
methodologies. Fortunately, I don't think such methodologies exist
(although there are certainly effective social influence methods that
work in the short run -- advertisers know all about them already).

Third, we already know how to effectively do social influence; by
training our kids to follow what are considered the agreed on rules
in society. To the extent that people end up controlling for following
those rules then we can very effectively influence (control) each
other;. The examples are endless: we move aside on a stairway to let
faster people go by, pay the waiter when handed the check, get change
when we pay more than the amount of the check, help make dinner when
asked, say "Hello" when we answer the phone, etc etc. This is all
control by disturbance, of course; you pay the check, for example,
only if you are controlling for having paid for your meal and the
check is a disturbance that is corrected by paying, etc.

So I guess I think seeking more effective ways to influence people is
not a project I would sign up for. Seeking ways to present arguments
more politely might be nice but I think that's something we could
learn more about from Miss Manners(or a Kindergarten teacher) than
from PCT;-)

Best

Rick
----
> I think it may have been Tom Bourbon years ago who asserted that
> what happens when people interact is that they provide disturbances for
> each
> other. Rick's preferred method of "going after" people seems like a
> textbook
> example of providing disturbances to others in order to change the
> perceptions that they control, thus perhaps influencing their apparent
> behavior or that of other onlookers.
>
> To describe social influence as resulting from disturbances we create
> for
> others has never struck me as particularly satisfactory. To anyone not
> versed in PCT, this theory of influence might even seem
> counter-intuitive.
> Does making life harder for other people by creating disturbances for
> them
> really get them to do what you want them to do? Granted, you can
> threaten
> other people and thus try to coerce them, and coercion will definitely
> involve creating big disturbances for variables they are trying to
> control,
> but it's more likely to succeed as a negative kind of influence�getting
> them
> to stop doing whatever they're doing�rather than a positive
> influence�getting them to go along with what you're telling them to do.
> And
> if you want instead to influence people without coercing them, how does
> making big disturbances for them help?
>
> From a PCT point of view, the disturbance theory of influence doesn't
> seem
> very satisfactory either. PCT suggests that people deal with
> disturbances to
> variables they are controlling by counteracting the effects of the
> disturbances in order to keep their own perceptions under control. Rick,
> in
> the recent "information theory" thread, has been at some pains to
> demonstrate that "information" about disturbances never even plays a
> role in
> the control process. If negative-feedback control has the effect of
> neutralizing the impact of disturbances on a person's perceptions, how
> can
> disturbances be said to have any influence on that person's behavior at
> all?
> Furthermore, it's easy to demonstrate with PCT how two persons can get
> locked into a positive-feedback spiral of conflict by providing
> disturbances
> for each other�something which we've often seen happening on CSGnet.
>
> It seems like we need some fresh thinking about social influence from a
> PCT
> point of view. Looking around us, it's clear that people are in fact
> capable
> of influencing each other, usually without any need to resort to
> coercion.
> From a sociologist's point of view, mutual influence is one of the most
> important phenomena of social life. I'd like to suggest an alternative
> way
> that we can influence other people: not by creating disturbances for
> them�in
> effect introducing variation and unpredictability into their physical
> environment�but by controlling our own perceptions so as to reduce or
> eliminate the effects of disturbances in some part of the physical
> environment that we share with the people we are trying to
> influence�thus
> stabilizing that shared environment and making it easier for them to
> control
> the perceptions that we would like them to try to control.
>
> This idea was implicit in the earlier thread that I started about
> feedback
> paths. I was trying to describe how the physical impacts on socially
> shared
> environments of our own efforts to maintain perceptual control can have
> an
> influence other people who are also using those environments. Perhaps I
> can
> best clarify what I'm trying to say earlier by drawing a distinction
> between
> the feedback paths that I was talking about and feedback functions,
> because
> the two concepts can easily be confused.
>
> A "feedback function," as I understand it, is the set of physical
> processes
> and causal connections by which the effects of the physical actions of
> the
> control agent are transmitted through the environment to have an impact
> on
> the controlled environmental variable, when a control system is in
> active
> operation. A "feedback path," as I would like to define it, is a
