Patterns of Human Behavior 181 



The daughter Annie tries to alibi for not giving gingerbread, and 

 Mrs. Corry promptly punishes her. This is not, was not, that sort 

 of context at all; it was one in which the daughter had no right 

 to give away gingerbread and was wicked to even think of doing so. 



The problem, then, for every individual in every interchange 

 is to maintain an up-to-the-minute grasp of understanding of the 

 state of the contingency patterns between himself and his vis a vis. 

 Consciously or unconsciously, he has to be able to recognize what 

 sorts of trigrams, or more complex sequences, should characterize 

 the relationship at every moment and to act in terms of these 

 recognitions. The individual has to predict from what occurred 

 previously which pattern is appropriate at the moment. This is 

 what we call understanding between persons. Without it or when 

 such understanding is traumatized or punished, very severe patho- 

 logical behavior may follow. 



But such understanding is only possible because we are able to 

 predict, to guess correctly at a given moment, within what pattern 

 we are operating and within what pattern the other person is 

 operating. Prediction is the essence of the matter, and it is at this 

 point that double-bind theory links up with information theory. 



Redundancy, as the term is technically used, is that charac- 

 teristic of the sequence of events that enables an observing subject 

 to make a better than probable guess at the next item in the 

 sequence, so that this next item, when it actually occurs, does 

 not provide 100 per cent new information. It is rather unfortunate 

 that the word redundancy has been used in this sense, because 

 coinfortable communication between people (we may even say 

 efficient communication between people) depends entirely upon 

 such ability to predict. It might have been happier to describe 

 the phenomenon of redundancy as a necessary condition of 

 efficiency rather than as a characteristic excess since it is economical 

 to deal with patterns rather than with multiple bits. 



It is now appropriate to think for a moment about the place 

 in human natural history of patterns of this order. Bavelas (per- 

 sonal communication) has shown that these orders of learning are 

 singularly difficult to modify when erroneous learning has occurred. 

 The experimental material is somewhat as follows: The subject 

 is presented with a board on which there are a number of buttons 



