Sociology & Politics

Sociology

Sociology involves understanding how people behave in groups, including how they communicate and interact with one another. PCT provides a way to understand how people’s goals operate when in groups, and we can use computers to model how more than one control system interacts in a group setting. The Crowd Demonstration link illustrates this. Each of the moving circles on the screen is an ‘agent’ who has two control systems – one to be as close as possible to its target, and another to be beyond a certain distance from other ‘agents’. Some of the demo programs online show how changing the numbers and control system settings of the agents can lead to a huge range of different social scenarios – from the classic duckling-following-parent to large scale crowd behaviour.

Clark McPhail, Kent McClelland and several other prominent sociologists have made a convincing case that PCT can be used to understand sociology. Further sociologists, such as David Heise, have incorporated PCT into ‘affect control theory’, which focuses on how people’s behaviour is a means of maintaining affect (e.g. mood) within certain reference values.

Recently, Dan Miller has written a wonderful online essay about the relationship between PCT and symbolic interactionism, as described by Mead & Goffman. Click here to read it.

Politics & Philosophy

PCT takes a strongly scientific approach to human nature. It proposes that people and other living systems are purposeful – and that the systems that are responsible for purposeful action are explainable in mechanistic terms. It takes the paradigm of model-building within physics and engineering and applies it to biology and psychology.

The philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn expressed his praise over Powers (1973) book: "this manuscript is among the most exciting I have read in some time; the achieved synthesis is thoroughly original."

In a current volume in development, Dialogues Concerning Two Life Sciences, Dag Forssell explains the great importance of PCT as a 'true' science within psychology.

Powers’ approach has major implications for key areas of philosophy and politics:

What is consciousness?

What is ‘will’?

Can we explain political catastrophes through the drive for power and control?

What is the nature of reality?

How do we best test a scientific theory?

The links on the right provide just some of the essays on these topics that are available.