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.
An important inflection point in studying human behavior occurred after World War II, promoting the use of carefully calibrated machines that responded to input faster than humans. These systems were called black boxes, originating from the term given to the container housing the first experimental magnetron to arrive in the United States (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) from the United Kingdom. A standard definition of the black box suggests it is a system in which relationships between known inputs and outputs can be used to discern inner workings (Vladimirski, 2009). This definition was a realization of the initial assumption of cybernetics, stating that simplistic representations of conscious behavior can be formalized in machines.
The black box idea was modified through investigations into first-order and second-order cybernetics. Mathematician Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which began with differential equation-powered anti-aircraft fire (which used a feedback mechanism to anticipate enemies’ actions and respond with an attack), was adapted by first-order cyberneticians through the creation of mathematical models of neurons (Pitts–McCulloch), and synthetic brains (Ross Ashby), and by second-order cyberneticians through tools applied to interconnected social systems (Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, and Heinz von Foerster). As a result of these approaches, the black box became a metaphor employed to systematize processes of machines, brains, minds, and complex social environments (Petrick, 2020).
This theoretical paper suggests that the development of theory and research in psychology has been influenced by these morphing black box metaphors, leading to shifts in theoretical paradigms that study the mind. Our three-part article outlines how tensions and unities between first- and second-order cybernetics run parallel to developments in psychology until the cognitive revolution, and diverge as the information age approaches. Based on today’s dominant research practices in psychology, we provide directions for psychological research rooted in the as yet unrealized potentials of second-order cybernetics. We suggest that adopting psychological research approaches that incorporate elements of second-order cybernetics may allow for the examination of consciousness as a distributed process nested within interconnected social ecologies.
The first part of the article explores developments in first-order cybernetics that resulted in three approaches portended by Wiener, psychiatrist Ross Ashby, mathematician Walter Pitts, and neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, which were further diversified beginning with the Macy Conferences on cybernetics. We outline developments in psychology, like the Hixon Symposium (Jeffress, 1951) and the London Symposia on Information Theory (Kline, 2015), that highlight the primacy of neuropsychology and information processing and the decline of radical behaviorism, running parallel to Pitts–McCulloch’s radical, theoretical version of first-order cybernetics.
In the second part of the article, we outline the gradual emergence of second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, 1979/2003), which applies cybernetics to lived experiences and sociocultural phenomena. While the rumblings of second-order cybernetics began at the Macy Conferences (Pias, 2016) and from McCulloch’s laboratory, its formal rise began with polyglot electrical engineer Heinz von Foerster’s work at the Biological Computer Laboratory (Kline, 2020). Second-order cybernetics suggests humans compute knowledge as environments unfold, recursively creating information feedback loops, and inspired the emergence of radical constructivism. Psychology, rather than embracing second-order cybernetics and radical/social constructivism, entered the cognitive revolution, producing competing explanations of how human cognition can be decoded through the computer metaphor of first-order cybernetics, still expressed today. We conclude by suggesting that inquiries in second-order cybernetics conducted just before the 21st century may offer cues to psychological researchers to use mixed methods and nested models to explain consciousness.
First-order cybernetics and psychology
Early cybernetics: Wiener, Pitts, and McCulloch
Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, did not explicitly refer to black boxes until the 1960s, but his work suggests that black boxes could be studied by observers or human beings in a detached manner, by discerning input variables to decode their inner functioning (Petrick, 2020). In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked with MIT electrical engineer Vannevar Bush, who built high-speed analog machines to solve differential equations. Claude Shannon, Bush’s graduate assistant, crafted an upgrade for the analyzer (the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer), which used Boolean algebra to solve logic circuits (Kline, 2015). While Wiener scarcely interacted with Shannon, he credits him for developing a stream of inquiry parallel to cybernetics, called information theory, related to using coding theorems to efficiently transmit messages (in telegraph, telephones, and radio; Wiener, 1956).
Believing Bush’s machines could replicate human functions (Bennett, 1993), and driven by needs of a war-stricken American society, Wiener used differential equations to predict enemy flight trajectories and prepare reactionary fire in anti-aircraft fire systems (Mindell, 2002). In Cybernetics, Wiener (1961) suggests interactions between statistical functions and physical design predict proximal and distal results. He used this concept to add sophistication to his anti-aircraft fire systems, which blurred the line between human and machine. Psychologists like Edwin Boring, who wrote a letter to Wiener during World War II, became interested in the input–output causality shown by Wiener’s anti-aircraft fire, suggesting it may be used to study the mind. Boring’s letter describes the mind as a mysterious box with knobs and binding posts. Suggesting mental functions could be expressed as linear relationships, Boring hoped Wiener’s electrical systems could model such causality. Detailed records of later correspondences are scarce due to Wiener’s preference for face-to-face communication during the secrecy of World War II (Petrick, 2020). These interactions may have added nuance to Wiener’s thinking about mental models.
Wiener’s approach to studying mental models agreed with Skinner’s radical behaviorism, which suggests the environment guides behavior (Hof & Müggenburg, 2021). However, he attempted to transcend behaviorism, which suggests the mind is unknowable, claiming mental models are initially closed black boxes, understood by observing input–output relationships in a larger environment (Petrick, 2020). Citing the example of a device designed to chase luminous objects, Rosenblueth, et al. (1943) discuss the machine as initially modeled to perform this behavior, starting out as a closed black box. Its activity can be understood by exposure to photic stimuli and observing responses; missing a goal warrants designing more sophisticated equations. To Wiener, the nature and quality of environmental input (here, a flash of light) fed into black boxes affected output (Piccinini & Scarantino, 2011). The addition of nuance to input served to slowly open black boxes and provided insights to systematize functionalities of complex tools and mental models. Wiener’s realization led to different cybernetic approaches to understanding black boxes, both applied and theoretical.
