I did a quick ctrl-f through the first few chapters of the book, and Norbert Wiener is mentioned just a couple times, and only in the context of his original work. I think that's a serious omission, given that Wiener wasn't just the coiner of the terms "cybernetics" and "control systems", but spent a huge amount of effort relating that to psychology and psychological issues.
From ChatGPT's summary: "Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) extends feedback analysis to the nervous system and to psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia as a breakdown of feedback)."
Ignoring this part of Wiener's work means that SMTM also ignored all the work that followed after it, like Karl Friston's work (zero mentions in SMTM as far as I can tell), which spends a lot of time discussing happiness in the context of control systems. Again, from ChatGPT: " In “What is Mood? A Computational Perspective” (Clark, Watson & Friston 2018) , mood = a hyper-prior over expected precision; momentary happiness corresponds to downward shifts in expected surprise."
I'd really want an explanation from SMTM why they omitted this, because, at the very least, this is a serious failure to engage with the literature.
Did you really miss the part of the post where it said that a ChatGPT query was significantly more resource-hungry than a Google search one? Or do you just feel, as the link argues, that you already have such a big carbon footprint that increasing it doesn't matter?
Let me guess: you takes planes for going on holidays because you heat your house with gas anyway, so it doesn't make a difference.
Yes, compared to the carbon footprint of myself and the world in general, the difference between a Google search and an AI prompt is neglible. That doesn't mean it's nothing, but I focus on the more impactful things I can do to reduce it.
Fretting about the marginal differences of prompts vs searches is like worrying about which tyres get you the best mileage to lower your emissions instead of simply driving less, or getting an electric car that you can charge from PV. Different orders of magnitude.
I'm going to leave it there as I don't want to drag this comment thread off topic any more.
There are fundamental limitations and flaws to both Wiener’s work, and the adoption of control theory by probabilistic approaches such as FEP, despite their grasp of the closed loop nature of behaviour.
See also the whole cybernetics inspired tradition of embodied cognition from Varela and Maturana, which dates from the 70s.
Also, affective neuroscience has been thinking about emotion in terms of control systems to regulate visceral needs and prediction error since the 1990s. Panksepp and Biven’s *paradigm shifting* The Archaeology of Mind (2014) synthesises this work.
More recently you could also look at e.g. Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty.
I feel personally assaulted by this post because when you asked what a personality psychologist would say a "trait" was, I gave the *exact damn answer you did.* Screw you, Adam, you can't be an expert personologist as well, you're already good at your own things!
But I do want to observe a few weak points in this piece. First, the notion that behaviorism is “dead” and lies “at the bottom of the ocean” doesn’t hold up. It's more like Skinner wanted us to believe Behaviorism was the whole body, and we've learned it's just an arm. That arm has sprouted itself a hand (e.g., social learning theory) and now there's other arms (e.g., cognitive psychology) and while we may continue searching for the rest of the body (I don't know how this became a weird forensic reference) it's not like we're still not using the arm. Behaviorism still gets used in training animals (and people, if you count ABA and CBT!).
Specifically for traits, the cybernetic framing just isn't so simple. Traits have to be recognized as emergent properties of genetic predispositions, reinforcement histories, cognitive schemas, and cultural narratives... they're multidetermined. If we're going to use the Big Five as an example, I can understand your explanation of extraversion as a social stimulation error correction; I can make one up for agreeableness (conflict/affiliation error sensitivity) and neuroticism (threat/danger error amplification) but I begin to hit trouble with things like conscientiousness (low thresholds for disorder?) and openness to experience (novelty-seeking governor?) and I think we both know that the Big Five are a necessarily limited list of traits as it is. It actually reminds me a bit of Walter Mischel's (1995; love him or hate him) IF-THEN contingencies, in which he believed each person's personality was simply their unique pattern of IF-THEN reactions. But I think cybernetics is one step better, if only because there will be fewer governors than there will be IF-THEN contingencies (in fact, each governor might be responsible for a number of particular IF-THENs, if we wanted to go that route, which I actually don't).
