[From Bill Powers (940216.0920 MST)]
Bill Leach (940215.2057 EST) --
The sort of thing that I am refering to is a bias or tendancy
that is present independent of environmental circumstances
(though within individuals the strenght of such bias likely
will be influenced by environment and experience).
The concepts of biases and tendencies come from the statistical
approach to understanding behavior. The way these ideas arise is
through observing that some people show the actual behavior
toward which there is said to be a bias or tendency, while other
people, often most people, do not. When this sort of spotty
observation occurs, there are two ways to interpret it.
One is to say that under specific circumstances which we do not
yet understand, a person organized in a particular way will
behave in a particular way. A person who is not organized in that
way will not show the behavior in question no matter what the
circumstances, while one who is organized in that way will always
show the behavior when the circumstances are right. The only
reason for which we can't predict whether the bias or tendency
will be expressed in the susceptible people is that we don't
understand what the required circumstances are, or what the
particular inner organization is that gives rise to the behavior.
When we do understand, we will not speak of biases and
tendencies; we will simply predict what will happen.
The other way to interpret the meaning is to say that ALL people
share the bias or tendency, but that it is expressed in a visible
way only in some of them at a given time. Under this
interpretation, the manifestation of the bias or tendency is just
a statistical matter. There's no reason why it should be observed
on one occasion and not on another -- that's simply a matter of
chance, whether the bias or tendency happened to predominate
enough, among all other competing biases and tendencies, to be
expressed in observable ways.
The second interpretation is the most common one. It allows a
scientist to convert an observation that holds true only for some
people some of the time into a statement that holds true for all
people all of the time. In a group of 100 test subjects, for
example, 60 subjects may be found to prefer apple juice to orange
juice in a forced-choice test. Replicating this experiment
several times with new groups of 100 people, we find that 59, 69,
55, and 58 people prefer apple juice to orange juice. The mean of
the observations is 60.2 people per group of 100. Assuming that
statistical significance is reached, the conclusion typically
drawn is not that 60 percent of people prefer apple juice and 40
prefer orange juice, but that "test subjects prefer apple juice."
Why is this conversion made? I think it is because the
experimenter wants to discover something universal about people,
but is not willing to admit that the experiment shows that there
is nothing universal about this preference. What the experimenter
does is to infer a bias or tendency in the test subjects -- in
ALL of them -- which happens to be expressed, at any given time,
in only 60 percent of them. So he can make a definite statement
about what "subjects prefer" even though, in any number of runs
of the experiment, 40 percent of them show no such preference and
in fact show the opposite preference.
To say that one person prefers apple juice or orange juice is to
report an observation: the person selected one or the other. But
if a person sometimes selects orange juice and sometimes apple
juice, there is actually no valid generalization about that
person that can be made, even if that person selects apple juice
60 percent of the time. All that can be said is that the person
selects aj 60 percent of the time and oj 40 percent of the time.
To go any farther, to say that there is something inside the
person called a bias or a tendency toward selecting orange juice,
is to invoke a dormitive principle: a cause defined to have the
effect that is observed, and lacking any other property. This is
how garbage facts are born.
The problem with garbage facts is that they give a false sense of
understanding something about individual people. They are useful
to manufacturers of fruit juice, who deal with populations only,
but as a basis for understanding how people are internally
organized they are worthless. More important, the false sense of
understanding satisfies the urge to understand, so further
questions, such as why a person prefers orange juice on a given
occasion, are simply not asked. What's the point of asking why a
person prefers orange juice, when we know that people prefer
apple juice?
You say:
An example that I think might be "safe" to mention is the idea
that the human creature is a "social creature." I maintain
that there IS an inherent "wiring" that causes humans to be
social in nature.
If there is such an inherent wiring, then we should observe that
on any measure of sociality, every person will show that
characteristic on every occasion, with no exceptions. This is
clearly not true. Whatever you use as a measure of sociality,
some people will measure positive and some negative, with most
showing up in the vague middle ground. Finding that "most" people
measure positive means nothing, for if there is a wired-in
sociality, the measure must always be positive, in everyone. The
only way to deny this conclusion is to start making excuses:
well, that tendency or bias is wired in, but in some people whom
we can't pick out in advance, under some circumstances which we
can't define, individuals may behave oppositely because of
conflicting biases and tendencies which we can't name. Or --
nearly as popular -- that tendency is always there in every
person, but our measuring instruments are not sensitive enough to
pick it up.
It would be more supportable to say that human beings behave in
the way we call "social" when they are interacting with other
human beings. There are facts about mutual dependency that hold
true no matter how people are organized internally; a baby
doesn't have to have any social instincts to get hungry and
experiment with methods for getting fed (which vary widely
according to the parents' experiences and theories of child-
rearing).
In fact, people sometimes behave socially, sometimes
antisocially, and sometime independently of social
considerations. Most people (but not all) spend the bulk of their
time interacting with others, so naturally the kinds of behavior
we see "tend" to be called "social." But in explaining their
behavior, invoking "social tendencies" or "biases" or "genes"
tells us nothing useful about the individuals. The questions we
need to ask about individual organization are at a deeper level.
We need to ask what capacities the person must have in order to
show the behaviors we observe. Those capacities can't be
explained simply by naming them after the consequences we see as
social interactions.
The aim of PCT is to make statements about individual
organization that are ALWAYS true of EVERY person in ALL
circumstances. We can say that ALL behavior is aimed at
controlling SOME perception, and elaborate that statement into
more specific models applying to specific behaviors. This
approach allows us to avoid talking about statistical tendencies
or biases, because it entails the proposal of facts which must be
universally true if the model is correct. In a tracking
experiment, we don't say that some people tend to move the handle
oppositely to disturbances on most trials. We say that EVERY
person who learns to track ALWAYS does this, not only in every
experiment, but at every moment during every experiment. While
there is still noise to contend with, we are not talking about
60-40 preferences, but about facts that are 10 standard
deviations above the noise, for each tested individual on every
trial of a task.
This experience with simple cases encourages us to demand similar
properties of any explanation of individual human behavior. Even
when we guess wrong, the guess is stated so that it must be
matched very closely by observation if it is to be deemed right.
That enables us to see very easily where we have guessed wrong.
Counterexamples, in PCT, must be taken seriously because they
should never happen.
ยทยทยท
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Daryl Neergard (940216.0659) -- "neergaar@cs.utk.edu"
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Best,
Bill P.