This is a major upgrade to how we think about personality.
I think it’s worth spending the time reading this article by Adam Mastroianni. The ‘SMTM’ acronym he mentions is ‘Slime Mold Time Mold’ the name of the group of his “mad scientist friends… who have just published a book that lays out a new foundation for the science of the mind” called The Mind in the Wheel. Mastroianni calls it “the most provocative thing I’ve read about psychology since I became a psychologist myself.”
Essentially, this is a cybernetic view of the mind. The easiest way to think of this is that the brain has a lot of control systems that work a bit like thermostats. For some systems, like breathing, people have largely the same tolerances and feedback loops. But for other (inferred) areas, such as sociability, things can be wildly different. This is why we talk about ‘introverts’ and ‘extraverts’.
If the mind is made out of control systems, and those control systems have different set points (that is, their target level) and sensitivities (that is, how hard they fight to maintain that target level), then “personality” is just how those set points and sensitivities differ from person to person. Someone who is more “extraverted”, for example, has a higher set point and/or greater sensitivity on their Sociality Control System (if such a thing exists). As in, they get an error if they don’t maintain a higher level of social interaction, or they respond to that error faster than other people do.
This is a major upgrade to how we think about personality. Right now, what is personality? If you corner a personality psychologist, they’ll tell you something like “traits and characteristics that are stable across time and situations”. Okay, but what’s a trait? What’s a characteristic? Push harder, and you’ll eventually discover that what we call “personality” is really “how you bubble things in on a personality test”. There are no units here, no rules, no theory about the underlying system and how it works. That’s why our best theory of personality performs about as well as the Enneagram, a theory that somebody just made up.
Not only do I think it is an interesting theory (psychology discovers systems thinking!) but Mastroianni also does a great job in distinguishing between science, and other things that are included in the field of psychology:
- Naive research (e.g. “Are people less likely to steal from the communal milk if you print out a picture of human eyes and hang it up in the break room?")
- Impressionistic research (e.g. “whether ‘mindfulness’ causes ‘resilience’ by increasing ‘zest for life’")
- Actual science (i.e. “making and testing conjectures about units and rules”)
This is why I’ve been drawn to systems thinking. It feels somewhat foundational in understanding how things work when you abstract away from immediate, everyday experience.
Like any good scientist, Mastroianni recognises that theories should not only be “falsifiable” in a Popperian sense, but “overturnable.” It may not be that everything runs on control systems, but wouldn’t it be interesting (as he points out, for everything from learning to animal welfare) if we found out that some of it did?
So, look. I do suspect that key pieces of the mind run on control systems. I also suspect that much of the mind has nothing to do with control systems at all. Language, memory, sensation—these processes might interface with control systems, but they themselves may not be cybernetic. In fact, cybernetic and non-cybernetic may turn out to be an important distinction in psychology. It would certainly make a lot more sense than dividing things into cognitive, social, developmental, clinical, etc., the way we do right now. Those divisions are given by the dean, not by nature.
Source & image: Experimental History