I almost think I'd want to take the paradigm a step further and say that (at least for personality, which is what I'm best qualified to address) the Free Energy Principle (FEP) is a better modeling paradigm than cybernetics. If cybernetics is like a thermostat, FEP is more like a weather forecasting service, and people are often not passive in that cybernetic-homeostatic way. Rather, we're constantly trying to predict future states based on current data and past patterns, minimizing prediction error (surprises!) by trying constantly to bring the world in line with our predictions.
So while cybernetics might explain why we feel uncomfortable when needs aren't met (hunger, social isolation, pain), FEP might explain why some people seek novelty, tolerate ambiguity, or rigidly pursue goals even when environments shift (e.g., conscientiousness might = tightly maintained long-range forecasts; openness might = flexible, exploratory model updates; neuroticism might = hypersensitive to threat predictions).
Regardless, here's the compliment underneath all my blah-blah: this article definitely got me thinking about psychology (and personality specifically) in an interesting way -- and I love the humility of knowing that "it might be very wrong" but as Carol Dweck always says, it only makes us "smack our lips [why, Carol?] and cry out 'I love a challenge!'"
FEP has many merits, but it is also - from the perspective of psychology - like using a mathematical sledgehammer to crack a nut. Control theory is, at heart, both more sophisticated, and more simple than FEP:
I once spent a day in a hospital room minding a young man with diabetes insipidus. He was hyperactive, to put it mildly, he was constantly on the move within the confines of the room, and it was obvious there was something wrong with him mentally. He would drink frequent glasses of water and then just as frequently go to the bathroom. At the time, I had no idea what diabetes insipidus was so I kept telling him to stop drinking so much water, so he wouldn't have to pee so much, but he just smiled and ignored me, thankfully. That is a pretty graphic example of what happens when a critical control system is damaged, and I still wonder what happened to that guy.
this was fantastic — just finished a degree in systems design engineering & the connection between control systems theory and “psychology troubleshooting“ feels intuitive but seeing it laid out so well connected a few new pieces in my brain. Thanks for pulling it all together!!
So basically you are suggesting we look at the nervous system as being composed of interacting control systems, similarly to how other body systems maintain homeostasis. This makes sense to me, but it also doesn’t seem new: a cybernetic model of psychology, as you call it, is otherwise known as a functionalist theory of the mind. If this is a new paradigm, how do you distinguish it from the psycho-functionalist project associated with people like Jerry Fodor? One thing that might be different is the idea that there’s just be one overarching teleological target controlling all cognitive functions, namely health in the broadest sense of the term. I think that’d a promising way to think about things, and likely to deliver much explanatory power, but I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you’re proposing.
Really interesting how this builds off the one idea I know from Slime Mold Time Mold - a cohesive theory as to why people have a hard time losing weight. They argue that there's a control system in your body that is basically a steady-state weight (again, like a thermostat) and that environmental factors may raise that 'temperature' from what would otherwise be our default settings per our individual genetics.
I'd say evolution is undeniably relevant to psychology, but evolutionary psychology often overextends its explanatory reach. It tends to offer plausible-sounding narratives without sufficient falsifiability, and ignores proximate, developmental, or cultural layers that are better suited to explain variation in human behavior.
Just as one example: “women evolved to prefer older men because they have more resources.” Even if this has some statistical truth, it fails predictive scrutiny. If signs of aging were inherently desirable as resource cues, we’d expect young men to deliberately mimic aging features (e.g., bald spots, grey hair). Yet, no one’s rushing to get a “resource halo” shaved into the back of their head. Attractiveness is mediated by far more than ancestral heuristics -- cultural norms, individual preferences, and status signals shift across time and place.
And don't get me started on evolutionary psychology's attempted explanation of rape as adaptive.
The quality of any given EP hypothesis is irrelevant to the question of whether evolution by natural selection is the right paradigm for psychology.