> potential
> set of physical processes and causal connections�a possible path through
> the
> physical environment�that a feedback function might take, whether or not
> a
> control system is in active operation.
>
> It might help for me to give a concrete example of a feedback path. When
> I
> go walking in the restored tall-grass prairie plots near my Iowa home, I
> frequently see paths across the fields in which the grass has evidently
> been
> beaten down by the deer that are plentiful in those areas. Once the
> paths
> are established, it's evident that the deer habitually use the same
> paths
> over and over to get where they're going, because one can often see deer
> tracks in the narrow strips of mud and dirt along the bottoms of these
> v-shaped notches in the tall grass. It isn't just deer who use these
> paths.
> One can also see tracks of other animals along the bottoms of the paths,
> and
> if my companions and I want to cut across a field ourselves, it's
> convenient
> for us to take a deer path, because wading through the tall grass can be
> quite a chore if you set out to break your own trail.
>
> From a PCT point of view, these deer paths offer potential feedback
> paths
> for controlling the perception of making one's way across a field of
> tall
> grass. By beating down the paths, the deer have removed on a
> semi-permanent
> basis the potential disturbances to travel that are offered by grasses
> that
> can get taller than a person's head. Of course, nothing compels either a
> person or a deer to use an established path in crossing a field, but
> it's a
> whole lot easier and more expeditious way to go than trying to set out
> on a
> new track. I'd describe these paths as "feedback paths of least
> resistance,"
> which then become part of an active feedback function when an animal
> actually uses a deer path to get across a field.
>
> My argument here is that the deer who have established these local
> regions
> of comparative stability in a shared environment have�without really
> intending to in this case�influenced other members of their herd, as
> well as
> other animals, to use the same paths, simply because they offer the most
> practical (or disturbance-free) way for large two- or four-legged
> creatures
> to get through the high grass. I would argue, further, that people can
> make
> intentional use of similar processes of stabilizing portions of socially
> shared environments in order to have an influence on changing other
> people's
> behavior, as they perceive it.
>
> For example, when we write an article or a book, or even a post a
> message on
> CSGnet, our intention is to influence possible readers to share the
> ideas
> and arguments that we want to convey�in other words, for them to control
> perceptions similar to those that we ourselves are controlling, as we
> make
> artful arrangements of arbitrary symbols appear on computer screens in
> front
> of us. These arrangements of words on screens may constitute regions of
> semi-permanent stability in a shared physical environment, because, in
> the
> case of CSGnet for instance, the magic of the Internet can make
> corresponding arrangements of symbols appear on screens in front of some
> undetermined number of other people in many other parts of the world.
> Moreover, CSGnet messages are logged, so that others can return to them
> and
> read them again and again if they wish.
>
> Now, I'll concede that there's no guarantee that our readers will
> control
> the same set of perceptions upon reading our words that we were
> controlling
> as we wrote them. In fact, it's pretty much guaranteed that some readers
> will "misunderstand" or "misinterpret" (from our own point of view) our
> messages, something that we also see demonstrated on a daily basis in
> this
> forum. Because each person has a uniquely constructed perceptual
> hierarchy,
> and because our only possible connections with others are through our
> shared
> physical environments, any perfect sharing of perceptions seems
> virtually
> impossible.
>
> But the art in writing is to create "feedback paths of least resistance"
> for
> others, arrangements of words so free of unintended disturbances�in the
> form
> of unclear statements or unintended connotations�that the perceptions we
> intended to convey are precisely the ones that readers are most likely
> to
> experience as they read. When we succeed, our words can have influence.
>
> I could say a lot more about how the establishment of feedback paths of
> least resistance not only allows social influence to take place but also
> might provide the mechanism leading to the broad patterns of cultural
> similarity we observe in people's everyday habits of behavior. However,
> this
> post has gotten too long already, and I can already anticipate some
> objections: by arguing that regions of stability in shared environments
> provide the channels for influence from one person to another, is it
> possible that I am becoming a Gibsonian, or else that I have once again
> succumbed to the behavioral illusion? So I'll stop here and see what
> others
> make of this idea.
>
> Season's greetings to everyone!
>
> Kent
>
