Collective Control Process

(Last Update: 10/21/21)

If you have already reviewed almost everything else offered on the Optima Bowling Coach site, the collective control process will be where the tire meets the road, where we walk the talk, as they say. What I am presenting here is brand new but will sometimes remind you of what you read previously. Helping you finish building the holistic bowling coach system I promised when we first started.

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Coach-Athlete Relation as a “Collective Control Process”

What I have focused on here will enable us to resolve the pedagogical relation problem introduced on the previous page. And help us move the teacher student relationship discussion beyond the adult-child relation. I now understand the teacher-student relation, or more generally, teaching and learning as a "collective control process," thanks to Kent Alan McClelland. Please search for and read the original article to grasp the author's full intent. I have only included the base points for our intentions. Herein we will learn that the coach athlete relation is, in reality, a collective control process, at any age moving through topic, teaching, knowing, understanding, and creating at any maturity level. To help you focus, what is presented here is collective control through closed-loop negative-feedback control system units, as individual perceptual control hierarchies intersecting with physical objects in a shared environment. 


Environmental Stability and Collective Control

By Kent McClelland

Presented, June 2011, at the Conference of The Control Systems Group, in Boulder, Colorado

Environmental Stability and Collective Control

[The] story of progress in human living conditions is an old and familiar one, often mythologized as the triumph of human domination over nature. With a story so familiar, it seems as if there is nothing new to say about it. My contention in this article, however, is that a careful examination of the control processes that have allowed human populations to achieve and maintain this remarkable stabilization of living conditions can shed new light on the social processes that have allowed humans to exert such pervasive control. By focusing on human control of the material environment, I will argue, we can gain insights into the social world, including social phenomena that have been among the central concerns of social theorists, such as social order and conflict, social power, social inequalities and their reproduction, deviance and social control, and social change.

To follow my argument, however, readers must first pay close attention to the systemic features of control processes and, in particular, negative feedback loops, which are an essential component of these processes. 

A CLOSED-LOOP MODEL OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR 

William T. Powers in… His landmark 1973 book, Behavior: The Control of Perception… presented the details of two important developments… closed-loop systems from the point of view of the behaving organism, and a hierarchical model of the organization of the brain. Perhaps his most important insight, however, was… that we can better understand the behavior of humans and other organisms by focusing on control of perception than on control of actions, and that behavior is the control of perceptions. [T]hat closed-loop systems in the human brain work by controlling the sensory input stream instead of physical actions… amounts to a radical critique of conventional approaches to human psychology, which still today are based on open-loop models of behavior that specify one-way causal links across the “reflex arc” from perceptual stimuli, as input, to cognitive processing, as an intervening variable, and then to physical actions, as output.

By looking at… the… model of a closed-loop system… we can see how Powers reconceptualized negative-feedback systems from the point of view of the behaving organism. First, his model makes a clear distinction between the system and its environment… The system… comprises the central nervous system of the organism, including the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves embedded in muscles and sense organs. The local environment, as he defines it, includes both the remainder of the physical body enclosing the central nervous system and the physical environment in which the body is situated.

Powers took another important step in reconceptualizing closed-loop models by specifying that perceptual signals, not reference signals, constitute the system’s input. The input function… occurs in the sensory organs that send perceptual signals to the brain. The reference signal… is not the system’s input; rather, it originates from within the organism… derived from “recordings of past perceptual signals,” which are retrieved from memory locations in the brain. In his model, then, organisms set their own reference standards for control based on their previous experiences, rather than having them imposed from the outside, like the reference standards for servomechanisms. By locating the origin of reference signals within the organism, Powers portrays organisms as intentional actors, whose purposeful actions aim at controlling their own environments in order to bring their perceptions of those environments into line with internally set reference conditions.

[With] the hierarchical model… organization of the brain… Powers proposed that the neural networks of the brain form interconnected strata or layers, arranged hierarchically, with networks of neurons in the lower layers of the hierarchy processing the perceptual signals from sense organs into relatively simple perceptions, while higher layers combine these simple perceptions into increasingly more complex perceptions, as perceptual data are transferred upwards in the hierarchy.