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts took a radical theoretical stance on the nature of the black box of the brain (Petrick, 2020), aiming to operationalize the rule-based logic that represented a theoretical conception of neural activity. Fusing neurophysiological and mathematical concepts, they developed mathematical versions of threshold neurons (nerve-cells having fixed output responding to optimal electrochemical activity) with fewer connections, called McCulloch–Pitts neurons (Abraham, 2016). The first neural nets functioned in pairs, classified information (e.g., yellow objects), accounted for alternatives that didn’t fit criteria (other-colored objects), and typified using another network (Cowan & Sharp, 1988). They believed interconnected nets, accompanied by sufficient memory stores, could function at the capacity of universal Turing machines (abstract devices that determined limits and extents of computable information; Hodges, 2014), and make increasingly accurate predictions (see Figure 1). The McCulloch–Pitts approach assumes that computational processes of command-and-control units simulating brain activity can provide insights into abstract mental models.
The McCulloch–Pitts nets.
Wiener’s, McCulloch’s, and Pitts’ work was christened cybernetics (from κυβερνήτης/kybernḗtēs, meaning steersman or governor) in 1947. At the time, cybernetics (first-order cybernetics) referred to the capacity of systems (human and machine) to maintain stability through feedback loops (Wiener, 1961). A preliminary meeting discussing cybernetics began in 1942, in New York, funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Scholars, including McCulloch and physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, gathered to understand the central nervous system. Wiener was not present, but was a pivotal part of subsequent meetings until 1952 (Dupuy, 2009). During the post-war period, he began to shift in his ideas about modeling human behavior in wartime machines.
The post-war shift in Wiener’s thinking
After the war, Weiner’s focus shifted from arms-related inquiry. He began to doubt applications of command-and-control units to social systems (Dupuy, 2009). Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other atrocities during World War II motivated him to withdraw access to his equations used to predict enemy aircraft trajectories from manufacturers like the Boeing Aircraft Company (Wiener & Pach, 1983). Collaborating with Pitts and McCulloch, Wiener applied his differential equations to mundane problems in mathematics and communication (the telegraph), believing both human action with tools and the tools themselves influence one another (Pias, 2005).
While machines could reproduce simplistic aspects of behavior, Wiener was aware the mind could handle spontaneous information/events, unlike a machine, which replicates behaviors in compressed timeframes. In his book, God and Golem, Inc., Wiener (1964) recounts a story, the “Monkey’s Paw,” that highlights this idea. A father wishes upon a strange totem for £200, causing his son’s death in a factory accident; promptly followed by the delivery of a £200 solatium. The man and his wife wish their son back, summoning a ghostly knock at the door, followed by a third wish for the ghostly presence to leave. The story suggests that magic is “literal minded,” requiring conditions to function in ways appropriate to human functioning just like anti-aircraft fire requires specific input each time to save a pilot’s life. The human mind may more readily associate intentionality with information (a doctor would perform surgery on patients even with simple instructions to “cure them”).
Wiener’s belief in the role of intentions/experience to understand machine and human activity were reflected at the Macy conferences on cybernetics. He and other Macy attendees investigated alternative outcomes in human systems through applied machines. Wiener’s (1949/2016) paper on sensory prostheses for visual and hearing impairments proposes machines integrating the vicissitudes of the environment. The visual aid aimed at improving spatial awareness through implements manipulated by hand, relaying impulses to the ears, guiding movement. The second prosthesis, a hearing glove, converted sound into electrical impulses delivered onto users’ hands, allowing translation of signals into words with practice. Using these machines creates cycles encouraging initial movement/behavior, training subsequent actions (understood as well-defined flows of information) in the environment.
The technologies created by Wiener adopt a moderate approach to first-order cybernetics compared to the McCulloch–Pitts nets. While Wiener used input–output causality to understand how applied machines prepared reactions to the environment, the neural nets aimed to directly decode brain activity in a context-invariant manner using mathematical models. The radical McCulloch–Pitts approach found expression at important psychology conferences like the Hixon symposium.
First-order cybernetics and the Hixon symposium
Analogies made by McCulloch–Pitts between human thought and software gained traction post-World War II, inspiring neuropsychologists and radical behaviorists to pursue empirical understandings of consciousness. Their reasons for relying on cybernetics differed. Neuropsychologists believed the mind, or black box, was transparent and its nature discernible (Petrick, 2020), believing electroencephalographies (EEG) surpassed reinforcement. Radical behaviorists considered the mind an opaque, unknowable black box (Hof & Müggenburg, 2021). They appreciated first-order cybernetics’ focus on cause–effect processes to understand mental activity, but believed the environment predicted conscious action. Skinner’s novel, Walden Two, suggests contexts steer humans towards success by collectively engineering proximal environments. This helps humans better understand their position within complexities of social environments (Altus & Morris, 2009). Wiener’s cybernetics aimed to extend behavioristic studies of machine and human adaptation using the functional approach exhibited by his light-chasing device (Rosenblueth et al., 1943).
Important psychology conferences like the Hixon symposium (1948) in Pasadena were dominated by neurophysiological explanations of consciousness (Jeffress, 1951). Computer scientist John von Neumann and McCulloch spoke at Hixon, outlining how logical devices replicated neural processes, fascinating the neuropsychologists in attendance. Moderators Karl Lashley and Wolfgang Kohler organized Hixon to integrate radical behaviorism and neuropsychology. However, newly expressed assumptions about machines/human thinking changed the ramifications of the conference (Miller, 2003), marking the beginning of radical behaviorism’s decline in the United States.
Presentations by neuropsychologists at Hixon tried to explain mental models through brain research. Ward Halstead discussed problems related to defining task quality and abstraction due to frontal lobe abnormalities. Heinrich Klüver presented primate studies showing that temporal lobe lesions result in consequences such as psychic blindness and oral fixation (Jeffress, 1951). Psychologists believed controlled experiments predicted how circumstances/afflictions guided behavior. These developments embody computational (Gardner, 1987) approaches to human thinking championed by McCulloch and Pitts. Some skepticism towards such understandings was shown by neuropsychologist Hans Lukas Teuber, who attended the cybernetic Macy sessions and coedited the 1952 meeting (Pias, 2016). In his letter to McCulloch, he doubted robot models of the brain simulated neural activity; suggesting these models remained just that: abstract models (Kline, 2015).
As psychology developed a fascination with computational and mathematical brain models claiming to provide direct insights into mental functioning, cybernetics shifted its focus. Integrating fields like anthropology, linguistics, epistemology, and psychology into cybernetics during the Macy sessions enabled questioning the scope for designed tools to generate predictable outcomes in social contexts.
