Control Processes and Self-Organization as Complementary Principles Underlying Behavior

This article 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 can reflect self-organizing tendencies.