> On Dec 19, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Bill Powers wrote:
>
> [From Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)]
>
> Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900) --
>
> BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is "going after" ideas
> or
> people who advocate things you don't like?
> RM: I think it has been very effective because it is the only way to
> effect
> change.
>
>
> Your statement is useful, because it could explain why you haven't
> thought
> of any other way. If you're convinced there is no other way but
> confrontation, ridicule, name-calling, and hatred, then of course you
> will
> not be looking for one. But I would assume that you have tried other
> ways,
> and the only reason they're not being used is that they haven't worked,
> either.
>
> One of the great difficulties in getting people to change anything about
> their customary ways is that it's hard to persuade them that there is
> any
> need to do so, or any gain to be had from changing. When a person has
> been
> trying for a long time to achieve some goal, I always wonder first why
> the
> person hasn't succeeded so far, when there are so many different ways to
> correct almost any error -- including giving up the goal.
>
> In most instances where I've been invited to demonstrate MOL with a
> volunteer (who of course doesn't expect anything dramatic to happen),
> exploring even small difficulties has quickly led to recognizing much
> larger
> ones on which the person has basically given up because a solution seems
> impossible. Reorganization has apparently failed.
>
> Persisting a bit leads to a different conclusion: the person has come to
> a
> point at which any change that improves some aspect of life makes one or
> more others worse. This leaves the person stuck with one unsuccessful
> way of
> trying to make things better, sort of a mixture of several opposing
> ways,
> like a good cop trying to play the bad cop at the same time. In short,
> what
> keeps the person from making any progress is a conflict. The person is
> in a
> "local minimum" of error, in that any move in any direction makes the
> total
> error larger. In a way I guess that's where we all end up, but sometimes
> there is some better local minimum that we can't get to because when we
> go
> in that direction, everything gets much worse before it starts to get
> better.
>
> When I suggest that one solution to a problem is to give up the goal of
> solving it, I am not being serious. I'm just saying that as a way of
> bringing to attention the instant objection most people would feel to
> actually giving it up. "But if I gave up wanting peace, justice,
> equality,
> fairness, compassion, and all the rest, I might as well give up living,
> too!" Then, of course, I would turn the conversation in a different
> direction, until the person found himself/herself objecting by saying
> :"But
> if I give up smashing the unjust, ridiculing selfish snobs, hating
> evil-doers, and shaming oppressers, I might as well give up all hope of
> anything getting better -- and give up living, too." Either way the
> person
> loses.
>
> Any attempt on my part to suggest one direction of change in particular
> will
> only arouse the opposition, all the reasons for which that change would
> make
> matters worse. What's necessary, I think, is to use methods of directing
> attention to help a person become aware not just of one set of ideas or
> a
> different opposing set, but of the conflict itself, the
> self-contradiction.
>
> There is literally no way in which one person can reach inside another
> and
> cause any particular change of organization to happen. It can't be done
> by
> force or guile. It can't be done at all. Reorganization is like
> digestion;
> nobody else can do it for you. I might be able to make your life so
> painful
> that you start to reorganize, but once you do I have no way to steer the
> reorganization in the direction I want it to go. And I can't erase your
> memory of what I did to you.
>
> Through all this I've been talking to myself more than anyone. What we
> need
> is a way to handle people like the shooter. But the more we talk about
> changing people, the clearer it becomes that we can change only
> ourselves. I
> think the solution has to be in the form of changing how we ourselves
> deal
> with people who trouble us because they are in so much trouble
> themselves.
>
> The question, as it seems to be morphing, is not how to reform or
> forestall
> crazy shooters (or bad theorists), but how to reform the way all of us
> try
> to deal with crazy shooters and shooters-to-be. If what we just
> naturally do
> is increasing the problems the crazies are facing, we will just
> naturally
> get exactly the opposite of the result we want.
>
> People are not going to stop having serious problems that could lead to
> extreme attempts to solve them. But I think it possible, in principle,
> for
> the rest of us to become more aware of their problems and to start
> trying to
> find out what they want, and to finds ways of helping them get it
> without
> their descending into what looks like madness to the rest of us.
>
> Best,
>
> Bill P.
>
>