People put up buildings that fall down, but that doesn't change the fact that Newton's laws of motion are the right paradigm for physical engineering. People say daft things about the quantum world but that doesn't make quantum physics wrong. Etc
Thom, evolution by natural selection is certainly the correct biological foundation for psychology, but it may not be the best paradigm for psychological inquiry itself. Human minds are not just "stone age minds" in modern contexts: culture, learning, and socialization exert immediate and powerful effects on cognition that can't be reduced to evolutionary imperatives.
Knowing that fear evolved to avoid danger doesn’t tell you much about how phobias develop from childhood trauma or why two people with similar genes have vastly different personalities.
I like a lot of what evolutionary psychology does -- I'm a fan of David Buss, for instance -- but it often tries to argue that it can do everything (as it seems you are arguing) which is an overreach.
Again, you are conflating (a) the merit of specific hypotheses advanced within a paradigm e.g. possible relations between fear responses and phobias, and (b) the question of whether the paradigm is the right one.
(a) and (b) are not the same, and I am only saying something about (b).
Related: you imply that viewing evolution by natural selection as the right paradigm for psychology entails the idea that human minds are just stone age minds in modern contexts. That's not so at all.
Here's an extended discussion of what it would actually mean if evolution by natural selection was not the right paradigm for psychology.
Nettle, D., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2023). Is a non-evolutionary psychology possible? In: A. du Crest, M. Valkovic, A. Ariew, H. Desmond, P. Huneman, & T. Reydon (Eds.), Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines (pp. 21-42). Springer Nature.
Thom... I'm not conflating anything. You're not understanding something I don't get, nor vice-versa. This is simply called "disagreeing."
It's a trick question, innit? "Do you think evolutionary psychology is the paradigm you're looking for?" you asked, having written a paper asserting that you feel it is. Here are the main weaknesses I see in your article's reasoning:
1) The whole paper is an overgeneralization. By saying all functional analyses are evolutionary, you're willing to risk oversimplfiying diverse methodologies (such as cultural and social theories).
2) You try to acknowledge the role of culture, but cultural evolution operates on an entirely different mechanism and timescale to biological evolution. Theories like dual inheritance suggest cultural factors can drive psychological phenomena independently of genetic evolution.
3) You try to argue that functionalism inherently requires an evolutionary basis, but behaviorist theories (e.g.) explain behavior based on reinforcement and punishment without invoking evolutionary history. Functionalism doesn't necessarily = evolution.
4) Evolutionary psych faces difficulties in emprically testing hypotheses about ancestral environments/adaptations; if evolution = all psychological theories, the testability/falsifiability of these broad claims become problematic.
5) Did you forget that cogntitive, behavioral, humanistic, and psychodynamic perspectives exist? Asserting that all possibly frameworks are evolutionary disregards the contributions and methodologies of other such frameworks.
History repeats: Watson and Skinner once believed everything you needed to know about psychology could be explained by behaviorism, and nothing else mattered? Evolutionary psychologists have taken up a similar banner. But as much as I admire Adam's quest for a single framework from which to view everything, psychology repeatedly resists monolithic paradigms. The truth seems to be that everything having to do with the human mind is multiply determined -- biological, psychological, cultural, developmental, and situational factors all interact.
It doesn't mean we can't maybe one day come to a "grand theory of everything" in psychology, but if we do, it's going to be a mosaic, not a single-discipline victory. Evolutionary perspectives will be a crucial piece, but... not the whole picture.
First, it was not a trick question at all! I am curious to know what Adam thinks. I still am! You're right that I know what *I* think, but what does Adam think?
Second, your comments are displaying several common misunderstandings of the EP agenda. In particular:
- Your comments 1, 2, 3 and 5 conflate ultimate and proximate levels of analysis.
- Your comment 4 shows that you view EP hypotheses as being about phylogeny / evolutionary history. They are not, they are about function. In the article I linked to we point out that EP was misnamed from the beginning: a more accurate label for its agenda would be (and would have always been) "adaptationist cognitive science".
Yeah, I had the same question. I guess Adam is more interested in a paradigm at the algorithmic level? In any case, this seems compatible with EP: evolution could design control systems for adaptive problems, and an evolutionary analysis could reveal the function of a given system / help carve them out and make hypotheses about their units.