Integrating social science into cybernetics
Interdisciplinarity at the Macy conferences on cybernetics
The Macy conferences on cybernetics were an important turning point for systems research. The sessions, attended by Wiener and chaired by McCulloch, encouraged interdisciplinary research combining the current ideas in computer-generation, medicine, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology. Ten meetings were organized over 7 years to create a theory of information to be operationalized in the study of machines, biological organisms, and social systems (Pias, 2016). The conferences provided a space for information theory and cybernetics to intersect with social and biological sciences (Kline, 2015). Some papers discussed applications of feedback loops to machines of varying complexity, aligning well with first-order cybernetics. Shannon (1951/2016) presented his maze-running mouse, Theseus (Gallager, 2001), that could adaptively learn to solve mazes when obstacles were altered, switching between two modes (finding goals, exploring new paths) to gather and relay information. Theseus embraces McCulloch–Pitts’ approach, treating the black box as discernible from the outset by creating devices resembling modern-day machine learning.
Psychiatrist Ross Ashby’s (1952/2016) presentation reformulated Wiener’s black box. Ashby and Wiener met at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol in 1951. They formulated the black box as a physical and mathematical concept. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Ashby initially wrote to Wiener suggesting the use of high-order differential equations to find the parameters necessary to build a black box (a brain model). Wiener responded to Ashby, suggesting creation of a physical prototype of a black box (Petrick, 2020). This led Ashby to work on building self-organizing machines that responded to the environment to reach stability.
At the 1952 Macy session, Ashby discussed the result of his efforts; the homeostat (see Figure 2). It was constructed from military surplus parts, comprising four electromagnets topped with manipulable vanes dipped in water troughs and linked through electrical circuits. Each unit had electrical output determined by the position of the vane in the trough. When one vane was manipulated (representing the environment), others (organisms) would react to outputs produced, driving the machine into action through dynamic feedback interrelations, until it became ultrastable, with each vane at the ideal position (Pickering, 2010). The homeostat represents a system interacting with its environment to gain equilibrium (e.g., an individual’s retina works best at certain illumination); what Ashby (1952) termed adaptation (see Figure 3). Ashby’s black box created a simplified physical representation of the environment’s effects on an organism to experiment on and decode the strategies they use to regulate themselves.
Ashby’s homeostat.
Adaptation.
Ashby’s first-order cybernetics, which slightly differs from Wiener’s, suggests mental models are somewhat knowable (partially transparent black box), claiming rudimentary aspects are understood through physical representation in machines like the homeostat. Environmental/social input changed Ashby’s (1952) black box, leading environments, mental representations, and behaviors to be triadically reciprocal, like in Bandura’s social learning (1960s) and social cognitive theories (late 1980s), which acknowledge reliance on homeostatic cybernetic models (Bandura, 1993). Ashby cites the example of a kitten learning to hunt mice by trial and error to explain how adherence of reactionary behavior to certain parameters decides quality of adaptation. The kitten’s state after responding to stimuli would produce a new black box, changing behavior and the kitten’s relationship to the environment. While Ashby’s approach differs from Wiener’s, he too balances steering human agency through ascertaining mental models, and leaving behavior open to emergent events.
Wiener and Ashby represent two moderate first-order approaches. While they do not directly acknowledge the observer, they suggest the implicit presence of the scientist who chooses input variables to guide self-organization through feedback loops. Wiener’s and Ashby’s approaches required diversification to explain causality in interconnected social systems. This possibility was entertained by incorporating humanistic disciplines into the cybernetic Macy sessions. Anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead advocated for the inclusion of social scientists in idea development (Kline, 2015). Psychologists like Joseph C. R. Licklider (1950/2016) presented on language; investigating how qualitative differences (based on nature of speech, familiarity) and sonic distortions (in sound waves) produced in communication change knowledge uptake. Sessions led by von Foerster (1949/2016) and Mead (1950/2016) began to suggest shifts in cybernetics, towards understanding the role of pragmatic action in adaptive navigation.
von Foerster and Mead on memory and language
Von Foerster (1949/2016) theorized a phenomenological, psychological, and biophysical model of memory. His ideas speak to human development in context. Comparing measured e-functions for forgetting eventually regressing to zero, and Ebbinghaus’s curve for remembrance of nonsense-variables in memory experiments (see Figure 4), von Foerster explained how individual differences in motivation/affect manipulate remembrance, delaying a decay-curve. He characterized memories as distinct packets of information internalized from environments. For instance, a traumatic or poignant experience starts in the environment in how it affects us and populates the unconscious. It is reexternalized, consciously, unconsciously, or both (never in totality), to negotiate later environments. Memories never completely vanish. New information enters the mind, based on emergent feedback, modeling future thinking on prior consequences. Memory becomes adaptive, supplemented by experience, rather than based in arbitrary mathematical equations. In von Foerster’s work, changing psychological states and external ecologies guide knowledge selection.
Simplified representation of von Foerster’s memory model.
Situational understandings of knowledge development were also reflected in Mead’s (1950/2016) conference session about learning ancient languages like Balinese. Languages, like technology, are cultural tools that help us to navigate our realities. They have common roots (English has Latin and Germanic elements). Valuing others’ experiences becomes imperative for anthropologists. Using language in context is familiarized through immersion into foreign cultures. To Mead, learning languages becomes less about taking up grammar from a tool providing fixed knowledge and more about adaptive insights gained by interacting in a dynamic, distributed context. Words/social cues are internalized as rules, externalized to initiate broken conversations, incrementally augmenting linguistic/social nuance.
Recalling experiences learning Balinese, Mead (1950/2016) explained colloquialisms used by individuals from different social strata. Mutual understanding is developed through observing differentiation in language. Fluency requires high-level abstraction, matching the capacity of young children for whom expansion of social cues is a priority for adaptation. Upon requests from a curious anthropologist, a child may repeat words without annoyance until situated understandings are achieved. Like children, anthropologists/tourists seeking mastery in indigenous languages must engage in agentic learning and see how environments react to the knowledge they possess. This assists equilibrium within larger social systems. Von Foerster’s and Mead’s presentations highlighted how unearthing the role of the environment, and the nature of mental representations, becomes contingent on experience.
