First, a disclaimer. I am not a bona fide social psychologist. I have taken social psychology courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. I have also published research on topics that clearly fall within the purview of social psychology. Still, my formal training is not in social psychology, but in personality psychology, and the bulk of my research falls within the personality domain. Given my background, the perspectives offered in this chapter might differ somewhat from those offered by others, especially so concerning things to do going forward.

Personality has been viewed from many different angles (Carver & Scheier, 2017a). This chapter outlines a view in which personality is considered through the lens of feedback control processes. We address two layers of control processes, managing two distinguishable aspects of behavior. One function of the layers is to permit people to handle multiple tasks across time. More specifically, they help transform simultaneous motives into a stream of actions that shifts repeatedly from one goal to another.

Thinking back over my academic career, there are several things that stand out to me. The first derived from my good fortune to collaborate with Chuck Carver (who also has a chapter in this book; see Chapter 60). We were both graduate students at the University of Texas, and we were doing work on self-awareness, trying to understand more fully how thinking about oneself impacts how one behaves. At the same time, Chuck audited a course that offered on overview of control theory. Control theory provides a framework for thinking about self-regulating or self-guiding systems. Most importantly, it helps to identify the component processes that are needed in order for a system to be self-correcting.

When people think about self-guided or self-correcting systems they often think of things like thermostats in heating systems, which function to keep the temperature at a set level, or, perhaps more recently, how self-driven cars keep themselves in the proper lane as they go down the highway, self-correcting as they negotiate turns and curves, and get buffeted back and forth by wind. At some point, Chuck had the epiphany that these same principles might apply when people try to make progress toward the goals they are striving to reach.

It was Chuck's insight that caused us to begin to recast the work we had been doing on self-awareness in terms of behavioral self-regulation. That is, the research findings on self-awareness were showing that the behaviors people engaged in were more closely aligned with their intentions and goals when they were more self-aware or more self-reflective. This sounded a lot like something a self-regulating system would do. The system would operate in a way that kept the person's behavior aligned with the endpoints the person was trying to achieve (e.g., the person's intentions, values, attitudes, and beliefs).

At some point, our thinking began to shift from what happens when goal pursuit is going smoothly to what happens when it's not going so smoothly. We began to think harder about what happens when people are engaged in goal-directed action and they are having a hard time making progress attaining what they want to attain.

The last chapter described several potential contributors to people's problems which seem to be implied by the self-regulatory model presented earlier in the book. The issues we addressed there were relatively straightforward. In this chapter we continue to consider problems, but we turn to issues that are more complex. In one fashion or another, these issues all relate to the notion of hierarchicality.

LINKS BETWEEN CONCRETE GOALS AND THE CORE VALUES OF THE SELF

Several potential problems stem directly from the idea that there are hierarchical links between action goals and the core principles and values that make up the self.

Hierarchicality as an Impediment to Disengagement

One of these problems concerns the expression of the disengagement impulse. In Chapter 12 we described difficulties in which doubt causes a person to experience an impulse to disengage from some goal but the person can't do so. We managed to avoid saying much there about why people are sometimes unable to give up. The test-anxious person remains committed to passing the exam, the socially anxious person remains committed to making a good impression, the mourning spouse remains committed to the lost relationship. Why can it be so hard to give up?

In 1981 we published a book in which we argued that feedback processes are important in the self-regulation of human behavior, that these processes underlie not just the body's internal maintenance activities, but even behavior that's consciously controlled. That book was a research monograph, reporting many experiments in detail. It was hard to read for plot.

Since 1981 we've realized that the line of thought we described there can be extended in several additional ways. This book revisits the themes of 1981 and adds several extrapolations from the earlier model – some our own, some developed by others. We discuss the latter in a way that's maximally compatible with our own ideas, to try to tell a coherent story. In doing this, we've tried not to do serious violence to ideas whose origins lie with people other than ourselves.

This book is in some respects a continuation of the earlier one. It's an easier read, partly because it's thinner on data. What dominates the stage in this book are ideas and speculations. This is very much a point-of-view book, and speculation plays a larger role here than in the earlier one. We've stretched to make connections across literatures, even where the links are tenuous. We hope these connections will cause you to consider some possibilities you might not otherwise have thought about.

To Whom This Book Is Written

We wrote this book to overview a set of ideas that we find interesting and useful about how behavior occurs in the behaving person.

Thus far in the book we've tried to build a conceptual edifice that portrays a self-regulating person, including problems. In this chapter we do something different. We raise the question of whether we've been leading you down a primrose path.

In our earlier discussions we evaded some questions. In this chapter we confront one of them, from several different angles (evading others successfully for the rest of the book). In particular, we've assumed that self-regulation at the level of our interest tends to involve something resembling an executive process. People form intentions to do things, then they go and do them. But is this assumption necessary? Is it a mistake?

Conceptual bases for raising this question occur in several literatures. The literatures are intriguing, and the points they make are very different from those made elsewhere in this book. We address three of them here: the literature of coordinations (which leads us back into the domain of dynamic systems), the literature of connectionism, and the literature of robotics (see Montefiore & Noble, 1989, for other views on these questions).

COORDINATION AND COMPLEXITY EMERGENT FROM SIMPLE SOURCES

The literature of coordinations focuses largely on coordination of physical movement. This literature is substantial, dealing with many interesting questions (e.g., Kugler & Turvey, 1987; Turvey, 1990), but our present interest is confined to a few of its themes.