Yes this. Was going to make the same comment. Tho perhaps EP looks at those systems/modules from one angle (more external -- WHY is this a thing) while this model would look on HOW they work (what things exist and how they operate)?
Also, tho I know v little about this, cognitive neuroscience goes beyond neurons afaik.
Yes absolutely. Why and how are different questions, commonly called ultimate and proximate. Good explanations of a given trait provide answers to both questions, in ways that are mutually reinforcing.
Evolution by natural selection is a paradigm that sets expectations especially for the why question; and by doing so it helps to inform our investigations of the how question.
Yes, I find the resistance to evolution-based (not necessarily limited to!) approaches/paradigms in psychology truly baffling. I suspect it's to do with dubious, overzealous and politically driven applications of ev psych -- or something that vaguely resembles ev psych on the first glance.
I mean, even the purest of pure behaviourisms require evolution based foundations. Culture (obviously ) requires evolved animals to develop it in the first place. Etc etc.
100%. There has been some daft and dubious uses of evolutionary perspectives, but that is no reason to drop the evolutionary perspective. As I said in response to another comment, sometimes people have stupid hypotheses about physical engineering and as a result buildings fall down, but that is no reason to reject Newton's laws of motion.
I have no training in psychology, but here are some things I would expect psychology to be able to discover if it is a useful paradigm:
1. What governors exist, like you said
2. What classifications of governors are there, and how can you tell them apart?
3. What influences set points?
4. Can a new governor be constructed? What would be required for me to build a 'buy healthy food' control system, and what would it's characteristics be?
5. Can a governor be destroyed?
6. How isolated are governors? Do governors leak error signals between each other? Can I need to pee so badly that I get lonely, or eat a sandwich so good I forget to breathe?
A bit of a tangent to your main point (I like SMTM and this cybernetic theory, but I don't have much to say on it) but you mention an Oxygen Detection System as an example multiple times.
This isn't technically correct. Humans (and most other animals I assume) can't detect oxygen directly and instead measure carbon dioxide levels. The feeling of suffocation comes from detecting high CO2, not from detecting low O2. If you're breathing an oxygen atmosphere CO2 and O2 levels are inversely related and this isn't a problem, but if you're breathing gas that has low/no oxygen content they become decoupled and you can asphyxiate very quickly with no symptoms at all, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
(I know I am being an annoying nerd about this, but I feel like you'd appreciate the lesson)
Hmm, a very interesting idea. Thinking of it like a thermostat is what much of the medical and psych industry already does. In other words cause -> effect. This misses the extreme level of complexity that is part of the human system. For example to borrow the thermostat analogy. It is too hot. Let's point a fan at the thermostat when in reality it was installed in by a huge window and sits in the sun all day. What is the correct "fix"? Oh, you're depressed, here take a SSRIs or some other option. What is really happening is that effect is being addressed (or the error in the thermostat model) but not the cause.
I hope to live to see the day of "Inside Out 3" where the Make Sure You Spend Time with Other People System is broken and needs fixing.
Lmao and one of the new added emotions is actually just “ChatGPT Therapist”
I did a quick ctrl-f through the first few chapters of the book, and Norbert Wiener is mentioned just a couple times, and only in the context of his original work. I think that's a serious omission, given that Wiener wasn't just the coiner of the terms "cybernetics" and "control systems", but spent a huge amount of effort relating that to psychology and psychological issues.
From ChatGPT's summary: "Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) extends feedback analysis to the nervous system and to psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia as a breakdown of feedback)."
Ignoring this part of Wiener's work means that SMTM also ignored all the work that followed after it, like Karl Friston's work (zero mentions in SMTM as far as I can tell), which spends a lot of time discussing happiness in the context of control systems. Again, from ChatGPT: " In “What is Mood? A Computational Perspective” (Clark, Watson & Friston 2018) , mood = a hyper-prior over expected precision; momentary happiness corresponds to downward shifts in expected surprise."
I'd really want an explanation from SMTM why they omitted this, because, at the very least, this is a serious failure to engage with the literature.
Why would you use the resource guzzler ChatGPT if you could have done an internet search or used Wikipedia?
