April, 1997. Vol 10,
No 4, 16-20
THE
FAILSAFE MECHANISM AND THE ISS
The Davies have made
their book Humankind the Gatherer-hunter available to members of ASCAP,
and so readers may already be familiar with their concept of the failsafe
mechanism. However, it is only a minor
part of their thesis, and is embedded in much other material, and so, during
the course of a delightful lunch meeting near
The failsafe over-rides the operator
"...involuntary patterns of behaviour act
to curb prolonged excessive effort on the part of individuals".
The failsafe is an automatic, unconscious,
non-rational mechanism, which operates at a different level from the brain
processes which are pursuing ongoing, voluntary activity. The failsafe is built into the machine, and
is different from the operator of the machine.
The operator may want the machine to work harder, and to exceed its
design limits, but the failsafe overrides this aspiration, and leaves the
operator helpless to get more out of the machine.
This ties in with what we know about human competition. That competitor wins who goes all out and
does not think of the possibility of losing.
We have seen the hype that boxers put out before a fight, and that politicians
put out before an election. There is
irrational optimism, and the possibility of losing or failure is laughed
at. Not only must the fighter convince
his followers, he must convince himself.
He will not win if he is constantly worrying about whether his exertions
in the contest are making him exceed his design limits. For this reason, the failsafe needs to come
in at a different level of function, and to be impervious to the hype which
characterises the competitive struggle higher up in the system.
The failsafe takes the form of physical illness
"...the failsafe would create an
incapacity which would be acceptable to everyone, including the invalid, as
sufficient reason for inaction. For this
reason, the failsafe symptoms would tend to exhibit the known characteristics
of a recognised incapacitating illness."
I
think it is reasonable to assume that in the EEA, our ancestors had concepts
for physical illness and concepts for madness, but it is unlikely that they had
concepts for neurosis or depression, at least in a form which would provide a
socially acceptable reason for being off work.
Therefore, depression probably took the appearance of physical disease,
as it does today in many cultures. The
idea of being off work with depression is an achievement of Western medicine,
and even in our culture the diagnosis is resisted vigorously by many
patients. In your EEA designed brain,
you can only be off work with physical illness or madness, and if the doctor
tells you that you must be off work but are not physically ill, the implication
is obvious.
In a
recent paper, we suggested that the message of the ISS might be conveyed using
the metaphor of physical illness, saying to competitors "I am too sick to
be a threat to you" and to supporters "I am too sick to go into the
arena and fight on your behalf" (Price and Gardner, 1995).
The higher level de-escalating option is
blocked
"...in Western industrial society, the
voluntary abandonment of excessive undertakings might be unthinkable. The moral, social, financial or legal
pressures might impose a wholly unavoidable duty. In these circumstances, the mild neurosis or
failsafe might be rendered self-perpetuating, and the sufferer might never
fully recover."
This echoes our point that a common cause of
the involuntary yielding of the ISS is "blocked voluntary
yielding". If you give way with
good grace, you don't need an ISS. We
have used the analogy of shivering to illustrate the clinical approach to
blocked voluntary yielding. If you want
to stop shivering, you do not treat the shivering muscles themselves, you
choose an alternative response at a higher level, like putting on more clothes,
or turning on the central heating. You ask, "Why has the central heating
not been turned on? Are they too poor,
or too proud of their resistance to cold, or is the mechanism broken, or has
someone forbidden them to turn it on?"
Likewise, if you want to stop being depressed, you look for situations
in which voluntary yielding has been blocked for some reason, and then you deal
with that problem at the higher level, by giving in, or fighting harder and
winning, or leaving the field, or reframing, or in some rational way dealing
with the impasse (see the case of Albert Squires in Stevens & Price,
1996). When stubborn pride or dire necessity prevent any resolution at the higher level, the
ISS/failsafe can be very intense and prolonged, as illustrated so vividly by
Anthony Trollope in his novel He Knew He Was Right.
The failsafe is a graded strategy
"A relatively mild form would limit
activity without interfering with the capacity to lead a normal
life....nevertheless, the external or self-imposed exigencies might be so
compelling that mild symptoms would be insufficient to hold back the zeal of an
overconscientious or overenthusiastic group
member. When the point was reached that
survival was threatened, the offender would be incapacitated by a significantly
more severe syndrome. The individual
would become an invalid and a burden to the group but would cease to be an overt
risk."
We agree that there are a number of reasons why
there should be variations in the intensity of the ISS. One is the intensity or importance of the
struggle which preceded the ISS. Leon
Sloman has pointed out that you probably get a mini ISS after something as mild
as losing a game of tennis. There is a
slight lowering of self-esteem, a slight reduction in braggadocio, and a slight
downward readjustment of tennis-related goals.