The eleven orders of perception described by Powers can be grouped into three broad categories. The first six orders, which Powers calls intensities, sensations, configurations, transitions, events, and relationships, are physical perceptions. He argues that perceptions at these lower levels of the hierarchy bring the physical world into perceptual focus and allow for physical movement and the manipulation of physical objects. Perceptual orders seven through nine, which he calls categories, sequences, and programs, are rational and conceptual in nature, and these higher-middle perceptual levels of the hierarchy are used in rational contemplation and decision-making, as well as in carrying out rational algorithms. The two highest orders of perception… are socio-emotional in nature. The tenth order of perception Powers calls principles, and perceptions at this level allow for choice among programs of action. In sociological terms, principle-level perceptions would include norms and values, as well as the characteristic traits of persons or groups… the eleventh and highest order of perception, system concepts, and in sociological terms he is referring to the identities of persons or groups, as well as other socially and culturally defined abstract entities like nations, races, or bodies of knowledge. 

Child-development researcher Frans Plooij... To describe the relationships among levels of the perceptual hierarchy… offers the image of nested concentric spheres, like layers of an onion. In this depiction, the outside layers comprise the physical levels of the hierarchy, which maintain close contact with the outside world, while control systems in inner layers of the hierarchy combine these physical perceptions into rational patterns, and neural networks in the innermost layers of the hierarchy construct more abstract socio-emotional perceptions.

Interestingly, recent research into brain morphology suggests that the physical layout of connections between the neurons of the human brain conforms approximately to a spherically concentric pattern.

The architecture of the perceptual hierarchy means that… basic somatic perceptions with their emotional coloration can become components of higher-order perceptions… and the theory thus implies that cognitive perceptions at every level of the control hierarchy, from sensations on up, may be built to some extent on this foundation of emotional feelings. Sensations, for example, such as smells, colors, or musical tones, may sometimes have an emotional valence for individuals. Higher-level perceptions, such as the rational concepts for social roles and social behaviors, like mother or ignore, also contain an implicitly affective component, as the research of sociologist David Heise and his associates has shown.  I have described the highest orders of perception, principles and systems concepts, as socio-emotional, because these perceptions of value and identity can take on even stronger emotional colorations than lower-order perceptions.

The experience of emotion, according to Powers… ordinarily includes not only a feeling component but also a “cognitive component” or, in other words, a goal. If the felt emotion is anger, for instance, the associated goal may be to do harm to another person, or if the emotion is fear, the goal may be to run away as quickly as possible. The physiological changes responsible for the feeling state—the elevated heartbeat and breathing rate caused by an increase in adrenaline—are likely to be much the same for anger or fear; what is different is the cognitive goal. Powers goes on to argue that the emotion is felt most keenly when this goal is blocked. Thus, anger boils over when the individual wants to punch someone in the nose, but can't because that someone is his boss, and fear intensifies when there is nowhere to run. Emotions as experienced, then, combine a physiological feeling state with a blocked action.

COLLECTIVE CONTROL AND SOCIAL INTERACTION 

The PCT [perceptual control theory] control-system model… shows how organisms can control certain aspects of their physical environments by varying their physical actions to counteract the effects of forces that might disturb those aspects of their environments. An important thing to remember… is that perceptual input provides the organism’s only source of information about what is happening in the environment. Furthermore… the variable actually stabilized in a control loop is the perceptual signal, which, when the control system is operating normally, is kept nearly equal to the reference signal. Because perception and physical reality are not necessarily identical, and because perception is in some sense no more than a neural representation of selected aspects of physical reality, Powers emphasizes that human organisms can only control their perceptions, not necessarily the underlying physical reality.

Nevertheless, human attempts to control perceptions must have some real physical effects for the model to work, and the fact that humans have been successful in controlling their environments… indicates that the process of feedback control works pretty well, whether or not the physical things we control are precisely what we perceive them to be.