The carbon footprint of using Chat GPT is negligible.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt
Did you really miss the part of the post where it said that a ChatGPT query was significantly more resource-hungry than a Google search one? Or do you just feel, as the link argues, that you already have such a big carbon footprint that increasing it doesn't matter?
Let me guess: you takes planes for going on holidays because you heat your house with gas anyway, so it doesn't make a difference.
Thanks for reading the link.
Yes, compared to the carbon footprint of myself and the world in general, the difference between a Google search and an AI prompt is neglible. That doesn't mean it's nothing, but I focus on the more impactful things I can do to reduce it.
Fretting about the marginal differences of prompts vs searches is like worrying about which tyres get you the best mileage to lower your emissions instead of simply driving less, or getting an electric car that you can charge from PV. Different orders of magnitude.
I'm going to leave it there as I don't want to drag this comment thread off topic any more.
There are fundamental limitations and flaws to both Wiener’s work, and the adoption of control theory by probabilistic approaches such as FEP, despite their grasp of the closed loop nature of behaviour.
See https://www.iapct.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Powers1978.pdf
See also our special issue for the spectrum of accounts:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/108TX57ZR17
See also the whole cybernetics inspired tradition of embodied cognition from Varela and Maturana, which dates from the 70s.
Also, affective neuroscience has been thinking about emotion in terms of control systems to regulate visceral needs and prediction error since the 1990s. Panksepp and Biven’s *paradigm shifting* The Archaeology of Mind (2014) synthesises this work.
More recently you could also look at e.g. Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty.
Interesting but not new!
Does it talk about or build on the already existing Cybernetic Theory of Psychopathology by Colin G. DeYoung & Robert F. Krueger?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1047840X.2018.1513680
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-67353-002
Also Cybernetic Big Five Theory
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656614000713
Lisa Feldman Barrets work on emotions and allostasis also relevant.
Relevant, but the don’t address the key methodological issues & philosophical stance of the SMTM account.
I feel personally assaulted by this post because when you asked what a personality psychologist would say a "trait" was, I gave the *exact damn answer you did.* Screw you, Adam, you can't be an expert personologist as well, you're already good at your own things!
But I do want to observe a few weak points in this piece. First, the notion that behaviorism is “dead” and lies “at the bottom of the ocean” doesn’t hold up. It's more like Skinner wanted us to believe Behaviorism was the whole body, and we've learned it's just an arm. That arm has sprouted itself a hand (e.g., social learning theory) and now there's other arms (e.g., cognitive psychology) and while we may continue searching for the rest of the body (I don't know how this became a weird forensic reference) it's not like we're still not using the arm. Behaviorism still gets used in training animals (and people, if you count ABA and CBT!).
Specifically for traits, the cybernetic framing just isn't so simple. Traits have to be recognized as emergent properties of genetic predispositions, reinforcement histories, cognitive schemas, and cultural narratives... they're multidetermined. If we're going to use the Big Five as an example, I can understand your explanation of extraversion as a social stimulation error correction; I can make one up for agreeableness (conflict/affiliation error sensitivity) and neuroticism (threat/danger error amplification) but I begin to hit trouble with things like conscientiousness (low thresholds for disorder?) and openness to experience (novelty-seeking governor?) and I think we both know that the Big Five are a necessarily limited list of traits as it is. It actually reminds me a bit of Walter Mischel's (1995; love him or hate him) IF-THEN contingencies, in which he believed each person's personality was simply their unique pattern of IF-THEN reactions. But I think cybernetics is one step better, if only because there will be fewer governors than there will be IF-THEN contingencies (in fact, each governor might be responsible for a number of particular IF-THENs, if we wanted to go that route, which I actually don't).
I almost think I'd want to take the paradigm a step further and say that (at least for personality, which is what I'm best qualified to address) the Free Energy Principle (FEP) is a better modeling paradigm than cybernetics. If cybernetics is like a thermostat, FEP is more like a weather forecasting service, and people are often not passive in that cybernetic-homeostatic way. Rather, we're constantly trying to predict future states based on current data and past patterns, minimizing prediction error (surprises!) by trying constantly to bring the world in line with our predictions.
