So start thinking about examples of collective control that don’t involve conflict. Oh, right, you deny that this is possible.
Kent denies this. He probably knows his model of collective control better than you do.
It is evident from your words (such as those quoted above) that you are constraining the word “model” to computer implementations, and that for you “model” is a computer implementation of the PCT model of a behavioral situation. Because there are no other computer simulations of collective control, for you the words “Kent’s model” refer to Kent’s demo programs in the early 1990s.
There’s an important distinction between the PCT model of a behavioral situation and a computer implementation that simulates that situation by replicating data measured in it.
A revision of your statement would say
I think Kent’s simulations of conflict are excellent, but I think he takes the wrong message from them. The message he takes from his simulations is that conflict can produce “social stability” in the form of a variable being kept at a virtual reference level. The message I take from his simulations is that conflict can be very destructive to the individuals involved.
You are saying that Kent arrived at his understanding of collective control by generalizing from his computer demos of conflict. I believe Kent arrived at his understanding of collective control by many years of observing social phenomena with ‘control theory glasses’ and that his computer demos were a first demonstration of principles.
Kent has acknowledged that conflict is a limiting case involving very small populations (two, three, or few). Even within that constraint, his demonstrations of principle in the early 1990s are extremely artificial. Without intervention of higher levels of control conflict does result in ‘stabilization’ of the contested variable at an intermediate level from which in each contestant there persists an error signal and a control output affecting the variable. But higher levels of control are never absent in living control systems. In arm wrestling or a tug of war higher level control of participation in the game overrides other systems (no doubt quit archaic evolutionary inheritances) which on meeting such resistance would ordinarily control alternative variables instead, as illustrated by the video I posted of W at the locked door in Shanghai.
But from that beginning 30 years ago Kent has gone on to develop how PCT can model more complex social arrangements and interactions. Working with him, Martin has shown logical and mathematical considerations that must be taken into account for building computer simulations of more complex examples. However, no one with the necessary skills has been interested in building simulations and demos of such complexity.
Kent has affirmed that he lacks computer skills and the knowledge and training in the design and execution of psychological experiments.
In addition, the requirements for experiment wrt social interactions are very different from the requirements wrt monadic control phenomena such as tracking and pursuit. This fact you have ignored. Instead, you simplify social phenomena to a form that is comfortably within the scope of simulation programming that is most familiar to you. This simplification is evident in your perceiving every example of collective control as a conflict and in your substitution of region (i.e. proximity) in place of esteem in Labov’s findings.
No one will fault you if you are uninterested in tackling this. But if to justify this to yourself you need to deny the existence of social phenomena don’t expect very many people to believe you. Maybe naive extremes of ‘libertarians’ and ‘rational agent’ economists will find it convincing.