With the Macy sessions, cybernetics began gauging how humans adapt to environmental uncertainties through lived action. McCulloch invited von Foerster to be part of the Macy sessions (Pias, 2005) to help create algorithms/machines to render the black box transparent. First-order cyberneticians treated systems as modifiable to meet fixed goals. Von Neumann applied cybernetics to digital computers, creating von Neumann Machines, which made increasingly accurate approximations (Pias, 2005). Von Foerster, however, suggests mathematical formulae only approximate feedback in living systems, leaving development of consciousness open to endless outcomes.
The possibility for a metanarrative that treats organisms as systems interacting recursively with tools and environments (Heylighen & Joslyn, 2001) spurred gradual migration towards second-order cybernetics. Ashby expressed his views about distributed understandings of the black box in a 1955 journal entry (Petrick, 2020). He responded to developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner’s question about representing interpersonal relationships using black boxes, saying new approaches that examine how interacting humans/observers could be black boxes that perceive and interpret each other’s sensory input must be developed, but doubted it would lead to concrete results. Following doubts surrounding the study of interconnected systems, events like the Dartmouth Conference solidified the computer metaphor in studying the mind, leading to the primacy of information processing in psychology.
Dartmouth and the computer metaphor
While a new systems approach began to emerge from the Macy sessions, psychology maintained a reliance on first-order cybernetics. Neuropsychologists continued using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure nervous activity from physiological output rather than studying abstraction. Photic flicker experiments driving cortical activity at frequency of stimuli were expanded by neuropsychologists like George Ullett, who aimed to unearth the role of anxiety in responses to stimuli using self-report scales (Ellingson, 1956). As radical behaviorism declined, psychology shifted from being the “science of behavior” to being the “science of mental life” (Crowther-Heyck, 1999). Events like the Dartmouth Conference led cognitive psychologists to take inspiration from computerized brain models, believing mental constructs could be formalized in machines, solidifying information processing theory.
Dartmouth formed a tipping point for tensions between black box perspectives, causing divergence between those developing intelligently behaving rule-based systems and those studying how machines and humans negotiated their environments through self-organization (Umpleby, 2005). Organized by mathematician John McCarthy through the Rockefeller Foundation, Dartmouth was attended by scholars influenced by cybernetics. McCarthy held a broad view of computing, much like Wiener. Earlier in the 1950s, McCarthy worked with Shannon on editing volume 34 of the Annals of Mathematical Studies, called Automata Studies. The volume invited papers from cyberneticians like von Neumann and Ashby. McCarthy had mixed responses to the submissions, saying they took conservative steps towards executing human-like decision-making in machines. He was initially hesitant to publish Ashby’s paper on an intelligence amplifier (a self-organizing system measuring intelligence as steps taken towards stability), but ended up accepting it upon initiation of conflict by Ashby, and subsequent discussions with Shannon. McCarthy expressed some interest in von Neumann’s complex neural networks for probabilistic decision-making, which sought to investigate complex mental models.
Tensions with Shannon, who viewed submissions to the volume more positively, led McCarthy to organize the Dartmouth Conference to escape association with cybernetics and to focus on his vision for artificial intelligence; technology employing algorithms to make adaptive decisions faster than humans (Kline, 2010). Despite McCarthy’s distance from the cybernetic problem, scholars like von Neumann greatly influenced organizers of the conference, such as graduate student Marvin Minsky. Minsky suggested the advent of digital computers presented ambitious opportunities to reproduce human behavior digitally, surpassing minimal machines like the homeostat. He called for logical explanations of human behavior based on closed feedback loops of neurophysiological processes, proposing to present his dissertation on trial-and-error neural networks in a computer.
Cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon agreed with Minsky, suggesting complex problem-solving could be understood by replicating its simplest components using command-and-control devices (Deffenbacher & Brown, 1973). Simon, and theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky, also attended the 1956 Symposium on Information Theory at MIT (Friesen & Feenberg, 2007). Chomsky suggested the mind comprises a built-in language-acquisition device (LAD) that helps children compute universal grammatical systems. Intersections between psychology, computer science, and linguistics favored the McCulloch–Pitts approach, treating black boxes as composed of discernible elements adhering to rule-based systems, rather than gauging semantic qualities of information (Piccinini & Scarantino, 2011).
McCarthy was doubtful about using robotic models to understand mental activity. He warned that they limited capacity to tap into higher order abstraction. He proposed investigating relationships between language and intelligence to see how symbolic representations help solve problems that need critical thinking. McCarthy’s vision for integrated conceptions of computing and human behavior was overshadowed by computational approaches. With 10 documented attendees, and the absence of physicist Donald Mackay, who researched limitations of analog computers, Dartmouth narrowed conceptions of cybernetics to focus on neural nets and self-organizing machines.
Following Dartmouth and the 1956 Symposium, cognitive psychologists became fascinated with machines that provided insight into storage, accession, and transformation of different forms of symbolic knowledge, strengthening information processing theory. Ulric Neisser suggested subjects understood information by creating mental representations that matched stimuli (Gardner, 1987). George Sperling (1960) expanded Neisser’s ideas by investigating the storage capacity of iconic memory. Saul Sternberg’s (1966) experiments indicated that increasing items to recall in memory tests produced higher processing times, pointing to possibilities for serial information storage in the mind. George Miller (1967) added specificity to these ideas through findings that suggested input exceeding seven (plus/minus two) items (e.g., numbers) produced higher inaccuracy in recall. Cause–effect understandings based on the computer metaphor were believed to give psychology a basis in hard science (Crowther-Heyck, 1999), stressing that mental architecture could be unearthed by studying well-defined flows of information through the mind. Information processing adopted a moderate approach that ran parallel to Wiener’s, seeking to open initially closed black boxes through inferential studies of causality between varied input and behavioral output in the environment (Maron, 1965).
The 1950s and 1960s fostered cross-disciplinary connections between psychology, neuroscience, and computer science to decipher the mind’s workings, spurring the cognitive revolution. As computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, and neuropsychologists peered into the black box to streamline society, some Macy attendees (Mead, von Foerster, Bateson) suggested humans manipulate both tools and interconnected social systems to adapt to emergent information (Sato, 1991). While Ashby’s 1955 response to Bronfenbrenner suggested mild skepticism over observing interconnected systems, scholars like von Foerster extended Ashby’s approach by applying technologies to social systems. The vision for a new cybernetics began to take formal shape through inquiries conducted by von Foerster and his colleagues who visited the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC).