So while cybernetics might explain why we feel uncomfortable when needs aren't met (hunger, social isolation, pain), FEP might explain why some people seek novelty, tolerate ambiguity, or rigidly pursue goals even when environments shift (e.g., conscientiousness might = tightly maintained long-range forecasts; openness might = flexible, exploratory model updates; neuroticism might = hypersensitive to threat predictions).
Regardless, here's the compliment underneath all my blah-blah: this article definitely got me thinking about psychology (and personality specifically) in an interesting way -- and I love the humility of knowing that "it might be very wrong" but as Carol Dweck always says, it only makes us "smack our lips [why, Carol?] and cry out 'I love a challenge!'"
FEP has many merits, but it is also - from the perspective of psychology - like using a mathematical sledgehammer to crack a nut. Control theory is, at heart, both more sophisticated, and more simple than FEP:
https://youtu.be/JsgKqnlGlbs?si=PvegxBaIFcApO6va
I once spent a day in a hospital room minding a young man with diabetes insipidus. He was hyperactive, to put it mildly, he was constantly on the move within the confines of the room, and it was obvious there was something wrong with him mentally. He would drink frequent glasses of water and then just as frequently go to the bathroom. At the time, I had no idea what diabetes insipidus was so I kept telling him to stop drinking so much water, so he wouldn't have to pee so much, but he just smiled and ignored me, thankfully. That is a pretty graphic example of what happens when a critical control system is damaged, and I still wonder what happened to that guy.
this was fantastic — just finished a degree in systems design engineering & the connection between control systems theory and “psychology troubleshooting“ feels intuitive but seeing it laid out so well connected a few new pieces in my brain. Thanks for pulling it all together!!
If you like this, acquaint yourself with PCT! www.iapct.org
So basically you are suggesting we look at the nervous system as being composed of interacting control systems, similarly to how other body systems maintain homeostasis. This makes sense to me, but it also doesn’t seem new: a cybernetic model of psychology, as you call it, is otherwise known as a functionalist theory of the mind. If this is a new paradigm, how do you distinguish it from the psycho-functionalist project associated with people like Jerry Fodor? One thing that might be different is the idea that there’s just be one overarching teleological target controlling all cognitive functions, namely health in the broadest sense of the term. I think that’d a promising way to think about things, and likely to deliver much explanatory power, but I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you’re proposing.
I see this treatise as edging towards perceptual control theory, which IS a whole new paradigm…
I for one, welcome our cybernetic overlords
Really interesting how this builds off the one idea I know from Slime Mold Time Mold - a cohesive theory as to why people have a hard time losing weight. They argue that there's a control system in your body that is basically a steady-state weight (again, like a thermostat) and that environmental factors may raise that 'temperature' from what would otherwise be our default settings per our individual genetics.
For explanations like this I can dig the theory. It might not explain everything but it would be nice to have some more effective explanations.
Hi Adam. Thanks for the essays.
What’s your take on Evolutionary Psychology? More specifically, why isn’t evolution by natural selection the right paradigm for Psychology?
I'd say evolution is undeniably relevant to psychology, but evolutionary psychology often overextends its explanatory reach. It tends to offer plausible-sounding narratives without sufficient falsifiability, and ignores proximate, developmental, or cultural layers that are better suited to explain variation in human behavior.
Just as one example: “women evolved to prefer older men because they have more resources.” Even if this has some statistical truth, it fails predictive scrutiny. If signs of aging were inherently desirable as resource cues, we’d expect young men to deliberately mimic aging features (e.g., bald spots, grey hair). Yet, no one’s rushing to get a “resource halo” shaved into the back of their head. Attractiveness is mediated by far more than ancestral heuristics -- cultural norms, individual preferences, and status signals shift across time and place.
And don't get me started on evolutionary psychology's attempted explanation of rape as adaptive.
The quality of any given EP hypothesis is irrelevant to the question of whether evolution by natural selection is the right paradigm for psychology.
