7 - Social Control

Summary

The social interactions between control systems can be categorized into three types: cooperative, conflictive and manipulative. Cooperative interactions involve the production of a result that can only be produced by two or more control systems working together. We described models of several different examples of cooperative interaction. Conflictive interactions occur when two or more control systems want the same variable or variables in different reference states. The result of such conflicts is that the commonly controlled variable can appear to be under control when it isn't. It is important to be able to distinguish these virtual controlled variables from variables that are actually being controlled by the collective. Manipulative interactions occur when one control system tries to control the behavior of another. These interactions can result in inter- and intra-personal conflict.