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

[Bill_Powers1]

From Bill Powers (2012.12.20.1400 MSRT)]

bob hintz 12-20-12

When a person enters a restaurant, is that a disturbance to the waiter, cook, owner, etc?

BP: I think of a disturbance as anything other than the action of the control system itself that can cause a change in a controlled variable. A distubance that acts in the same direction as the current action of the control system allows that system to relax its own efforts, which opposes the effect of the disturbance just as much as the change of action following a contrary disturbance does.

BH: Maybe I should specify that a PCT perspective almost never examines how various persons might benefit from working together and how they go about fitting their control outputs to achieve control of variables that are beyond any individual's control.

BP: Not by itself, it doesn't. But PCT provides definitions of all the major components -- signals and functions -- in a control system, so anyone who wants to can apply it to social situations (as Kent McClelland, Clark McPhail, Charles Tucker, and some other sociologists have been doing for a long time.).

BH: I believe a social PCT perspective would be very useful and different from an individual PCT perspective.

BP: I agree. Not only "would" but "is." One of the differences that has been discussed in this forum for a long time is that societies are not control systems -- that is, there are no social perceptual input functions, perceptual and reference signals, comparators, and output functions, though one can easily construct metaphors as if such things exist in the air between people. A social system, for any individual, consists of other individuals and general concepts in the mind of each observer that pertain to social variables. Kent McClelland has done some nice modeling work analyzing conflicts between people as social phenomena, defining conditions under which there can be cooperative control even when there is some degree of conflict among the participants. Years ago, Tom Bourbon devised a two-person tracking experiment that produced good data. I worked with Clark McPhail and Chuck Tucker in the 1980s to model crowd behavior (McPhail's specialty), and those two actually tested the model against real crowds of students rushing around a quadrangle at the U. of Illinois. Shoot, I've forgotten the name of the clever grad student who participated in doing those experiments. Schweingruber? And of course we can't forget Phil Runkel, the late organizational psychologist of some note who wrote several very thick books on the subject of PCT and its applications to social phenomena and research.

Outside our small contingent of sociologists, there hasn't been much done with PCT in relation to sociology. But that's beginning to happen.

Best,

Bill P.

···

At 01:25 PM 12/20/2012 -0600, you wrote:

[Kent]

[From Kent McClelland (2012.12.21.1130 CET)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)
Bill Powers (2012.12.20.1208 MST)

This conversation has taken a turn that I think confuses PCT analysis with PCT ethics.

from the perspective of PCT ethics, it may be that "doing social influence" is questionable (though I doubt it), and arbitrary control is probably not ethically a good idea (though deciding in any particular instance whether an instance of interpersonal control is arbitrary would seem to require a fine-grained analysis of the goal structures of both controller and controllee that is pretty tricky given our present knowledge of perceptual hierarchies). But from the perspective of PCT analysis, whether these things are ethically OK or not is entirely beside the point.

Social influence and arbitrary control happen all the time in the social world we live in. They are facts of human social environments, just as surely as gravity is a fact of the physical environment. They are social phenomena to which individuals must adjust as they make their way through their environments, just as the unyieldingness of metals or the density of air are physical phenomena to which individuals must adjust.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a world in which social influence didn't occur. Without social influence I wouldn't have a language, a family, a warm place to live, the wonderful variety of food I consume, an education, a computer, you name it. I would be living a pretty meager existence now, if I had even managed to survive this long.

