What do people think they’re doing? Action identification and human behavior

Issues in the cognitive representation and control of action are broached from the perspective of action identification theory. This theory holds that any action can be identified in many ways, ranging from low-level identities that specify how the action is performed to high-les'el identities that signify why or with what effect the action is performed. The level of identification most likely to be adopted by an actor is said to be dictated by processes reflecting a trade-offbetween concerns for comprehensive action understanding and effective action maintenance. This means that the actor is always sensitive tocontextual cues to higher levels of identification but moves to lower levels of identification if the action proves difficult to maintain with higher level identities in mind. These respective processes are documented empirically, as is their coordinated interplay in promoting a level of prepotent identification that matches the upper limits of the actor's capacity to perform the action. The implications of this analysis are developed for action stability, the psychology of performance impairment, personal versus situational causation, and the behavioral bases of self-understanding. People always seem to be doing something. They also seem to be quite adept at identifying what they are doing. What is less clear is how these two observations relate to one another. The theory of action identification Cognition and Action That people can think about what they do is hardly a controversial idea in psychology. The suggestion, however, that specifiable causal links exist between cognitive representations of action and overt behavior is greeted with skepticism in certain quarters. This skepticism is fueled in part by people's capacit

Society of self: The emergence of collective properties in selfstructure

Using cellular automata, the authors show how mutual influences among elements of self-relevant information give rise to dynamism, differentiation, and global evaluation in self-concept. The model assumes a press for integration that promotes internally generated dynamics and enables the self-structure to operate as a self-organizing dynamical system. When this press is set at high values, the self can resist inconsistent information and reestablish equilibrium after being perturbed by such information. A weak press for integration, on the other hand, impairs self-organization tendencies, making the system vulnerable to external information. Paradoxically, external information of a random nature may enhance the emergence of a stable self-structure in an initially disordered system. The simulation results suggest that important global properties of the self reflect the operation of integration processes that are generic in complex systems. When people think about or describe themselves, any number of specific thoughts, memories, fears, and feelings may come to mind. By themselves, however, the cognitive and affective elements that arise during self-reflection do not provide for a sense of self. Rather, a person has a self-concept to the extent that he or she has a relatively coherent structure within which the multitude of self-relevant thoughts and feelings achieve organization. In this sense, the self represents a society of autonomous, yet interdependent and interacting agents. Like a society of individuals, the self can be viewed as a complex dynamical system, with interactions among system elements promoting the emergence of macro-level properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of the elements in isolation. It is only at the level of such emergent properties that one can meaningfully characterize the structure as a whole. People can be said to have high or low self-esteem, for example, only because their thoughts and feelings about themselves are organized in a manner that indicates a relatively coherent evaluation, in much the same way that societies can be said to have norms only because the behaviors of individuals in a population are coordinated in a relatively coherent fashion. This reasoning does not mean that the self is not a unique cognitive structure or that the specific elements of self- by virtue of being the largest structure in the cognitive system, encompassing all personally relevant information derived throughout one's life (e.g., None of these defining aspects and processes of the self would be possible without at least some semblance of integration among self-relevant elements. Before one can verify one's self-concept or maintain a level of self-esteem, after all, one must have a relatively coherent perspective on the vast number of features relevant to self-understanding. It is critical, then, to appreciate the means by which specific cognitive and affective elements are integrated in service of coherent self-understanding. Processes of integration are not unique to the self-system. To the contrary, the issue of how distinct elements become coordinated to form a coherent structure constitutes one of the main challenges facing contemporary science (cf. 3

What do people think they're doing? Action identification and human behavior

Issues in the cognitive representation and control of action are broached from the perspective of action identification theory. This theory holds that any action can be identified in many ways, ranging from low-level identities that specify how the action is performed to high-level identities that signify why or with what effect the action is performed. The level of identification most likely to be adopted by an actor is said to be dictated by processes reflecting a trade-off between concerns for comprehensive action understanding and effective action maintenance. This means that the actor is always sensitive to contextual cues to higher levels of identification but moves to lower levels ofidentification if the action proves difficult to maintain with higher level identities in mind. These respective processes are documented empirically, as is their coordinated interplay in promoting a level of prepotent identification that matches the upper limits of the actor's capacity to perform the action. The implications of this analysis are developed for action stability, the psychology of performance impairment, personal versus situational causation, and the behavioral bases of self-understanding. People always seem to be doing something. They also seem for seemingly unbounded constructions of behavior. As philosto be quite adept at identifying what they are doing. What is less ophers have long noted, any segment of behavior can be conclear is how these two observations relate to one another. The sciously identified in many different ways (Anscombe, 1957

Modes of Self Reflection Sim 1

Data derived from the simulation of Expression and Integration modes of self-reflection

The Intrinsic Dynamics of Psychological Process

Psychological processes unfold on various timescales in accord with internally generated patterns. The intrinsic dynamism of psychological process is difficult to investigate using traditional methods emphasizing cause–effect relations, however, and therefore is rarely incorporated into social psychological theory. Methods associated with nonlinear dynamical systems can assess temporal patterns in thought and behavior, reveal the emergence of global properties in mental and social systems due to self-organization of system elements, and investigate the relation between external influences and intrinsic dynamics. The dynamical perspective preserves the insights that inspired the field’s early theorists while connecting social psychology to other areas of scienc