People put up buildings that fall down, but that doesn't change the fact that Newton's laws of motion are the right paradigm for physical engineering. People say daft things about the quantum world but that doesn't make quantum physics wrong. Etc
Thom, evolution by natural selection is certainly the correct biological foundation for psychology, but it may not be the best paradigm for psychological inquiry itself. Human minds are not just "stone age minds" in modern contexts: culture, learning, and socialization exert immediate and powerful effects on cognition that can't be reduced to evolutionary imperatives.
Knowing that fear evolved to avoid danger doesn’t tell you much about how phobias develop from childhood trauma or why two people with similar genes have vastly different personalities.
I like a lot of what evolutionary psychology does -- I'm a fan of David Buss, for instance -- but it often tries to argue that it can do everything (as it seems you are arguing) which is an overreach.
Again, you are conflating (a) the merit of specific hypotheses advanced within a paradigm e.g. possible relations between fear responses and phobias, and (b) the question of whether the paradigm is the right one.
(a) and (b) are not the same, and I am only saying something about (b).
Related: you imply that viewing evolution by natural selection as the right paradigm for psychology entails the idea that human minds are just stone age minds in modern contexts. That's not so at all.
Here's an extended discussion of what it would actually mean if evolution by natural selection was not the right paradigm for psychology.
Nettle, D., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2023). Is a non-evolutionary psychology possible? In: A. du Crest, M. Valkovic, A. Ariew, H. Desmond, P. Huneman, & T. Reydon (Eds.), Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines (pp. 21-42). Springer Nature.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64e385e145e8e55034c9cdc3/t/64e5fdb99603a75b98e47abf/1692794298208/Nettle+%26+Scott-Phillips+2023+non-evolutionary+psychology.pdf
Thom... I'm not conflating anything. You're not understanding something I don't get, nor vice-versa. This is simply called "disagreeing."
It's a trick question, innit? "Do you think evolutionary psychology is the paradigm you're looking for?" you asked, having written a paper asserting that you feel it is. Here are the main weaknesses I see in your article's reasoning:
1) The whole paper is an overgeneralization. By saying all functional analyses are evolutionary, you're willing to risk oversimplfiying diverse methodologies (such as cultural and social theories).
2) You try to acknowledge the role of culture, but cultural evolution operates on an entirely different mechanism and timescale to biological evolution. Theories like dual inheritance suggest cultural factors can drive psychological phenomena independently of genetic evolution.
3) You try to argue that functionalism inherently requires an evolutionary basis, but behaviorist theories (e.g.) explain behavior based on reinforcement and punishment without invoking evolutionary history. Functionalism doesn't necessarily = evolution.
4) Evolutionary psych faces difficulties in emprically testing hypotheses about ancestral environments/adaptations; if evolution = all psychological theories, the testability/falsifiability of these broad claims become problematic.
5) Did you forget that cogntitive, behavioral, humanistic, and psychodynamic perspectives exist? Asserting that all possibly frameworks are evolutionary disregards the contributions and methodologies of other such frameworks.
History repeats: Watson and Skinner once believed everything you needed to know about psychology could be explained by behaviorism, and nothing else mattered? Evolutionary psychologists have taken up a similar banner. But as much as I admire Adam's quest for a single framework from which to view everything, psychology repeatedly resists monolithic paradigms. The truth seems to be that everything having to do with the human mind is multiply determined -- biological, psychological, cultural, developmental, and situational factors all interact.
It doesn't mean we can't maybe one day come to a "grand theory of everything" in psychology, but if we do, it's going to be a mosaic, not a single-discipline victory. Evolutionary perspectives will be a crucial piece, but... not the whole picture.
Hi. A couple of things:
First, it was not a trick question at all! I am curious to know what Adam thinks. I still am! You're right that I know what *I* think, but what does Adam think?
Second, your comments are displaying several common misunderstandings of the EP agenda. In particular:
- Your comments 1, 2, 3 and 5 conflate ultimate and proximate levels of analysis.
