“T his book offers a theory of human functioning. The theory does not claim to predict the acts humans will produce, or be induced to produce, or be prevented from producing—though that topic will come up. Rather, the theory will ex- plain how humans function regardless of the acts they choose—how acts serve the functioning. The book will also tell how we can stop demanding impossible behavior from humans, ourselves and others, and thereby free ourselves of the costs of many sorts of conflict.

Unlike authors of many popular books claiming to offer psychological knowledge, I will not tell you how to win friends and influence people. In fact, I will advise you to avoid trying to do that. And I will tell you that you can sometimes be influential without trying. I will certainly not tell you how to outwit others or bend them (or break them) to your will.

Unlike authors of most texts in psychology, I will not drag you through the traditional topics that label courses and resound in the lecture halls of universities—though I will say some things about some of those topics as I go along. And I will not try to display for you in any systematic way the multifarious shapes and guises of human behavior, either in the popular manner or the academic; I leave that task to historians, cultural anthropologists, novelists, and other chroniclers.

I will not indoctrinate you with the conceptions, theories, and passwords that will get you into graduate school. I spent three years in graduate school and then about 30 years unlearning most of what I had learned there. The three years were difficult, and the 30 years were even more difficult. I would not want you to go through all that.

Though this book is not academic in the usual sense of repeating what most academic psychologists have believed during the past several decades, I do claim it to be scientific in the sense that a good many of the claims I make about human functioning can be put to experimental test can be tried out in tangible, physically demonstrable ways that can be reproduced or extended by anyone who takes the trouble. The theory I offer here is Perceptual Control Theory, or PCT for short. Its core postulates have indeed been tested, the results of the tests have been published in the scientific literature, and the core assumptions are being extended in the designs of further experimental tests. Furthermore, the experimental tests have been far more demanding than the experimentation in the mainstream psychology books, as you will see. I am not saying that everything I say here has been tested empirically, but I do make that claim about the fundamental postulates and about a good many derivations from them.

I will disagree in serious ways with most of the widely accepted psychological theories you encounter in popular literature, in textbooks (of whatever discipline), and in the halls of academe. I will agree with the other theories at some points, but the underlying assumptions of the theory here (Perceptual Control Theory) are not those you will find either printed or implied on many of the pages printed about psychology. In that sense, this book is disputatious. I do not, by the way, claim that those other authors and lecturers are immoral or mentally deficient. I claim only that they are wrong.”

• From the Preface of “People are Living things”, by Philip Runkel, 2003. Used without permission, although the whole book available as a free PDF download from the publisher’s website, www. livingcontrolsystems.com, as well as the free online libraries http://www.archive. org and http://www.z-lib.org,

Think for yourself.

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