Second-order cybernetics and its bifurcation from psychology
The biological computer laboratory
The biological computer laboratory’s beginnings: Adherence to first-order cybernetics
After a sabbatical year working with McCulloch, von Foerster commenced work as professor of electrical engineering in 1958 and headed the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at UIUC (Müller, 2011). Multidisciplinary faculty worked at the BCL. First-order cyberneticians like Ashby held professorial positions. Notable visiting researchers included psychologist Gordon Pask, operations research scientist Stafford Beer, and biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Von Foerster established the laboratory through a grant from the Office of Naval Research, but most funding in the growth phase came from the Air Force, and the National Science Foundation. These organizations believed biological processes could be replicated in complex electronic systems (guided missiles, other Cold War implements; Kline, 2015).
Initially, the BCL developed machines that mimicked electrical nerve activity (Müller, 2011). A good example is the Numa-rete, developed by von Foerster and doctoral student Paul Weston, which imitated the retina, counting objects in its visuospatial field (Müggenburg, 2019). While initial work tended towards Ashby’s first-order cybernetics, a shift occurred when von Foerster began collaborating with Humberto Maturana.
Maturana’s influence
The BCL slowly started focusing on human systems or “observers” as active agents in using machines. These ideas, labeled “deviant hypotheses” (Müller, 2011), are attributed to Humberto Maturana’s involvement after meeting von Foerster at a conference in Europe. Maturana posits electrochemical nerve activity leads to impulses in bounded cycles, producing physiological output. Neurophysiological processes resemble a closed system (e.g., touching a hot plate causes the response of withdrawal, providing relief. This experience, abstracted by the mind, alerts us to be careful next time). Stored information may or may not alter future behavior contingent on the environment’s later offerings. Lived experiences guide mental models and behavior.
Memory changes with experience, affecting future feedback loops with the environment. Each external situation leads to specific neuronal firing, leading to abstraction and language responding to each event, rather than functioning like an equation producing fixed results. Intelligent behavior is adaptive, generated through neuronal connections responding to particular instances. Without situating action produced from neuronal activity in context, connections may appear unsynchronized. Nervous systems are organizationally closed, but structurally coupled with sociocultural environments (Mingers, 1991). This theory of organization is called autopoiesis (see Figure 5).
Autopoiesis.
Productive arguments with Maturana led von Foerster to inquire how language assisted adaptive navigation. Knowledge internalized through language is used to learn about the environment and to act on it as events unfold. This shift led to the creation of collective databases to augment knowledge, operationalizing Vannevar Bush’s postwar ideas for a web of trails.
The web of trails and von Foerster’s Direct Access Intelligence System
In his 1945 piece in The Atlantic titled “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush recounted events from World War II, suggesting physicists and engineers changed their values during this period to create destructive military gadgets (Bush, 1945). After the war, Bush envisioned recasting roles played by these scientists. A possible redirection of competencies involved creating translucent screens with keyboards to organize information. The human mind, rather than using alphanumeric typologies, classifies information conceptually. Indexing systems, termed memex by Bush, may assist humans to access and relate to different sources, creating complex webs of trails.
Individuals interacting with the memex disseminate information via discourse. Someone interested in antiquarian pottery may scan information from the memex and show it to a friend with similar interests. The memex extends information into larger social ecologies, allowing technology to support human internationalities. The web of trails may have been a response to neural nets developed by Pitts and McCulloch. Rather than solely providing predictions and learning from input, they allow human beings to coconstruct knowledge using technology and language, representing evolving mental models. Bush proposed that machines may not only learn from humans, but can also remold human minds, suggesting the trails of both humans and computers were interlinked (Barnet, 2008).
Bush’s ideas for distributed computing influenced development of several information technologies (e.g., Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center; Glassman, 2012). The first commercial computers were created in 1951, expanding into personal computing through efforts of Macy attendees like Licklider, who suggested computers assisted human problem-solving through access to information. Licklider’s vision of a knowledge-sharing universe, and Bush’s memex, inspired the ARPANet (Advanced Research Project Agency Net) of the 1960s, used by researchers working for the Department of Defense to share ideas (Waldrop, 2018). Modern-day web pages, and technology like hyperlinks (data accessed by clicking) and hypertext (nonsequential annotation for idea sharing; Nelson, 1987) echo this ethos of distributed, technology-mediated interaction.
Productive human–tool transactions were investigated in later BCL research. In 1970, von Foerster wrote a grant for a Direct Access Intelligence System (DAIS), a database of collective knowledge organizing ideas based on semantic relationships using algorithms (von Foerster, 1970). Like the memex, binary logic created connections between data to spur meaningful relationships between concepts. Other BCL researchers, like psychologist Gordon Pask and operations research scientist Stafford Beer, began creating similar interfaces, attempting applications of cybernetics to lived experiences.
Beer, Pask, and the end of the BCL
Beer and Pask were second-generation cyberneticians of the 1960s and 1970s. They worked to expand Ashby’s ideas about biological computers in the 1950s and 60s in Great Britain. A project they worked on involved creating “fungoid” whisker systems of artificial neurons to be trained to perform sensory functions (like discerning frequencies of sound). Their projects were unsuccessful in finding a biological organism whose physical essence/behavior could be used to create a synthetic brain (Pickering, 2010).
Both scholars became interested in social applications of cybernetics. Beer wished to apply cybernetics to operations research, to streamline industrial functioning (Pickering, 2002). Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) suggests organizations function like humans, possessing a plastic nervous system with five organizational levels (Pickering, 2010). The first consists of work at lower organizational levels, communicated between departments of workers. In case of conflict, System 2 (likened to the sympathetic nervous system) relays information to higher management. Another facet of System 2, analogous to the parasympathetic nervous system, may send emergency information to higher levels during crisis. System 3 comprised an operations research group (likened to the pons and medulla) to resolve emergencies. System 4 corresponded to the diencephalon and ganglia (which relay sensory information), comprising computational devices storing performance-related information, managed by humans. Beer modeled System 4 around a World War II Operations Room. System 5, analogous to the cortex, comprised deliberations by directors/leaders to discuss metalevel, big-picture issues.
