Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (2002). Control processes and self-organization as complementary principles underlying behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 304-315..
This essay addresses the convergence and complementarity between
self-regulatory control-process models of behavior and dynamic systems
models. The control-process view holds that people have a goal in mind
and try to move toward it (or away
from it), monitoring the extent to which a discrepancy remains between
the
goal and one’s present state and taking steps to reduce the discrepancy
(or
enlarge it). Dynamic systems models tend to emphasize a bottom-up
self-organization process, in which a coherence arises from among many
simultaneous influences, moving the system toward attractors and away
from repellers. We suggest that
these differences in emphasis reflect two facets of a more complex
reality
involving both types of processes. Discussion focuses on how
self-organization may occur within constituent elements of a feedback
system—the input function, the output function, and goal values being
used by the system—and how feedback processes themselves often reflect
self-organizing tendencies.
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