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.

I have been privileged to contribute to several distinct topic areas in personality, social, health, and abnormal psychology. Many of these contributions have had the label “self-regulation” attached to them at one time or another. To a personality psychologist (which is what I am), self-regulation refers to the use of mental reference points to guide one's behavior so as to create end states that correspond to those mental reference points.

My most important scientific contribution has probably been to help make this concept (and term) commonplace across psychology. At least two parts of that statement require more words. First, although I did play a role in popularizing self-regulation as a concept, I certainly didn't do it alone. Early in our careers, my collaborator Mike Scheier and I essentially caught a wave that was forming at the time. Our own contribution to the use of the term occurred in the context of that broader wave. (We did, however, spend an entire afternoon deliberating about using it in the title of our first book together.)

The second point that requires more words concerns the origins of the concept. Although I would be happy to avow my utter brilliance in synthesizing it, I did not do any such thing. Rather, having run across the concept in various guises early in my career, I decided that it mattered a great deal and that others should also realize it. So I tried over the years to make people aware of it and its relevance to the broader issues they were interested in.

There is a subtext here that students of psychology (and probably anything else) should realize. Almost everyone in any field, including psychology, would like to be widely known as the person who created some particular new idea (and, just as importantly, thought of a clever label for it). But ideas invariably have roots in other ideas. There are fewer new concepts than you probably think there are, but there are a lot of new twists on older concepts. I don't think I am entirely without creativity, but a startlingly high proportion of what I have done in my career turns out to have involved taking concepts others had created and applying them in slightly different ways to slightly different contexts.

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).