Each system was reciprocally coupled to every other. For example, information or suggestions from System 4 may be rejected by operations researchers in System 3, looking at the strain it might place on workers of System 1. Rather than mechanization applied to separate departments, Beer used the metaphor of the human nervous system to spur synergic interaction between organization members. While mechanization formed part of the VSM, through its importance in System 4, the framework suggests that digital representational models could be adapted by observing relationships to actual performance. Beer applied the VSM to Project Cybersyn, during Salvador Allende’s (the first democratically elected socialist President) rule in Chile, to provide daily factory-production data and tools the government could use through human–machine interaction to predict and discuss future economic outcomes (Medina, 2011). A military coup ending Allende’s rule (and his life) led to the abandonment of Cybersyn in 1973.
While Beer sought to understand industrial functioning, Pask applied cybernetics to the arts and to teaching/learning. Devices like Musicolor treated sound from musical performances as input to produce light shows, responding pragmatically by “becoming bored” in case of a monotone performance, incorporating agencies of users and audiences to gauge responses. In his teaching and training machines, Pask initially focused on nonverbal skills, designing the Solartron Adaptive Keyboard Instructor (SAKI), offering simulated training to aspiring keyboard operators (Pickering, 2010).
In the 1960s and 70s, Pask (1976) called upon concepts from Conversation Theory (see Figure 6) to craft teaching devices supporting representational information. Systems like INTUITION required students to create data visualizations or entailment structures to connect concepts. Conversation theory suggests ideas are exchanged, evaluated, and reformulated through action and shared language in learning environments. Interfaces and instructors provide guidance through top-down knowledge (Pangaro, 2017). This treats knowledge as emergent from nonhierarchical communication. Pask takes Piaget’s cognitive constructivism, which suggests objective realities are constructed within the mind, and places it in social contexts (Scott, 2001; like developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who treats knowledge construction as collaborative transactions between individuals).
Conversation theory.
In the mid-1970s, as cybernetics tended towards the sociocultural, it became difficult for the BCL to acquire funding. Incursions into Cambodia during the Vietnam War resulted in student unrest across U.S. universities. This led to concerns about activism creating incivilities by leaving the nature of consciousness open to interpretation, resulting in the Mansfield Amendment, which caused projects distally related to national defense to lose military funding (Umpleby, 2005). Von Foerster applied for retirement in 1974. The laboratory closed in 1976. During this period, von Foerster coined the term second-order cybernetics, and subsequently collaborated with anthropologist Gregory Bateson.
Second-order cybernetics and the cognitive revolution
von Foerster, Bateson, and the observer
The concept of “second-order cybernetics” is often traced back to 1959, when “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” was published by McCulloch’s MIT Laboratory (Lettvin et al., 1959). The article discussed how the eye does not pass fixed representations of the environment to the frog, but filters facets important to survival (e.g., ability to spot insects in the dark). Maturana expanded these ideas in Chile with graduate student Francisco Varela to develop autopoiesis. Von Foerster provided a short definition of second-order cybernetics, agreeing with Maturana’s theory and Pask’s ideas about the development of thinking through interaction in a resource handbook for a course he offered at the BCL in 1974. He called it the “cybernetics of observing systems,” operationalized in understanding cognition, dialogue, and sociocultural phenomena (Kline, 2020), pivotal to studying human consciousness.
Post-retirement, von Foerster worked with anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who had recently published Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). With Bateson, von Foerster contributed to research at the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute. In the late 1960s, Bateson’s former wife (Lipset, 1982), Margaret Mead (1968), suggested applying cybernetics to urban planning, government, economics, and industry. Bateson’s cybernetics provides deeper meaning to Mead’s suggestions, outlining development of thinking as guided by linguistic and pragmatic processes between connected systems (humans, machines, societies) rather than mechanical input and output. He also alludes to Wiener’s ideas (suggesting second-order cybernetics expands circular causality of first-order ideas), suggesting input and output are part of a larger system comprising organisms and interactions with the environment (Kline, 2020). Bateson (1979) suggests “Mind” constitutes transformation of information in interlinked systems (machines, humans, societies) into coded versions through cyclical chains of determination, leading classifications of mental events to have sociocultural properties immanent within experience and within the social world.
In “Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” von Foerster (1979/2003) suggests experiences of observers are nested within individuals, and in environments, like Bateson. First-order cyberneticians fail by excluding changing psychological/emotional states of observers in ideas about human thinking/technology, relying on predictions rooted in closed feedback loops of the nervous system. Individuals’ characteristics make external observations possible. Von Foerster extended Maturana’s proclamation, “anything said is said by an observer,” by saying “anything said is said to an observer,” thus bringing human experience into the cybernetic problem.
McCulloch–Pitts’ radical first-order cybernetics understands nervous activity through rule-based logic (Kline, 2020). While Wiener and Ashby’s moderate first-order cybernetics implicitly considers the observer in understanding the black box, second-order cybernetics treats users of cultural tools as a black box capable of conversing with tools to adaptively meet their needs (von Foerster, 1979/2003). It embraces, and simultaneously extends, first-order cybernetics in an attempt to achieve the new framework to be employed in the study of distributed systems, as envisioned in Ashby’s reflective responses to Bronfenbrenner (Petrick, 2020). Rule-based systems assist with approximating truth, but variable human agency in the environment is contingent on emergent experience. Tools, environments, and observers are recursively coupled black boxes (see Figure 7).
Second-order cybernetics.
Integrating emergent experience into the cybernetics equation(s) points towards new approaches to psychology following the development of thinking. Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (2013) radical constructivism, for instance, emerged in 1984 and appreciates von Foerster’s cyclical coupling of observers and observed systems. It suggests each individual is capable of authentic interactions, leading to distinct mental models. Neurological processes and innate tendencies responding to perturbation guide adaptation. Advancement of thinking need not adhere to logical operators (individuals traverse distinct paths) but may lead to social equilibrium.
The obscurity of second-order cybernetics and radical constructivism was contextualized by governmental regulation during the Vietnam War. Consequently, varied cognitivist psychological approaches of the 1970s adhered to the computer metaphor to streamline human consciousness, rather than chasing the inconstancy of emergent mental activity. This manifested in competing approaches aiming to peer into the black box.
