Of the Failings of King Midas: Dynamics of Influencing Others
What is Already Known About Behavioral Change and Product Engagement? Foundations for Wildfire Management et al. Volume 1, Essay Number Six.
Introduction
What is already known that has the capacity to support processes of behavioral adoption and product engagement? This short essay continues where the previous one left off, with Maturana and others’ vision studies leading to the major discovery of the closure of the nervous system. The following discusses some of the implications of closure related to the opening question. The findings continue to draw attention to the relationship between humans and the world around them, which can be used to gain insight into human performance in the context of behavior adoption and product engagement.
Missing the Midas Touch
For this short essay on influencing behavior adoption and product engagement, the story of King Midas is an appropriate beginning. King Midas exchanged his services to the god Dionysos for the ability to turn everything he touched to gold, including flowers, the grass, his food and drink, the table, and most regretfully of all, his daughter when he wrapped her in an embrace (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011). Regardless of the tragic ending, the King’s most significant failing, might the Midas touch be sought after by those doing the work of seeking behavioral adoption and product engagement? Might the Midas touch desirably circumvent the human performance challenges currently being experienced and increase the rates of compliance?
The story of King Midas is represented in Maturana (1983), who discusses the “instructive interactions” Dionysos made possible, where everything the King touched turned to gold. Maturana describes instructive interactions as those where anything touched by a human, including other humans, would adopt the features determined through their touch. As a result, everything would eventually look the same, and it would be impossible to tell things apart. It is on the basis of Maturana’s experiments with color vision that the nervous system was found to be closed and not admitting of instructive interactions, as was demonstrated in the previous essay.
Due to the nervous system’s closure, it is impossible to linearly transmit information, behavior, understanding, and properties from one human to another through touch or by any other means. The studies in color vision in “Of Remembering Old Wine” showed that the external world cannot be objectively communicated to the nervous system. Rather, it is the activity of the nervous system that can be correlated internally with color experience. This overturns the long-held assumption that humans merely process information from sources external to them, as if they are passive computers receiving pure signals from the world outside. Instead, humans, through the nervous system, bring forth the world they live in, which is triggered by the external world, but not specified by it. Midas also failed by asking Dionysos (and he who granted it) for an ability that violates the biology of the closed nervous system of his daughter, and the living and non-living things he touched along the way (next essay). Midas's most significant failing was breaking the biological order.
Looking at the findings of color vision, a component of perception and the nervous system it belongs to, and scaling it to all perceptual spaces, difficulties with behavioral adoption and product engagement emerge. Whether they are engaged with or not, they remain issues, but they can be made sense of through the literature, even if they cannot be changed. With instructive interactions made impossible by the nervous system’s closure, there is, as a consequence, no 1:1 correspondence between the world and anything put in it and the human perceiver. There are “things” external to humans, but they only trigger and do not determine activity within the nervous system and its internal correlations. What is presented to a human is not processed in a true, objective form, but rather encountered by the other on the basis of their nervous system, a situation which becomes challenging when individuals bring forth through their biology opposing worlds. As communication takes place between one world and the other, what was considered information and knowledge by one may be distinguished as noise by the other. What one world conceives of as excellent product design may be found to be inappropriate for its use by an individual in another world. Biology is at the core.
In some instances, it may appear as if instructive interactions were possible. Of course, this is not the case as the structure of the nervous system does not permit such interactions. Interactions that can be likened to those called instructive are instead representative of the variability of the nervous system when moving from individual to individual, making it appear as if an instructive interaction took place. It is probable, but not guaranteed, that in any population, individuals with a nervous system state complementary to the behavioral adoption or product engagement effort will be encountered, underlying the appearance of instructive interactions, but it is an illusion. It is important that the experience of a successful interaction, appearing to instruct another linearly, should not form the expectations of future interchanges, such as those where the outcomes do not align with the desired behavior adoption or product engagement. Situations where wanted outcomes are not produced do not constitute failings, but are rather indicative of the complexity of the nervous system.
Conclusion
King Midas’s golden touch may at first seem desirable to anyone who wishes to change the behavior of others, as well as how and if they make use of products. The myth’s tragic ending surely makes the ability seem less desirable, but the beginning of the story, where touch or interaction produced desired results, may still seem advantageous. Looking back on the path of seeking others to adopt certain behaviors, it may seem the case that Midas’s touch, known as an instructive interaction in Maturana’s (1983) work, was possible while in others, instructive engagements seem impossible.
Drawing from the foundation established in “Of Remembering Old Wine,” the nervous system was found to be closed and therefore not accept any instructive interactions. The next in this miniseries will discuss interactions between the world and the closed nervous system through Maturana’s notion of structural determinism.
Midas remains a myth. In some instances, there are power differentials that give the appearance of instructional interaction. All authority constraints on behavior have actually accomplished is reducing the number of possibilities that can be pursued by the person or persons being instructed, and in turn making compliance more likely.
The notion of instructive interactions belongs to the information processing and computation conceptualization of the human and non-human animal possessing a nervous system. Closed instead of open, the human nervous system does not passively receive and process into internally held images information from the outside objective world. It would be impossible for it to do so. Instead, the outside world is brought forth through the internal activity of the nervous system, triggered internally and externally (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011).
References
Maturana, H. R. (1983). What is to see? Archivo de Biología y Medicina Experimentales, 16(3-4), 255-269.
Maturana, H. R., & Poerksen, B. (2011). From being to doing: The origins of the biology of cognition (2nd ed.). (W. K. Koeck, & A. R. Koeck, Trans.) Kaunas, Lithuania: Carl-Auer.