I suppose you could attempt to live a hermit-like life in which you tried to refrain entirely from any acts of social influence or arbitrary control, but as soon as you start interacting with other people you open yourself to the possibility of influencing them. It's a common human "failing" and I expect that PCT gurus are as prone to it as anyone else. I know for a fact that Bill and Rick have been enormously influential in their writings, web posts, talks, etc., because I number myself among those who have been profoundly influenced, and I'm grateful for it.

That your work hasn't been more widely influential may have had something to do with your apparent disdain for finding better ways of influencing others, ways like good salesmanship�providing others with something that may be useful to them by tailoring your message to their interests and ways of thinking, that is, working hard to see the world from the other person's point of view and modifying your message to fit (sounds like a PCT virtue to me). I say apparent disdain, because I know that you both have worked hard to make your writings clear and concise, so that they can serve as feedback paths of least resistance for others, in my terminology.

I take it that the job of the PCT analyst is to understand and explain facts as they exist, without regard to whether they are good or bad from an ethical point of view. I have chosen to study conflict from a PCT perspective not because I think it's a good thing, or necessarily a bad thing, but because conflict occurs with great frequency in social life, and I want to know how and why. If my work of analysis eventually influences people to be able to handle their conflicts better, that's all to the good, but not the ultimate goal of my academic work.

Without trying to influence you unduly or arbitrarily, I would hope in the future to see you consider more carefully and less judgmentally the social world in which you live and get real about what is happening out there and about how a PCT analysis can help all of us understand it, maybe even control it, a little better.

Sorry about the rant, but I'm with Bob Hintz that everybody engaged in the PCT conversation, and not just sociologists, could benefit from taking the social and cultural embeddedness of the individual more seriously.

Happy winter solstice to everyone!

Best,

Kent

···

On Dec 20, 2012, at 7:35 PM, Richard Marken wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.19.1030 CET)--

Bill Powers (2012.12.18.1311 MST)
Rick Marken (2012.12.17.0900)

BP: I guess my question would be, how effective is "going after" ideas or
people who advocate things you don't like?

KM: The exchange between Bill and Rick in the "Assassins" thread about whether
there are any effective ways of inducing change in the perceptions that
other people are trying to control reminds me of my dissatisfaction with the
way that social-influence processes have sometimes been described by PCT
theorists.

RM: And this reminds me of how odd it is for us to be thinking of how
PCT can provide more effective ways to do social influence. For my
part, I have never been particularly interested in finding more
effective ways of inducing changes in other people. There are several
reasons for this.

First, finding effective ways to do social influence does not seem
very different to me from finding more effective ways to arbitrarily
control other people. Looking for an effective way to get people to
agree with me about gun control or information theory in PCT or
whatever (when they don't already agree) seems to me a lot like
finding an effective way to control their behavior, is it not? I'm
trying to find an effective way to get them to do what they currently
don't want to do (vote for strict gun control laws, stop wasting time
on information theory and start doing PCT). And PCT teaches me that
arbitrary control is not a good way to deal with people. It's just
going to lead to more conflict. There is, in fact, no effective way to
arbitrarily influence other people. I argue for my point of view, not
in the hopes of effectively influencing people to change their mind
but, rather, to keep the arguments in favor of my position alive so
that when (and if) people are ready to change they will know where to
go. That's why I say that my methods have been effective; those
methods have kept ideas (like oxygen, plate tectonics, anti-slavery)
alive until the people who opposed those ideas eventually died off and
people willing to accept the other point of view were born.

Second, if it were really possible to develop more effective ways to
change people's minds (influence them socially) then other people
could also use them on you to adopt their ideas just as you could use
them on them. So what one ultimately believes about, say, gun control
would depend, not on the quality of the arguments or on data but on
who got to who first with their effective social influence
methodologies. Fortunately, I don't think such methodologies exist
(although there are certainly effective social influence methods that
work in the short run -- advertisers know all about them already).