The Sloan initiatives: Psychology’s divergence from cybernetics
The Sloan Initiatives (beginning in 1976) were a tumultuous turning point for psychology. The initiatives attempted to establish interdisciplinary understandings of effects of experience on cognition by uniting anthropology, linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and neuroscience (Gardner, 1987). The 1978 reports describe the need for complete understandings of the black box by studying subjective abstraction and neurophysiological mechanisms behind mental representations. Psychological texts of the era, like Ulric Neisser’s Cognition and Reality (1976) investigated issues humans encounter in their lives, as they form new concepts about a dynamic world. According to Neisser, human development produces schemas/plans for perceptual action that change as experiences unfold, requiring application to different situations. The Sloan Initiatives called for such approaches aiming to understand how mental representations guided experience in social systems (Keyser et al., 1978). However, the programs were panned by those seeking cause–effect explanations of mental models, who adhered to the computer metaphor portended by first-order cybernetics. This led to the peak of the cognitive revolution.
The 1970s and 1980s gave rise to varied psychological theories to ascertain individual differences in the development of mental models. David Rumelhart’s (1975) work in understanding how humans process stories expanded Neisser’s schemas, saying that individuals schematize information based on previous narratives they have read, constantly updating expectations for the nature of any fictional/nonfictional text. The individual and new information from the environment must be considered as a system in Rumelhart’s approach, demystified by observing how input and outputs are related, like Wiener’s first-order cybernetics.
Psychologists like Albert Bandura (1993), who explicitly acknowledges reliance on cybernetic models, developed a social-cognitive approach. The Bobo Doll experiment, wherein experimenters asked children to play with a large doll after watching violent and friendly adults interacting with it, indicates that the environment affects mental representations and resultant behavior. Someone’s mental functioning can be understood by observing the quality of vicarious reinforcement they receive when they react to specific contexts. Social-cognitive theory formed a key part of the cognitive revolution, suggesting schematization involves reciprocal interaction between cognition, behavior, and environment (Bandura, 1977), much like interrelations in Ashby’s synthetic brains (Pickering, 2010). Both information processing and social-cognitive theory align with moderate approaches to first-order cybernetics.
The Sloan Initiatives aimed to understand intelligent behavior through a multidisciplinary lens, like the Macy Conferences on cybernetics. With the cognitive revolution, psychologists began to accept that mental representations differed with individual experience. However, they continued to rely on the computer metaphor, assuming rule-based systems provide adequate explanations of the breadth of human thought and action. This led to a computerized crisis in psychology that found expression in today’s information age, wherein competing theories about the appropriate nature of mental representations arise, based on input–output causality rather than understanding unfolding experiences in distributed systems.
Second-order cybernetics evolved differently; suggesting environments and mental models interact through recursive feedback loops (von Foerster, 1979/2003). It investigated these possibilities by creating technologies integrating both human agency and rule-based systems. The cybernetics of cybernetics suggests human behavior cannot be predicted solely, or even primarily, through algorithms approximating neural processes; it must also be studied by observing development of thinking in unfolding environments, and accounting for alternate possibilities (adopting ideas akin to social and radical constructivism). Second-order cybernetics bifurcates from psychology in the cognitive revolution, owing to psychology’s objective to define individual mental representations and steer society towards well-defined outcomes.
Our narrative suggests developments in psychology run parallel to cybernetics until the cognitive revolution. In the last section, we trace psychology’s continued reliance on the machine metaphor to peer into the black box in the information age. These developments are contextualized by the disappearance of second-order cybernetics into obscurity, and the expansion of information technologies such as satellites and computers (Kline, 2020). Finally, we outline how second-order cybernetics can be operationalized in psychological research, to better decode human consciousness.
Psychology and cybernetics in the information age
The history of cybernetics reveals the black box is a contested metaphor. Relationships between first- and second-order cybernetics involve both unity and disunity. While second-order cybernetics is oft interpreted as opposing the radical McCulloch–Pitts approach, its origins are traced back to McCulloch’s laboratory’s investigation of a frog’s vision; ideas that inspired Maturana’s autopoiesis (Mingers, 1991), and von Foerster’s cybernetics of cybernetics (Müller, 2011). Beer and Pask are also emblematic of this checkered cybernetic history; their initial studies of organisms to use as blueprints for Ashby’s synthetic brains were extended to understand real-time phenomena in management and teaching contexts (Pickering, 2010). Bateson too, includes Wiener’s ideas about treating flows of information through the mind as part of a larger system, but suggests journeys towards opening the black box are open to infinite possibilities illuminated through evolving interconnected experiences (Kline, 2020). The unity of second-order cybernetics with Ashby and Wiener’s ideas suggests that it both embraces and looks to extend first-order cybernetics. Second-order cybernetics does peer into the black box to gain general approximations about mental functioning, but liberates itself from the machine metaphor by adopting pragmatic understandings of consciousness nested within complex social environments.
While cybernetics pieces humanistic and mechanistic approaches together, dominant frameworks in psychology have adopted the computer metaphor of first-order cyberneticians to formalize mental processes (Gardner, 1987). Psychologists try to ascertain, and often contest, what mental perceptions comprise using several competing theories (Pokropski, 2019). The bifurcation of psychology from second-order cybernetics as we traverse through the information age presents questions for psychological researchers. Should psychologists peer inside the black box through rule-based logic, or qualitatively understand real-time experiences in varied contexts to understand how the black box functions nested in a distributed social system?
The solidification of social-cognitive theory, information processing theory, and developments in brain research during the cognitive revolution (Miller, 2003) and into the information age point to psychology’s adherence to first-order cybernetics. Triadic reciprocalities of cognition, behavior, and environment in Bandura’s (1977) social-cognitive model, and subsequent motivation theories (e.g., achievement goal theory, Urdan & Kaplan, 2020; self-regulation, Zimmerman, 2013; and implicit intelligences/mindsets, Dweck, 2008) resemble dynamic feedback between “organism” and “environment” in Ashby’s homeostat (Pickering, 2010). Motivation theorists operationalize Bandura’s model to frame interventions enhancing individual learning. Implementation adheres to approximations about cognitive/behavioral competencies to be enhanced in specific environments, and is scaled up based on previous experimentation. However, alterations to pedagogy in classes/schools are curated around developing mastery orientations (setting goals for personal development, not competition) and growth mindsets (the idea that the brain/abilities change with time) as outputs within confines of the classroom (Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016). Sole reliance on such an approach evades constructively understanding subjective experiences and interactions simultaneously unfolding in varied settings (home, school, community).
