[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[Nick Thompson]

Whew, Eric, that’s quite a hypothetical!!!!!  Will poor Glen every be allowed to go to a party again?

 

But you are exactly right that that is the sense in which I wanted to use the term. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 3:05 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

 

Glen said: " I would claim motives are a higher order behavior, but NOT (solely) at a higher level of organization.  I.e. motives consist of BOTH low level behaviors like eyeball saccades AND high level behaviors like how one feels about another person." And then a bit later Glen complained (rightly) that no one had followed up on his examples. I will attempt to fill that gap!

 

I suspect the first issue is here is what we call "higher level." Sometimes, when people reference "higher level behavior", they are envisioning something like a "ladder of life" with simpler beings lower down and more complex beings higher up. In that context, something like a saccade is low on the scale, because many "lower beings" do it, and throwing a baseball might be higher on the scale, because only a few non-human species are capable of such a thing. Based on how the above quote is phrased,  I believe that is what Glen very-understandably thinks Nick is be talking about.  However, Nick is invoking something else entirely, something like "levels of analysis" talk, in which meaningful "higher" things exist in the relations between lower-level things. 

 

The most common context in which people are exposed to this is in biology class, where we are told that at some level there are cells, and that many cells of similar type make tissue, tissue combines into organs, organs into organ systems, and systems into organisms. In some obvious sense, cells "make up" organs, but also one would not really come to understand organs by virtue of individually examining cells. There is something "higher-level" going on, something about the organization of the cells that we consider important, and worth talking about and studying in its own right, which is why organ-talk and organ-level science are things.  

 

When Nick says that " Motives ARE behavior.  Just at a higher level of organization.", he means "higher level" in that sense. We see that someone is motivated towards a certain goal when we witness them varying their behavior across circumstances in order to achieve that goal. If we want to measure how motivated someone is, we change the circumstances so that they are no longer directed at (what we assume to be) their goal, and then measure the strength of their effort to "return to course." That line of thought can be elaborated extensively, with other examples brought in from both scientific efforts and mundane life, and what you end up with is the conclusion that: Motives are an identifiable type of pattern that can exist between behavior and circumstances, specifically a pattern in which behavior changes such that the acts in question continue to be directed towards producing a particular outcome. 

 

Let us say that saccades (Glen's example) are relatively random (within a certain range of eye rotation), but that we notice Glen's saccades occur slightly more often towards the location of an attractive woman located 5 degrees to the right of and 5 degrees up from the person he is talking to. From this, we may suspect Glen is motivated to look at the woman, but we must admit is quite possible that his eyes always saccade in that fashion, as we have never measured Glen's saccades before. Or maybe the bias is unusual, but is explained by an unrelated factor, such a slightly lighter bulb illuminating that part of the background. All fine and good, a hypothesis, but no way to test it. However, suppose that the woman starts moves around the room, and we notice that Glen's saccades, while still containing a fair amount of randomness, consistently bias towards the direction of the woman, wherever she happens to be. And let us also assume that Glen's position shifts in a wide variety of ways throughout the conversation, with the only notable consistency being that they position his head such that it reduces the size of the saccades necessary to bring the woman closer to the periphery of his vision. We might, from that, conclude/abduct/declare/assert that Glen "is motivated" to look at the woman. Let's say that Glen likes red heads in low cut dresses, and when this particular red-head--in-a-low-cut-dress leaves the room, the described pattern falls apart for a few minutes, but then re-appears, directed towards an auburn-haired woman with a slightly-less-but-still-distinctly-low-cut dress. We have become firmer in our conclusion/abduction about Glen's motives. 

 

(Note that whether or not saccades work that way isn't the issue, the issue is that if they DID work that way, we would likely agree on the conclusion made.) 

 

Note that as far as the scientific assessment of motivation is concerned "asking Glen" need never comes into it! What Glen self-reports his motives to be isn't relevant. Glen's self-report can understood, at best, as an effort to describe the higher-order patterning of his own behavior in exactly same way we have been describing it, i.e., in verbally "illuminating" what the variations in his behavior are directed at. But that is at best. Depending on who he is around, Glen almost certainly has an even-higher-order patterning of behavior designed to misrepresent his actual motivation in the course of a conversation, "No, of course not honey! Who is this asshole anyway? I've been shifting around because my hip has been acting up, that's all." And Glen would likely engage that higher system whether or not he had any awareness that doing so was deceptive, because our social-interaction systems are very strongly entrenched. 

 




-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 1:59 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

Heh, there you go again, rejecting the heterarchy! >8^D

I would claim motives are a higher order behavior, but NOT (solely) at a higher level of organization.  I.e. motives consist of BOTH low level behaviors like eyeball saccades AND high level behaviors like how one feels about another person.

On 1/3/19 10:55 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Motives ARE behavior.  Just at a higher level of organization.  


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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