Throughout our careers we've been interested in the structure of behavioral self-regulation. Sometimes when relatives or acquaintances ask us what we do for a living, we use that phrase. Often enough, what we get in return is a blank look. In truth, it's a pretty abstract phrase. It's hard to know what it means unless you already know what it means. The term self-regulation in itself says more than we intend. After all, control of such qualities as body temperature, blood pressure, and blood chemistry all represent self-regulation. But these aren't what we're interested in.

Even adding the qualifier behavioral to self-regulation doesn't entirely solve the problem. This leaves a door open to a large body of work on the regulation of physical action – motor control. There are links between the processes of motor control and the processes we focus on (to carry out any kind of behavior, you somehow have to translate the intent to act into actual movement). Yet the topics are different enough to draw a line between them. For the most part, movement control is outside our focus.

Behavioral self-regulation in this book concerns mostly behavior at the level of interest to personality–social (and health, organizational, clinical, and counseling) psychologists. The question we're interested in is how behavior – at that level of abstraction – happens. This restricts the topic a little. In another sense, though, we're using the word behavior broadly. We're interested both in action and in emotion.

To say that behavior is regulated by feedback processes is to assume the existence of reference values for behavior. In this chapter we consider reference values and some differences among them. For most practical purposes the term reference value is interchangeable with the term goal. Life, in this framework, is a continual process of establishing goals and adjusting patterns of behavior to match those goals more closely, using informational feedback as a guide.

GOALS

This emphasis on goals is very much in line with a growing emphasis on goal constructs in today's personality–social psychology (Austin & Vancouver, 1996; Elliott & Dweck, 1988; Miller & Read, 1987; Pervin, 1982, 1989). A variety of labels are used in this literature, reflecting differences in the emphases that various writers place on aspects of the goal construct. The next section briefly reviews a few of these constructs.

An Overview of Broad Goal Constructs

One of the earliest of this generation of goal constructs was Klinger's (1975, 1977) use of the phrase current concern to describe goals with which a person is presently engaged. This phrase conveys the sense that the goals are temporary. They occupy the mind for a while but eventually yield to other concerns. The phrase also suggests a sense of mental engagement with an issue or problem, a quality of unfinished business.

This book has focused on a particular way of thinking about how people live their lives. Although a few complexities came up along the way, the underlying idea is pretty simple: People live life by identifying goals and moving toward them, and by identifying anti-goals and staying away from them. Some goals reflect biological programming; others stem from conscious weighing of alternatives; others arise from dreams and fantasies and even from a self-organizing process of bootstrapping. Whatever their origins, these values are the constellations people use to guide their journey through life.

In this closing chapter we extend this way of thinking a step further, with the assertion that goal engagement is a necessity of life. There must be goals, striving toward one end or another, for life to continue. Without goal engagement, life ceases. As has been true more than once in this book, this assertion follows a path blazed by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960).

Our waking lives are filled with behavior. We haul ourselves out of bed each morning and set off for the day. We do much that's mundane and even trivial. Sometimes we do things we think are important at the moment but will later decide didn't matter much after all. Sometimes we do things that seem trivial at the time but will later seem more momentous. Occasionally our actions involve our core sense of self, though this is probably rare for most people. A lot of human behavior, after all, is an extended process of maintenance activity – buying groceries, washing dishes, driving from place to place to get things. Some behavior involves a lot of physical movement, but some of our most important behavior involves moving little more than our mouths and eyes.

FEEDBACK CONTROL IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR

In this chapter we argue that all these behaviors embody the processes of feedback control. We didn't invent this idea. Explicit statements about it go back at least to Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's (1960) book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (see also Hunt, 1965; MacKay, 1963, 1966; Powers, 1973a, 1973b), and ideas underlying it go back much further (chap. 3 of Miller et al., 1960, reviews the history of related thought). We're part of a second generation of psychologists who regard it as plausible.

Early Applications of Feedback Principles

The first theorists to argue for the idea that feedback processes are important in macro-level human behavior were Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960).

The two previous chapters addressed goals underlying behavior. We made several distinctions there, aimed mostly at conceptualizing differences between long-term and short-term goals, abstract and concrete goals. In this chapter we address another kind of distinction.

Here we reflect on the fact that some of the goals that lie behind behavior are private and personal. They don't take into account the wishes, desires, or sometimes even the existence of other people. In contrast, other goals explicitly take into account the wishes and desires of other people. This chapter focuses on the divergence between these classes of goals. There are several ways to take other people into account, and that's part of the story as well.

ASPECTS OF SELF

The themes of this chapter are rooted deeply in psychology – rooted not in the goal construct so much as in the concept of self. James (1890, pp. 292–305), discussing the idea that the self is multifaceted, distinguished between what he called the spiritual self and the social self. The spiritual self is the inner subjective being, the person's dispositions. It's the part of self that welcomes or rejects experiences.

&Our main interest is in the structure and processes of normal behavior. However, any view on normal behavior also suggests ways that functioning can go awry. The conceptualization we've presented here is no exception. It suggests several angles on dysfunctional behavior, which we examine in this chapter and the next. In them we consider ways in which processes outlined earlier can go off track, leading to difficulties (for views that are related to this but also differ in some ways, see Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996; Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994; Hamilton, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Cather, 1993; Kirschenbaum, 1987). In keeping with our overall strategy, we begin simply and then elaborate. The issues treated in this chapter are straightforward; Chapter 13 treats matters of greater complexity.

Some of the problems in people's lives stem from relatively simple snags in the self-regulatory process. These snags involve only the feedback loop and ways in which the effects of that loop can be disrupted. The problems are simple in structure, but not trivial in consequence.

REGULATING WITH THE WRONG FEEDBACK

Ours is a view in which people self-regulate their actions in order to keep on track in moving toward desired goals or intentions.