Applications of cybernetics to psychological theory: Historical and conceptual explorations

Abstract

This article outlines links between cybernetics and psychology through the black box metaphor using a tripartite narrative. The first part explores first-order cybernetic approaches to opening the black box. These developments run parallel to the decline of radical behaviorism and advancements in information processing theory and neuropsychology. We then describe how cybernetics migrates towards a second-order approach (expanding and questioning features of first-order inquiry), understanding applications of rule-based tools to sociocultural phenomena and dynamic mental models, inspiring radical constructivism, and also accepting social constructivism. Psychology, however, enters the cognitive revolution, adhering to the computer metaphor of first-order cyberneticians to streamline human consciousness. The article concludes by outlining how second-order cybernetic approaches emerging in the 1990s may provide cues to psychologists to adopt mixed methods, and bioecological models in the information age, uniting understandings of observable human activity, inner perceptions, and physiological processes across contexts to understand consciousness.

Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning, and population thinking in psychological science.

“…Likewise for the early 20th century physicists who introduced quantum mechanics and observed that the world of solid objects, gravity, and so-called physical reality is actually a vast web of interacting quantities of energy, whose properties exist only in interaction with other quantities (Di Biagio & Rovelli, 2021; Rovelli, 2020; van Fraassen, 2010). And, who knows, a scientific revolution may still be in the offing for the mid-20th century scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who conceived of cybernetics, systems theory, and eventually complexity theory and complex adaptive systems (for a brief history, see Tilak et al, 2022; and references therein).…”

Gordon Pask’s second-order cybernetics and Lev Vygotsky’s cultural historical theory: Understanding the role of the internet in developing human thinking

“…This falls in line with Bush's (1945) web of trails, which outlines how humans may interact with technologies, gain information, share it with others, and make analogies to their own experiences to decide further actions and thoughts. Bush's conception of distributed systems powered the internet's creation and foreshadowed personal computing (Tilak et al, 2022). Present internet algorithms provide information streams based on corporate interests.…”

“…While the 1960s and 70s saw inquiry into distributed human-machine interaction through systems like ARPAnet (an Internet prototype used by researchers to share ideas; Waldrop, 2018), second-order cybernetics faded into obscurity in social science after the Vietnam War, bifurcating from psychology (Tilak et al, 2022). Psychologists embraced input-output causality of information-based modelling during the Cognitive Revolution, prioritizing inner perceptions over observable experiences.…”

“…The word cybernetics is derived from the Greek word kybernetes , which refers to the act of steering (Wiener, 1961). While early cyberneticians or first-order cyberneticians aimed to create machines simulating mental processes to observe in a context-invariant manner, allowing systematization of the mind through input–output causality to meet the needs of a war-stricken American society (Tilak et al, 2022), second-order cybernetics, emerging in the 1970s, aimed to understand the viability of machines in dynamic social systems through interpreting moment-to-moment agentic feedback loops (Kline, 2020). The dichotomous lexicon of first- and second-order cybernetics is often considered a caricature of positions; second-order cybernetics embraces and expands the scope of first-order cybernetics, investigating latent characteristics of observed systems, but also social and cultural meanings they construct from information as they navigate social environments as observers (Scott, 2004).…”

Social Network Analysis as a Cybernetic Modelling Facility for Participatory Design in Technology-Supported College Curricula

“…With the Internet becoming a publicly available tool in the late 1990s (Boyd and Ellison 2007 ; Tilak and Glassman 2020 ), and the rapid expansion of corporatized new media technologies (Chavalarias 2016 ), tools such as social media produce cybernetic feedback loops that constantly influence human thinking and action on an ongoing basis, creating explore feeds and content that tries to reverse engineer preferences to drive revenue. Cybernetics is a transdiscipline that enables an understanding of how complex systems (brains, individuals, societies and even machines) adapt and react to moving social fields to exercise goal-oriented behavior (Flood and Carson 1993 ; Tilak et al 2022a ). When applied to the use of online technologies, cybernetics may expose the cognitive/social mechanisms and design parameters to create goal-oriented learning environments (Pangaro 2008 ) that foster nuanced reflection and perspective taking through the use of tools like social media (Tilak and Glassman 2022 ).…”