Third, we already know how to effectively do social influence; by
training our kids to follow what are considered the agreed on rules
in society. To the extent that people end up controlling for following
those rules then we can very effectively influence (control) each
other;. The examples are endless: we move aside on a stairway to let
faster people go by, pay the waiter when handed the check, get change
when we pay more than the amount of the check, help make dinner when
asked, say "Hello" when we answer the phone, etc etc. This is all
control by disturbance, of course; you pay the check, for example,
only if you are controlling for having paid for your meal and the
check is a disturbance that is corrected by paying, etc.

So I guess I think seeking more effective ways to influence people is
not a project I would sign up for. Seeking ways to present arguments
more politely might be nice but I think that's something we could
learn more about from Miss Manners(or a Kindergarten teacher) than
from PCT;-)

Best

Rick

On Dec 20, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2012.12.20.1208 MST)]

Rick Marken (2012.12.20.1030)]

RM: And this reminds me of how odd it is for us to be thinking of how
PCT can provide more effective ways to do social influence. For my
part, I have never been particularly interested in finding more
effective ways of inducing changes in other people. There are several
reasons for this.

First, finding effective ways to do social influence does not seem
very different to me from finding more effective ways to arbitrarily
control other people. Looking for an effective way to get people to
agree with me about gun control or information theory in PCT or
whatever (when they don't already agree) seems to me a lot like
finding an effective way to control their behavior, is it not?

BP: Yes, these are all good points in this post and we need to find answers to them.

First, there's the "please pass the salt" problem, which is arbitrary control of another person's behavior (but just the behavior -- no permanent changes in controlled variables or reference levels needed and only temporary changes in the visible actions). I think we agree that this is commonplace and harmless, if it's really just a request that can be refused.

RM: I'm trying to find an effective way to get them to do what they currently
don't want to do (vote for strict gun control laws, stop wasting time
on information theory and start doing PCT). And PCT teaches me that
arbitrary control is not a good way to deal with people.

BP: Now we're talking about longer-lasting or permanent changes. I had to think about this for a while. What I found was that I assume that the only reason a person might be against gun control laws or in favor of promoting information theory is that they haven't resolved all the conflicts and perhaps haven't really looked into their own higher-order reasons. In other words, I assume that what I want is correct, natural, and totally justified, while what they want is an aberration. I don't need therapy, but they do.

Interesting. Do I really want to step back and see both sides from a detached point of view? No, I do not. What if I discovered that I was wrong? We can't have that.

Ah, another difference between "pass the salt" and "ban the guns." In the salt case, it is unlikely that the other person has any reason not to pass the salt. But I know some people who might say to me, "Your doctor said to cut down on the salt. Do you like high blood pressure?" So they might refuse for that reason, and consider that they're taking care of me.

So is there a problem only if there is already some kind of conflict?

RM: It's just
going to lead to more conflict. There is, in fact, no effective way to
arbitrarily influence other people.

BP: Yes, you got there before I did. But as it happens, we both want to arbitrarily influence other people, don't we? Well, let's put that a different way. We both would like people to change what they perceive, want, and do IF AND ONLY IF that would make them more capable and happier, and in addition IFF it fits the way we think things ought to be.

The therapist's dilemma. Here is this poor mixed-up burglar, made incompetent and prone to getting arrested because his internal conflicts cripple his control systems. Do I as a therapist just want to help him remove his conflicts, so he will not be crippled any more and thus become a really competent, confident, and happy burglar? Or do I also hope he will see that being a burglar works against his own self-interest so he can now find something else to do? Of course I would hope he will stop being a burglar, wouldn't you?

Well, the basic oath of loyalty to PCT says "No organism ever produces a behavior except for the purpose of making its experiences more like the way it wants them to be." So no therapist does therapy except to produce the results he wants to see. Can I stop wanting to cure burglars? I suppose I could, except for the case in which the place burgled is my house, or the house of someone I care about. Or the house of a poor starving widow, or newlyweds, or a kid at Christmas -- unfortunately there are too many people I can empathise with, so I'm stuck with wanting to cure the burglar. Actually, he would be happier, too -- the pay for burglary is lousy and the retirement communities have bars on the windows. On the inside.

