Controlling People : The Paradoxical Nature of Being Human

“We need to strive for a world where people control what is important to themselves while minimizing the controlling of others.” We are all controlling people. In fact our feelings of wellbeing depend on staying in control. Just as when we drive a car, we must stay in control in everyday life in order to keep the things we care about going in the right direction. Yet this natural controlling behavior is sometimes the very reason we end up losing control. This happens when we try to control other people as well as when we try to control ourselves. So how do we do better? Based on Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), this entertaining and enlightening book by psychologists Richard S. Marken and Timothy A. Carey explores the paradox of why we often lose control by trying to be in control and why our controlling nature makes it difficult to stop this self-defeating behavior. They show that understanding PCT opens the window to understanding and learning about ourselves as controlling people and equips us to lead more effective and satisfying lives. Aconflict exists when two or more control systems try to bring the same perceptual variable to different goal or reference states. A simple example of a conflict is what happens when two people push on opposite sides of a swinging door. One person is entering the room and is controlling for perceiving the door opening into the room; the other person is leaving the room and is controlling for perceiving the door opening out of the room. Since the door can't be open into and out of the room at the same time, the two people cannot control their perceptions of the position of the door simultaneously. Indeed, what happens in a conflict is that a perceptual variable, like the position of the swinging door, ends up stuck between the goal states sought by the different control systems. The swinging door remains closed because the person's efforts to open it out are being resisted by the person who wants to open it in, and vice versa. As with the dieting example in the previous chapter, if one of the door pushers was much stronger (higher gain) than the other, the strong door-opener may be able to force the door open but it will still be a fairly unsatisfactory controlling. If the door-openers are equally matched in strength, the door will stay shut for as long as the pushers keep pushing. So when control systems are in conflict, neither system is able to get what it wants. The control systems that are in conflict have lost control of the perception they are trying to control; and they have lost control because they are trying to be in control - of the same perception. Conflict is, thus, that paradoxical situation where one's efforts to be in control result in the loss of control