- Your comment 4 shows that you view EP hypotheses as being about phylogeny / evolutionary history. They are not, they are about function. In the article I linked to we point out that EP was misnamed from the beginning: a more accurate label for its agenda would be (and would have always been) "adaptationist cognitive science".
Yeah, I had the same question. I guess Adam is more interested in a paradigm at the algorithmic level? In any case, this seems compatible with EP: evolution could design control systems for adaptive problems, and an evolutionary analysis could reveal the function of a given system / help carve them out and make hypotheses about their units.
Yep, precisimundo. We could even call those control systems "modules"...
Yes this. Was going to make the same comment. Tho perhaps EP looks at those systems/modules from one angle (more external -- WHY is this a thing) while this model would look on HOW they work (what things exist and how they operate)?
Also, tho I know v little about this, cognitive neuroscience goes beyond neurons afaik.
Yes absolutely. Why and how are different questions, commonly called ultimate and proximate. Good explanations of a given trait provide answers to both questions, in ways that are mutually reinforcing.
Evolution by natural selection is a paradigm that sets expectations especially for the why question; and by doing so it helps to inform our investigations of the how question.
Yes, I find the resistance to evolution-based (not necessarily limited to!) approaches/paradigms in psychology truly baffling. I suspect it's to do with dubious, overzealous and politically driven applications of ev psych -- or something that vaguely resembles ev psych on the first glance.
I mean, even the purest of pure behaviourisms require evolution based foundations. Culture (obviously ) requires evolved animals to develop it in the first place. Etc etc.
100%. There has been some daft and dubious uses of evolutionary perspectives, but that is no reason to drop the evolutionary perspective. As I said in response to another comment, sometimes people have stupid hypotheses about physical engineering and as a result buildings fall down, but that is no reason to reject Newton's laws of motion.
Ahah I suppose we could. But I do like the idea of a control system as a common / easy way to implement things. As in Tomassello's evolution of agency
It is… but not as you might know it…
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5127/pr.036114
I have no training in psychology, but here are some things I would expect psychology to be able to discover if it is a useful paradigm:
1. What governors exist, like you said
2. What classifications of governors are there, and how can you tell them apart?
3. What influences set points?
4. Can a new governor be constructed? What would be required for me to build a 'buy healthy food' control system, and what would it's characteristics be?
5. Can a governor be destroyed?
6. How isolated are governors? Do governors leak error signals between each other? Can I need to pee so badly that I get lonely, or eat a sandwich so good I forget to breathe?
Great questions. A lot of them are answered by the algorithm in perceptual control theory known as reorganisation…
A bit of a tangent to your main point (I like SMTM and this cybernetic theory, but I don't have much to say on it) but you mention an Oxygen Detection System as an example multiple times.
This isn't technically correct. Humans (and most other animals I assume) can't detect oxygen directly and instead measure carbon dioxide levels. The feeling of suffocation comes from detecting high CO2, not from detecting low O2. If you're breathing an oxygen atmosphere CO2 and O2 levels are inversely related and this isn't a problem, but if you're breathing gas that has low/no oxygen content they become decoupled and you can asphyxiate very quickly with no symptoms at all, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
(I know I am being an annoying nerd about this, but I feel like you'd appreciate the lesson)
Hmm, a very interesting idea. Thinking of it like a thermostat is what much of the medical and psych industry already does. In other words cause -> effect. This misses the extreme level of complexity that is part of the human system. For example to borrow the thermostat analogy. It is too hot. Let's point a fan at the thermostat when in reality it was installed in by a huge window and sits in the sun all day. What is the correct "fix"? Oh, you're depressed, here take a SSRIs or some other option. What is really happening is that effect is being addressed (or the error in the thermostat model) but not the cause.
The def. of happiness there is satiation, satisfaction. Okay! For higher forms, may consult the Thomists and Aristotelians.
AKA Utilitarianism.
great article - feels like the closest thing i’ve seen to a first-principles approach in psych.
Fab, check out perceptual control theory www.iapct.org
dear adam,
fascinating piece as always!
i like this a lot: "The point of a paradigm is to be wrong in the right direction."
thanks for sharing!
love
myq