To understand the sociological implications of this model of human agency as control of perceptions, we need to take a fresh look at the relationship between human actors and their environments.

If human behavior is control, and the actions of every control unit in the brain require a feedback loop through the external environment, then to understand human behavior we need to analyze those feedback loops.

Suppose feedback loops were visible, like gossamer threads stretching from an individual's body through objects in the environment and back to the individual's sense organs. Each perception that the individual is controlling at a given moment, that is, anything in the individual's current perceptual world that would prove disturbing if arbitrarily changed or anything the individual is currently using to perform an action, would be the target of a feedback loop.

Of course, some of the perceptions controlled by individuals are abstract ideas—higher-order perceptions, in control-theory terms. According to PCT, such abstract perceptions are constructed from simpler, more concrete perceptions, and they get their meaning from examples in the individual's memory of physical objects that come to symbolize the more abstract ideas. People can control these more abstract perceptions by acting in the physical world on some selection of the symbolic objects that symbolize the abstract perceptions.

Furthermore, the physical actions involved in the control of a perception tend to stabilize some portions of the environment through which the feedback loops pass.

Thus, control of perceptions involves feedback loops through the physical environment, and the actions of a feedback control system can have observable effects on the stability of certain portions of the environment through which the feedback loops pass. 

The fact that our control of perceptions can stabilize variables in the physical environment provides a useful focus for analysis when we turn from considering the actions of isolated individuals to talking about social interactions. If the feedback loops emanating from the individuals who share an environment were all visible, we would often see feedback loops from two people or more intersecting at a variety of locations within that environment.

What does it mean when feedback loops from different individuals intersect in their shared environment? First, the intersection of feedback loops in the physical environment provides us with a plausible definition for social interaction from the PCT point of view. Whenever active feedback loops from two or more individuals intersect in the environment, we can say that social interaction has occurred. Second, if different parts of the environment intercept different numbers of feedback loops with different amounts of gain, and if the control of perceptions tends to stabilize the parts of the environment through which feedback loops pass, we should be able to observe that some parts of the environment are relatively more stable and less manipulable than others, because the feedback loops of a greater number of individuals or feedback loops with greater system gain have intersected in those physical locations. [W]hen two or more control units attempt to control the same variable in the same physical environment, their combined efforts result in environmental stabilization that is more tightly controlled than a single control unit could achieve individually. All else equal, the tightness of control varies with the sum of the system gain factors characterizing the control effort that each actor has contributed to the joint action. 

In sum, the more feedback loops passing through any controllable environmental feature, and thus, the more people who will be seriously disturbed if that feature changes, the more resistant to change it will be. 

When [a]... virtual reference level that emerges from a collective control process stabilizes the environmental variable at a compromise level different from the participants’ various preferences for that variable, each actor involved in the collective control process will experience perceptual errors and take action to bring the variable as perceived back into line with his or own individual reference conditions. But because the individually preferred reference conditions differ among the actors involved, no environmental solution is possible that will satisfy every participant. Thus, when participants disagree about the reference conditions to use, collective control processes inevitably produce some degree of conflict (depending on how sharp the differences are), as the people involved work at cross purposes, each trying to bring the variable into line with his or her own preferences, and their efforts tend to cancel each other out, leaving the controlled variable in a stable condition, but nevertheless one that is unsatisfactory from the point of view of every participant.

[With] different portions of the environment serving as targets for varying numbers and strengths of feedback loops… the collective control processes producing some of the intersections of feedback loops may be largely cooperative, because the actors sending feedback loops into those environmental locations have reference points for the jointly controlled environmental variable that are well aligned. In other cases, the intersections of feedback loops may be sites of conflict, where actors struggle to impose their own reference conditions on a contested environmental variable in the face of opposition from other interested parties.

[W]e might talk about hot and cold environmental stabilities, held in place by collective control processes that are either mostly conflictive or mostly cooperative. 