These slight changes favour the new cognition of "He (or she) is a
better player than I am". If the
struggle has been more important, like a parliamentary election, the ISS is
likely to be more severe. The higher you
rise, the harder you fall.
Also,
the ISS may be superimposed on a lifetime low self-esteem or ISS strategy
(Price et al., 1994). In that case, it
might appear mild, and the individual not much different from before, but an
ISS in someone playing a lifelong high self-esteem strategy might need to be
more severe (presenting as psychotic depression, with delusions about past
status and competence).
And,
of course, the ISS can be expected to get more severe, the longer there is a
failure of voluntary subordination.
There
is no doubt that a moderate degree of ISS, enough to cause symptoms, is
compatible with normal life and work.
What is particulary inhibited in the ISS is
social initiative (aggressive and sexual).
The dysthymic person makes a good servant.
The failsafe may take the form of chronic
fatigue syndrome
"...features of a viral illness could be
artificially prolonged."
I would agree that the ISS is one cause of
chronic fatigue syndrome (ME). There is
presumably a centre somewhere in the brain whose
activation makes you feel ill, and it is normally activated by interleucins or some other product of infection, and its
adaptive value is to keep you out of harm's way until you are better. It is likely that this mechanism has been
recruited by the ISS, and is part of the mechanism of the metaphor of physical
illness.
The failsafe influences higher mental function
"...eventual, voluntary rejection of
unrealistic targets would be the function of the failsafe."
Yes, we think the original function was
downgrading of RHP (self-esteem), because targets for active competition depend
on an evaluation of relative RHP. There
is also a reduction in self-assertion (except to dependents and loved ones) but
this is secondary to the reduction in RHP, since assertion is proportional to
RHP. There is also signalling of low RHP
to rivals and supporters.
The
ISS creates a mental state in which ambitious projects are abandoned. This is partly due to downgrading of RHP
(lack of self-confidence), partly to downgrading of resource value (loss of
interest) and partly due to the depressive lack of sense of entitlement or
ownership. It is significant that these
three variables (RHP, resource value and ownership) are the determinants of the
decision to attack rather than flee or submit in animal contests. The ISS makes the individual behave like a
loser, look like a loser and feel like a loser.
This is why we think the evolutionary origin of the ISS lay specifically
in social competition rather than in a more general regulation of investment,
as suggested, for instance, by Nesse (1990), and I think also by the Davies.
Switching to a bottom-up perspective, the brain tracts which may be
responsible for the influence of the ISS on higher level decision-making have
been described by Derryberry & Tucker (1992):
Of special interest are the extensive sets
of regulatory projections ascending from the brainstem and limbic system to the
cortex. Rather than conveying
information, these neurochemical systems appear to be
involved in cortical processing during different emotional states (Saper, 1987). Such "bottom-up" modulation
provides mechanisms through which emotion might influence learning and
cognition and fits well with recent findings that emotion has important effects
on attention and memory (Blaney, 1986). (p. 329)
We would add that these tracts not only reflect
the emotion generated by the limbic system, but also elevation and depression
of mood generated in the reptilian brain (corpus striatum).
Specialists are more vulnerable
"Specialised personalities (specialists)
would be at greater risk from neurosis".
We have not related specialism
specifically to the ISS, but note that Arieti and Bemporad (1978) suggested that specialists might be more
vulnerable to depression. They
distinguished two main types of specialist:
1. Those
who rely on social relationships for their support and
self-esteem. At risk are those who rely
on a small number of relationships. The
paradigm here is the depressed widow who had relied entirely on her husband for
emotional and physical support. These
people are similar to Beck's sociotropic types, who
tend to get depressed when they have interpersonal problems (Beck, 1987; Coyne and Whiffen, 1995).
2. Those
who rely on their own achievement for their
self-esteem. Specialists here are those
whose goals are few in number and have little chance of being reached. These people are similar to Beck's autonomic
types who get depressed when they fail to achieve.
These two types represent different competitive
strategies. Some people rely on their
group membership and their allies; others rely on their individual achievement
and their prestige. With most people,
there is a balance between the two. The
principle here is that if you put all your eggs in one basket, you are at risk
of being left with only broken eggs - and it is the apprehension of all one's
eggs being broken that triggers the failsafe/ISS.