RM: I argue for my point of view, not
in the hopes of effectively influencing people to change their mind
but, rather, to keep the arguments in favor of my position alive so
that when (and if) people are ready to change they will know where to
go. That's why I say that my methods have been effective; those
methods have kept ideas (like oxygen, plate tectonics, anti-slavery)
alive until the people who opposed those ideas eventually died off and
people willing to accept the other point of view were born.

BP: Who was it who said that progress in science or society is just a matter of waiting for the right funerals?

This is the free-market approach: lay out your wares and wait for people to select themselves as customers. I guess I have used this approach, too -- when it comes right down to selling PCT in a proactive way, I always shrink from the challenge. Why can't people just see that PCT works better? I can't go grab them out of their homes and push them protesting to the marketplace. I can't pry their minds open with a can-opener. Sometimes I'd like to try, but it wouldn't work.

RM: Second, if it were really possible to develop more effective ways to
change people's minds (influence them socially) then other people
could also use them on you to adopt their ideas just as you could use
them on them. So what one ultimately believes about, say, gun control
would depend, not on the quality of the arguments or on data but on
who got to who first with their effective social influence
methodologies. Fortunately, I don't think such methodologies exist
(although there are certainly effective social influence methods that
work in the short run -- advertisers know all about them already).

BP: That's a persuasive point. It makes clear that we don't want some high-efficiency irresistible way to change people's minds. That would lead instantly to misuse. And it wouldn't lead to an appreciation of truth any more than teaching by using reinforcements would.

I seem to be coming around more toward your view. You say that about all we can do is to keep working on the theory and the experiments that define it. Either this will attract a lot of people, or it won't. We aren't going to persuade the unwilling, and we don't need to persuade the willing. PCT speaks for itself, directly to the learner. To paraphrase Tim Carey, we have to figure out "how to teach PCT without getting in the way."

RM: So I guess I think seeking more effective ways to influence people is
not a project I would sign up for. Seeking ways to present arguments
more politely might be nice but I think that's something we could
learn more about from Miss Manners(or a Kindergarten teacher) than
from PCT;-)

BP: This gets us to the basics: "Just the facts, ma'am." Without fear or favor. If we can figure out what the facts are, which we can to some extent. How dull.

Now my pendulum begins to swing back. Every good story, every story that people want to hear more of, has conflict in it. A little spice, a little excitement. Good guys and bad guys. A dash of justified outrage. Truth overcoming falsehood. Not too much like Saturday Night Wrestling, but just a little of the flavor. Maybe what we need is a really good self-righteous villian, like Galileo's Pope Urban VIII.

Of course we don't want to overdose on the spices. Too much spice leaves a bad taste that's hard to get rid of.

Well, I never did come to an ending point, so I declare that this is it.

Best,

Bill P.

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2012.12.21.2045)]

Kent McClelland (2012.12.21.1130 CET)--

KM: Social influence and arbitrary control happen all the time in the social world we live in. They are facts of human social environments

RM: Completely agree. Who said otherwise?

KM: Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a world in which social influence didn't occur. Without social influence I wouldn't have a language, a family, a warm place to live, the wonderful variety of food I consume, an education, a computer, you name it. I would be living a pretty meager existence now, if I had even managed to survive this long.

RM: I have made this same point when I argue economics with
libertarians. Cooperation (cooperative control) is what makes an
economy (and a civilized society, for that matter) work.

KM: I suppose you could attempt to live a hermit-like life in which you tried to refrain entirely from any acts of social influence or arbitrary control, but as soon as you start interacting with other people you open yourself to the possibility of influencing them. It's a common human "failing" and I expect that PCT gurus are as prone to it as anyone else. I know for a fact that Bill and Rick have been enormously influential in their writings, web posts, talks, etc., because I number myself among those who have been profoundly influenced, and I'm grateful for it.