Whether the environmental stabilities are hot or cold, however, whenever certain variables in the environment are held in place by the joint actions of some collection of people all controlling their perceptions of those variables, anyone else sharing that environment can take advantage of these dependable stabilities for the control of other kinds of perceptions, whether or not they themselves make any efforts to hold the stabilities in place. Relatively fixed parts of the environment thus provide stable feedback paths for controlling many other perceptions that may be built upon that stability.

COLLECTIVELY CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLES  

From the perspective of PCT, all social processes by definition depend upon collective control. Hence, every social process results in stabilization of one or more physical variables in the shared environment of the participants in the social process. Different kinds of social processes stabilize different kinds of variables, of course, and the stabilization can take different forms depending on the variables stabilized. The variables stabilized can range from simple to complex within the hierarchy of physical variables.

By stabilization of a physical variable, I mean stabilization against disturbances, that is, reducing the extent of the fluctuation in a variable that would occur in the absence of the control process. Such stabilization can take the form of increasing the predictability, repetitiveness, or uniformity of the variable, or even the prevention or near elimination of certain types of fluctuation in the variable.

The social processes of collective control can stabilize many different kinds of physical variables. Some social processes result in construction and maintenance of a built and manufactured environment… Other social processes are involved in obtaining a predictable food supply. Yet other social processes impose predictability on the physical appearances… fashions of grooming and wearing apparel. Many rituals create uniformity in displays of emotion… Some work processes impose predictability… patterns of physical action of the workers. In whatever form it occurs, some kind of stabilization of the environment is the inevitable outcome of a collective control process.

Very often, the people engaged in a collective control process are intent upon stabilizing not physical variables, per se, but rather variables at one or more of the higher levels of the perceptual hierarchy, variables that by their nature are somewhat abstract. Religious… uniformity of beliefs or ethical values… which from the PCT perspective are principle-level perceptions… business… sales campaign… would be a program-level perception. Although abstract perceptions… don’t correspond to any single physical perception, to stabilize these perceptions the participants collectively must control a variety of lower-level physical perceptions, and their control of the lower-level perceptions will have an observable impact on their shared environment, as the corresponding physical variables are stabilized.

The physical evidence of their control of these lower-level perceptions provides crucial feedback for the participants themselves as they attempt to control their own higher-level perceptions, like the goal of perceiving unanimity of belief among the congregation or successful implementation of the sales campaign. And the physical stabilities emerging from these collective control processes can supply evidence to outside observers, as well, that the control process is taking place, provided that the outside observers have the necessary perceptual organization for detecting these more abstract stabilities.

Just as we can classify different kinds of physical stabilities that emerge from collective control processes, we can usefully classify social structural entities by the different kinds of physical stabilities that they are designed to produce. Business… the collective-control perspective is most immediately and obviously applicable to economic organizations. Governmental organizations… Police and military… Regulatory agencies… Legislatures… Healthcare organizations… Educational organizations… Religious organizations... The media. The list could go on and on, but all of these organizations work by collective control processes intended to insure the predictability and stability of the physical objects or patterns of action necessary to life as we know it.

Although the principles that I am presenting apply equally well to smaller scale and shorter-lived control processes, even to brief dyadic [Twofold, a group of two] interactions, the macro social processes that I will discuss in my additional examples can serve nicely to illustrate my arguments. Furthermore, pointing out how well PCT can apply to macro social processes will help to demonstrate the wide range and flexibility of the theory.

The stabilization of a shared environment emerging from social processes has many potential benefits for the participants. First of all, as noted above, the stability resulting from collective control processes tends to be tighter or more uniform than could be produced individually. Predictable stabilities in the environment also provide the individual with a platform for successfully controlling higher-level and more complex perceptions, as when predictable access to food and shelter allows the individual to concentrate on tasks like making money or doing scientific research, rather than feeding oneself and sheltering from the elements. Each of the types of environmental control that… have benefited humans collectively by making our lives more stable and comfortable, have emerged from our ancestors’ and our own collective control processes. However, collective control processes have often had drawbacks as well as benefits. I turn next to explaining some of these drawbacks and describing some additional consequences of the fact that collective control processes allow us to stabilize many variables in our environments.

CONSEQUENCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL STABILIZATION BY COLLECTIVE CONTROL 

The first important drawback of environmental stabilization by collective control processes… collective control is often accompanied by conflict. Unless the reference conditions used by all the participants in a control process are precisely aligned—something that is highly unlikely if thousands or millions of participants are involved—at least some of the participants will end up acting at cross purposes with each other in their attempts to control their own perceptions using their own reference values for the variable in question.

Even if some or all participants in a collective control process share precisely aligned reference values for controlling their own perceptions, the social process may be one that produces conflict. Competitive social processes like sports leagues or democratic political systems, for instance, produce environmental stability and conflict simultaneously.

A second commonly occurring drawback of collective control processes is what an economist might describe as “opportunity costs.” The stabilization of some parts of a shared environment for purposes of attaining collective goals may reduce the opportunities for people in that environment to pursue a range of other possible goals. Powers has described this problem as a matter of “degrees of freedom”. The control systems in the brain, he argues, can control many different perceptions at once, but physical limitations of the human body put an upper limit on the number of perceptions that can be controlled simultaneously at any given level of perception. He describes this limit as the degrees of freedom available to the actor. Controlling a higher-level perception often involves keeping the lower-level perceptions that contribute to that perception stabilized, and that stabilization may then preclude the control of other possible perceptions at the higher level.

In general, the environmental stabilization resulting from collective control facilitates some perceptions and activities while reducing the degrees of freedom for perceiving and doing other things.

The simultaneous enhancement and reduction of the degrees of freedom emerging from collective control can have a third major downside: social inequality. As increasingly large parts of the environment are stabilized in line with the needs and preferences of some groups, other groups may find their degrees of freedom considerably diminished.

The stabilization of our physical environment by collective control has yet a fourth downside. Stabilization comes at an energy-flow price. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the creation of order in some parts of the environment can only be accomplished by increasing the disorder in other parts, so that stabilizing the environment in one place means destabilizing it in another.

Because macro-scale collective control processes tend to stabilize environments in ways that generate conflict and reduce the degrees of freedom available to certain segments of a population, it frequently happens that individuals living in environments with hot stabilities find themselves unable to control perceptions that are important to them. By important perceptions, I am referring to a wide range of possibilities: from highly abstract perceptions, like feelings of personal success or a sense of self-worth or the perception of being surrounded by supportive friends, to much more concrete perceptions, like getting enough to eat and having a roof over one’s head. PCT predicts that inability to control important perceptions will initiate an internal process of reorganization of the individual’s control-system hierarchy.

Because individuals in environments that limit their degrees of freedom are likely to start reorganizing their control systems, and because reorganization often results in new ways of seeing and doing things, the macro-scale collective control processes that provide environmental standardization and stabilities, hot or cold, tend at the same time to provoke innovative behaviors. Moreover, when environments result in inequality or other hot stabilities, the segments of the population most limited in their degrees of freedom are the ones most likely to innovate. Whether such innovations are seen as problematic depends largely on the context. When observers from privileged positions see members of disadvantaged segments of the population finding innovative ways to control their perceptions, the observers are likely to regard the innovative behavior as deviant. Sociologists have long been familiar with the concept of innovative deviance, as, for instance, when individuals who are blocked from reaching culturally endorsed goals turn instead to criminal means. Innovative behavior in highly competitive environments that are culturally valued, such as science or the arts, is more likely to be regarded as evidence of creativity. Highly competitive environments are similar to other unequal environments, however, in that they tend to restrict the degrees of freedom of those who are not the winners of the competition, so that losers are often prevented from controlling perceptions that are important to them, which leads to reorganization of their control systems and increases the likelihood of innovative behavior.  