Differences
1. Our
model sees the ISS as one of two (or possibly more) strategies in the
"agonistic strategy set". The
ISS is a de-escalating strategy in the sense that it de-escalates conflict by inducing
the actor to give in. However, there is
an alternative strategy in the form of the Involuntary Dominant Strategy (IDS)
which is an escalating strategy and is the opposite of the ISS. In the IDS, RHP, resource value and sense of
entitlement are all increased. If an
outcome was uncertain before, the deployment of the IDS is likely to ensure
that the actor wins. What we don't know
is whether the strategy set is accessed in two different ways - an uncertain
outcome might elicit either the IDS or the ISS in a randomised proportion,
whereas a certainly negative outcome might access only the ISS. This is an empirical matter - our model
merely draws attention to the problem.
The
failsafe model does not have an equivalent of the IDS - it would not make sense
for a machine to accelerate when its design limits are being stretched.
Why do
we talk of a strategy rather than a reaction or response? We could easily say
that the ISS is a response to social adversity.
But this would conceal the fact that we are dealing with a two stage
process. There is accessing the strategy
set, which requires one type of information, and there is selecting a strategy
from the set, which requires a different type of information. For instance, when a squirrel finds a nut, it
may either eat it or bury it. The
information which accesses the squirrel's "nut disposal strategy set"
is the presence of the nut, but this plays no part in the selection of the
strategy. This requires other
information, such as the time since last nut eaten.
If one
wished to stick to the response model, one could say that there was an
interaction effect between nut disposal behaviour and state of hunger. But one would run into difficulties with more
complex situations. Crawford (1987), for
instance, has pointed out that the choice of strategy may be either
developmentally contingent (determined by events long before the strategy set
is accessed) or concurrently contingent (determined by current information).
We
think the ISS and the IDS represent one of three strategy sets at different
levels of the brain, each set containing an escalating and a de-escalating
strategy. This idea derives in part from the work of Paul McLean (1985, 1990)
who observed that the brain contains three relatively independent "central
processing assemblies" at roughly neocortical,
limbic and striatal levels. The ISS and
IDS are at the lowest level - the level which determines mood (depression and
mania). Higher up is the limbic strategy
set whose escalating strategy includes the emotion of anger, and whose
de-escalating strategy contains a number of depressive emotions such as
sadness, shame and guilt. At the highest
level of voluntary action the escalating strategy is a determination to succeed
(sometimes "at all costs") whereas the de-escalating strategy is an
acceptance that one cannot get one's own way.
At each of the three levels, there is a constellation of information
used to decide when the strategy set is accessed, and a different constellation
used to select either the escalating or the de-escalating strategy from the
set. Thus, to describe the stimulus
situation which determines the response to social adversity, one needs to
specify six different constellations of information. I think the use of the strategy set model
helps to clarify this complexity.
The
reader may ask what happens when the different levels adopt conflicting
strategies. We have discussed this
problem with an illustrative case (Stevens & Price, 1996, chapter on
Treatment). In brief, problems arise
when there is escalation at the higher (neocortical)
level and de-escalation at the middle (limbic) and/or lower (striatal) levels.
2. Our
model is more social. The failsafe model
sees the individual getting depressed when overworked, and then jeopardising
group cohesion by being inefficient. Our
model is concerned when people are too efficient, especially when two different
people or factions in a group are being efficient in opposite directions, and
pulling the group apart. This is agonistic
symmetry, in the Bateson/Kortmulder sense. Our agonistic strategy set is concerned with
symmetry breaking. If two opposing
factions are equally efficient, the deployment of either the ISS or the IDS
serves to break symmetry. It is like a
group of children taking turns over some toy:
the ISS means that it is not your turn; the IDS gives you centre stage and
access to whatever is desirable. This is
a situation in which only one child can play with the toy at once. If two powerful group members are pulling in
opposite directions and are equally matched, it does not matter, from the
group's point of view, whether one gets an ISS and takes to his bed, leaving
the field free for the other; or whether
one gets an IDS and becomes so confident, energetic and committed that he
steamrollers the opposition. Of course,
if both deploy an IDS at the same time, the group is
in trouble - that is probably why mania is less common than depression.
Conclusion
It is reassuring when people coming from
different directions describe the same phenomenon in different language but
with essentially the same meaning. This
happened with the concept of catathetic signals (see
my review of Frank Salter's book, ASCAP ? month, 1996) which were described
from the psycholinguistic perspective as Face Threatening Acts, and with the
concept of R-gap which was described from the position of sociology as a
difference in energy.
Now
the Davies have described the phenomenon we have
called the ISS, and, coming from the different direction of commerce and
industry, they have used language taken from engineering. And it is a sobering thought that whereas we
have been refining and elaborating our model for nearly thirty years, they have
come upon it almost in its completeness as a mere by-product of their main
interest in climatic change, culture and learning. They have come nearer to our model than any
of those actually working in the field, such as Engel & Schmale
(1972), Klinger (1975), Nesse (1990) and Powles
(1992).
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