Approaches rooted in information processing, like cognitive load, gauge how unnecessary demands on working memory (dealing with novel, incoming information) hamper learning, assuming linear flows of information through a well-defined cognitive architecture (much like Wiener’s cybernetics) comprising long-term memory (stores information) and working memory through machine-like causality. Three types of cognitive load affect knowledge uptake and use (intrinsic—related to tasks; extrinsic—unrelated to tasks; and germane load—effort towards dealing with intrinsic load; Sweller, 2019). Consider children observing zoo exhibits on a field trip. Each animal enclosure is designed so that children focus (germane load) on displayed animals and accompanying information (intrinsic load), as they move across exhibits, avoiding distractions (extrinsic load). However, if a peer group moves from a snake exhibit to an iguana enclosure, and one group member makes fun of another for “looking like an iguana,” the bullied child may interpret taunts in the context of incoming information. The framework provided by cognitive load theory evades these dynamic events, suggesting information is internalized in closed feedback loops of incoming and outgoing information.
Even brain research has taken a computational turn, relying on machine learning to predict diagnoses. A good example is the prediction of Alzheimer’s onset and progression using preprocessed brain scans as input to train algorithms in deriving meaningful features. Such methods make inferences based on data retrieved at a single time point (Moradi et al., 2015; Trambaiolli et al., 2011), like software powering narrow AI such as Siri/Alexa, used to meet simplistic requests (e.g., playing a song). Explanations from brain-based and cognitive approaches often localize individuals in compressed time, making context-invariant judgments that don’t account for enactive experience (Golonka & Wilson, 2019).
As von Foerster suggests, experiences affect later events and neural activity in endless ways undetermined by computer programs. Psychologists like von Glasersfeld (who takes inspiration from von Foerster) and Lev Vygotsky (whose sociocultural theory resonates with Pask’s cybernetics) are proponents of socially nested models of consciousness, often overshadowed by the cognitive revolution. While von Glasersfeld’s (2013) radical constructivism focuses on individual development in unfolding environments, Vygotsky (1997) suggests individuals construct social realities through productive interactions. Bronfenbrenner (1979) takes social construction and interrelationships a step further, investigating interactions in immediate systems (where one is directly present), and larger sociocultural arenas (political ideologies, value systems). The bioecological approach suggests that positive interrelationships (dyads/triads/tetrads/and so on, engaging in collective molar activities) across immediate and distal systems reinforce one another, spurring development of cognition. Bronfenbrenner’s research model accepts that computational processes may guide proximal, narrowly defined perceptions (through self-report data and physiological measures), but also calls for phenomenological observation (through interviews and ethnographies), liberating psychologists from machine-like causality. Sociocultural and bioecological research are beginning to gain traction with the explosion of communication platforms in the information age (Glassman & Kang, 2010). However, methods adopting distributed understandings of consciousness are yet to gain primacy in psychology, owing to its quest to understand individual mental functioning through a computational lens.
Just prior to the 21st century, second-order cybernetics suggested triangulating cognitive and brain-based approaches with phenomenological experience and nesting research in immediate and distal environments. These ideas may provide cues to psychologists for adopting new models for studying human consciousness in the postmodern age. The first is neurophenomenology, crafted by second-order cybernetician Francisco Varela. The framework calls for triangulation of dynamic first-person accounts/narratives, and computational output from EEGs (Pokropski, 2019). Intracranial EEGs with higher resolutions than regular EEGs have made correlation between neurological processes and recounted experience easier and have been applied in epilepsy treatment (Petitmengin, 2006). Elicitation interviews have been used to allow individuals to describe/reflect over physical experiences (Bitbol & Petitmengin, 2017). Nesting such mixed methods in varied social contexts may provide a blueprint to understanding consciousness through a bioecological lens.
Beer’s later ruminations about the VSM may provide insights into nested research models. Perhaps reacting to instabilities in Chile, Beer asserted that organizations are part of larger economic/political systems, making it possible to view the VSM as comprising federal and national bodies at higher levels, and localized firms at lower rungs. Such recursivity suggests understanding human consciousness and functioning in social systems may not involve isolated black box systems, but perhaps infinite sequences of truncated systems (individuals, technologies, groups, societies) enmeshed within one another (Pickering, 2010). In his 1994 book, Beyond Dispute, Beer elaborates this truncated model (see Figure 8), influenced by his yogic spiritual practice. The recursive model of consciousness begins with nerves, ganglions, and plexuses (concentrated nerve nets), which process and distribute information. It moves onto the cerebrum, or individual consciousness, and extends to neighborhoods, workplaces, and larger social systems. As systems expand, using logical operators in guiding success becomes less plausible; interactions must be studied as they unfold (Beer, 1994). A truncated consciousness echoes Bronfenbrenner’s model, which investigates interrelationships within and between systems to look at types of cognitive development spurred by interactions.
Beer’s truncated Viable System Model.
Varela’s and Beer’s ideas suggest studying consciousness by triangulating brain-based data and phenomenology, and through ecologically nested understandings, respectively. However, such research programs are yet to become dominant in psychology. We suggest vestiges of inquiry in second-order cybernetics at the end of the 20th century provide cues for psychologists in the information age to move towards understanding cognition/biology and unfolding psychosocial experiences across time and across varied contexts.
Our narrative provides a blueprint based on metaphors drawn from cybernetics for the advancement of approaches to psychological research. Looking at the progression of psychological research and theory as divergent from second-order cybernetics during the cognitive revolution, we suggest incorporating elements of second-order cybernetics into dominant research paradigms in psychology. We suggest that developments towards distributed understandings of consciousness, emblematic of bioecological and sociocultural approaches, may allow psychology to tap into the unrealized potentials of second-order cybernetics and decode approaches to be applied to both minds/brains and individuals/societies.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
