Of the many illustrious documents produced during Fellowships at CASBS, very few are better known among psychologists than the slim, engaging volume that was published in 1960 by George Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram. The book was called Plans and the Structure of Behavior. It was the product of three psychologists from three different universities, who were at the Center during 1958-59 for a variety of individual reasons, but also to pursue some shared interests. In the course of that pursuit emerged their book.
They opened the book with a quote from yet another book that had been written at CASBS a few years earlier, which they reported they had run across in the CASBS library. This one, by Kenneth Boulding, was called The Image. The Image portrayed a vivid picture of perception and thought, but it lacked a picture of action. Miller, Galanter, and Pribram wanted to have a picture of people who act, albeit a picture that would be consonant with how thought processes were coming to be conceptualized. Thus, The Image, encountered serendipitously, helped foster the creation of Plans and the Structure of Behavior.
Plans and the Structure of Behavior was perhaps the most prominent of several sources of that era that treated cybernetic feedback concepts as a model for portraying the structure of behavior. It was instrumental in promoting more broadly a view in which the flow of information and control within a person follows principles similar to those followed by other natural and artificial systems.
The book was not particularly planned to be a product of that year at the Center. As the authors put it in their prologue, as they debated the issues they were wrestling with, they found themselves having to write down their argument in order to remember what it was. “And as things became clearer, suddenly it seemed necessary to make a book of the argument.” So the book’s emergence itself reflected some degree of serendipity.
In 1970, I was beginning a graduate program in personality psychology. I was ill suited to graduate school, in retrospect, having little sense of direction and little interest in the ideas that predominated in seminar conversations among my mentors and fellow students. I may have been well on the way to drifting gradually farther afield and perhaps out of psychology altogether. I had never heard of Miller, Galanter, or Pribram (owing in part to the focus of my undergraduate psychology department, and in part to my lack of initiative toward splashing around in ideas in psychology outside of personality). I had certainly never heard of cybernetics.
Two year later (give or take), two things happened in close proximity to one another. The first was that a couple of my more gregarious friends had been talking with students in the social psychology program, who were interested in a theory of “objective self-awareness” that had been proposed recently by a young faculty member together with a graduate student (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). This theory held that when attention is directed to the self as an object, an evaluation takes place in which the self is compared to the salient standard for behavior. One potential consequence of that comparison was adjustment of behavior to conform more closely to the standard. All it took to make that happen was to induce the person to pay attention to himself or herself.
The second thing that happened occurred in the context of a seminar on cognitive development, of all things. The seminar was supposed to have focused on Piaget, but the professor who taught it inserted many bits of whatever else he was interested in at the time. One of the things he was interested in (more or less as a side-light, really) was Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s ideas about information flow and the structure of behavior. It took me about 3 minutes to look at the outlines of those ideas, put them beside self-awareness theory, and say (to myself, I presume, rather than out loud), well that’s obviously pretty much the same thing as that. I didn’t realize for another year or more how annoying that conclusion (which seemed pretty obvious to me) would be (given the meta-theoretical disputes in psychology in those days) to the people whose self-awareness theory I was about to intrude on.
This juxtaposition of ideas sparked the first real interest I had had in any topic that had arisen in my graduate program. I fairly quickly thought of two simple experiments extending self-awareness theory slightly (one of which became my dissertation project). And those experiments led to other studies. Once the dam cracked, the river flowed fairly freely, and I did a lot of work in the context of self-awareness theory. But I always thought of the processes I was studying in terms of feedback control. In fact, about seven years after being introduced to Plans and the Structure of Behavior, I published an article titled “A cybernetic model of self-attention processes.”
The serendipitous juxtaposition of self-awareness theory and Plans turned something loose in me. From that point onward, growing into an academic psychologist, which had been such an inefficient and halting process for the first two years, became a process that felt natural. One thing led to another and another and another, and a career in behavioral science became possible. Though that career has taken a variety of directions, the underlying logic of Plans has remained in the conceptual background throughout.
And today, in 2014, the product of a long line of serendipity, I am a Fellow at CASBS. As I walk the grounds on which Miller, Galanter, and Pribram worked, I occasionally find myself wondering whether that line will extend yet further, and that some product of my year here might have an influence that will result in someone else’s being here.
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