The process of reorganization of an individual’s perceptual control systems has, of course, an emotional dimension. When an individual loses control of important perceptions for any length of time, it feels bad. The inability to deal with disturbances or correct errors may be felt as frustration, pain, or depression, depending on how long it continues. If the source of the offending disturbance is obvious, the individual may feel anger or rage toward that source. An individual confronted with a stabilized environment that restricts his or her freedom and frustrates the achievement of important goals is likely to feel anger, and the individual may then act on that anger by turning to violent disruption or destruction of the environmental rigidities seen as causing the frustration. By disrupting the collective control processes maintaining stabilization, violence serves to destabilize an environment felt to be too confining. This analysis implies that stabilized environments with built-in inequalities, in which some segments of the population find their degrees of freedom severely restricted, are more likely than less stringently controlled environments be sites of violence. Of course, we can also predict from PCT that when violence disrupts those collective control processes, the response of individuals participating in the collective control processes will be to redouble their own control efforts, perhaps by turning to what sociologists ordinarily refer to as social control, such as sanctions or incarceration, which from the perspective of PCT can be defined as efforts to restrict available degrees of freedom even further for the segments of the population seen as offenders or criminals. When the same kind of conflict dynamic arises between countries, it can lead to violent reprisals and terrorism or open warfare. 

More broadly, my analysis suggests that virtually all kinds of environments stabilized by macro-scale collective control processes will be sites of chronically ongoing social change. Because each individual develops a unique organization of perceptual control systems, the environmental facts on the ground in highly controlled environments will never make room for every individual within those environments to control important perceptions satisfactorily. This inevitable lack of fit between individual and environment will always mean that some individual participants are experiencing negative emotions and engaged in reorganizing their control-system hierarchies. Thus, there is always a creative or destructive edge to macro-scale collective control processes, as some segments of a population are constantly reorganizing their perceptions and even striking out against the rigidities that they perceive as restricting their degrees of freedom. The stabilization of a social environment never can be fully settled.

Two other predictable processes also contribute to ongoing social change. As participants enter and exit collective control processes that stabilize a given environment, the virtual reference levels for these control processes continually change, if only by a very small amount in macro-scale control processes.

More rapid kinds of social change can occur when the reorganization of one individual’s perceptions results in a creative solution to a problem widely felt within a given segment of a population. Other individuals who observe the behavior of this individual may quickly pick up this new way of seeing and doing things, especially when their own perceptual hierarchies contain lower-level control systems similar to those of the creative individual, so that all that is necessary for them to imitate the solution is to “plug in” the new higher-level perceptual pattern that solves the problem. Thus, behavioral innovations can spread rapidly by imitation through a population, with the accompanying rapid pace of social change, expedited even further when a mass-media broadcast of the innovation gives large numbers of people the opportunity to observe the new pattern.

DISCUSSION: THE DISENCHANTMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY?

My analysis has been based entirely on a relatively simple set of assumptions: (1) what PCT tells us about the psychology of individual human beings, and (2) the fact that collective efforts to control similar perceptions can result in the stabilization of variables in the participants’ shared physical environments.

Everything that I am talking about is open to observation and can in principle be mathematically modeled. Even the perceptual variables that individuals are controlling, which because they are internal to the individual are not directly observable, can be ascertained by means of what Powers calls “The Test for the Controlled Quantity.” While the implications of my analysis are far from completely worked out, I would argue that the parsimony [Unusual or excessive frugality; extreme economy or stinginess], flexibility [Capable of being changed or adjusted to meet particular or varied needs], and material [substance out of which a thing can be made] tangibility [possible to understand or realize] of this PCT approach give it some decided advantages over other more popular approaches to social theory.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks Boris Hartman, Richard Kennaway, Kenneth Kitze, Martin Lewitt, Richard Marken, Fred Nichols, Richard Pfau, William T. Powers, Richard Robertson, and Martin Taylor for their comments on an earlier version of this document.


See Research Resource: The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory, Living Control Systems IV (2020), Edited by Warren Mansell; Section C: Collective Control and communication.


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