RM: Social influence (really, social control) works great when it is
done cooperatively -- by mutual agreement. Social control is never a
"human failing" because controlling is what people so. It's
dysfunctional, however, when it is done non-cooperatively.

KM: That your work hasn't been more widely influential may have had something to do with your apparent disdain for finding better ways of influencing others, ways like good salesmanship�providing others with something that may be useful to them by tailoring your message to their interests and ways of thinking, that is, working hard to see the world from the other person's point of view and modifying your message to fit (sounds like a PCT virtue to me). I say apparent disdain, because I know that you both have worked hard to make your writings clear and concise, so that they can serve as feedback paths of least resistance for others, in my terminology.

RM: My work hasn't been particularly influential because it is a big
disturbance to the variables controlled by the people who are my
audience (research psychologists). I understand why they reject it
(though not all do) and I am sympathetic.

I am not interested in "selling" PCT because selling involves doing
things I don't care to do:like lying to psychologists by telling then
that PCT will fix problems they don't really have or saying that PCT
is what it's not. The latter is the typical recommendation I get when,
for example, I argue that someone's cherished theory -- like
information theory -- is not really consistent with PCT. The
"influence" technique that has been recommended to me in these cases
is to not be such a prick and just agree that information theory,
reinforcement theory, conventional research methods, or whatever are
perfectly consistent with PCT. That's not influence; that's just lying
-- from my perspective, anyway. Obviously, the people who think those
theories are consistent with PCT think otherwise. C'est la vie.

KM: I take it that the job of the PCT analyst is to understand and explain facts as they exist, without regard to whether they are good or bad from an ethical point of view. I have chosen to study conflict from a PCT perspective not because I think it's a good thing, or necessarily a bad thing, but because conflict occurs with great frequency in social life, and I want to know how and why. If my work of analysis eventually influences people to be able to handle their conflicts better, that's all to the good, but not the ultimate goal of my academic work.

RM: I love it that you are studying conflict; I did a little work on
that too but didn't carry it anywhere near as far as I should. And I
would also like to see a lot more work done on cooperation. Your last
sentence is an excellent statement of exactly how I feel about my own
work on PCT; so excellent that I'll paraphrase it:

"If my research and analysis work eventually influences people to be
able to do better research on control systems that's all to the good,
but not the ultimate goal of my academic work".

KM: Without trying to influence you unduly or arbitrarily, I would hope in the future to see you consider more carefully and less judgmentally the social world in which you live and get real about what is happening out there and about how a PCT analysis can help all of us understand it, maybe even control it, a little better.

RM: I don't quite understand what you mean here. But if you think I
have no interest in influencing people then I certainly didn't make
myself clear. I very much want to influence people; but I also know
that I can't control what people believe. I can only influence those
who are in a position to be influenced; I don't expect to be able to
influence people who don't want to be influenced. "A person convinced
against their will is of the same opinion still". I try to influence
people by presenting the data, models and application to real behavior
of PCT as honestly and accurately as I can. Perhaps my sin, from your
perspective, is that I don't try other "techniques" for presenting PCT
that would be more successful. But I assure you that I am willing to
try other techniques as long as they don't require doing what I see as
lying.

KM: Sorry about the rant, but I'm with Bob Hintz that everybody engaged in the PCT conversation, and not just sociologists, could benefit from taking the social and cultural embeddedness of the individual more seriously.

RM: I have no problem at all with the rant; I have no objection to
people trying to influence me. What I do have a problem with is your
and Bob Hintz's persistent claims that I (and possibly Bill too) don't
take the social and cultural embeddedness of the individual seriously.
I take it very seriously. I'm very interested in interpersonal (ie.
social) cooperation and conflict, I'm very interested in how economies
work (as I've said, I consider an economy -- a collection of
producer/consumers -- as control writ large). I would love to know
what I could do to convince you two that I take the social and
cultural embeddedness of the individual seriously.

Happy winter solstice to everyone!

RM: Same to you. It's all uphill (length of day-wise) from here;-)

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com