Customer Reviews

Behavior: The Control of Perception

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This book presents a model of behavior and a way of analyzing and understanding behavior that should cause a major shift in how psychologists and other social scientists think about what causes us to do the things we do. In brief, you do things to control your perceptions so that they are in accordance with preferred states that you have -- preferred states such as your goals, values, and what you feel are appropriate ways of behaving in certain situations. Called "Perceptual Control Theory", the views presented in this book should be understood by anyone who seriously wishes to understand human behavior. Highly recommended, in particular, to scholars of human behavior.

Interesting book. Powers has some powerful arguments and some good evidence for his conclusions. However I think the evidence for the control of perception actually points somewhere else and not where Powers thinks it does. There is a confusion between the concept of variables and functions.