March 16, 2014

March 16, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Yesterday, March 15, will be forever engraved in my memory. I gave a successful  seminar for the teachers of Butte College, where I teach two psychology classes. Teachers are the perfect audience because they are involved in teaching. This set the stage for my ability to explain things accurately and coherently. Everybody who was in that room understood Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

I was so excited about the reinforcement which I received that I could not sleep the whole night. It is now early in the morning and I am feeling calm and satisfied. I have composed a new announcement for the upcoming seminar in which I state very clearly that in order to be able to listen to ourselves we must stop listening to others and instead become speakers, who listen themselves.  

When my wife got up, I wanted to tell her more about the seminar, but she was not interested, although she was happy with my success. I have been in that situation many times, where I want to talk, but she, or someone else doesn’t want to talk. If in such a situation I say something to someone who doesn’t want to hear what I say, my ability to say it immediately decreases. If I continue to speak in such a situation, what I say gets further and further of the track. In the seminar, where people were ready to listen to me, I could be an effective speaker, but under circumstances in which this is not the case my speech is not as clear.  Due to my success and my previous experiences, I am now determined to not say anything anymore under unfavorable circumstances. 

I am not getting in trouble for something I haven’t said. Moreover, when I don’t say anything, there is nothing to say! I experience the relief that comes from not being too eager or too impulsive. I often got in trouble for saying something when I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew way back that the environment wasn’t there, but I said something because I didn’t trust what I knew. Yesterday’s seminar restored my sense of self-respect. I verified with the audience whether what I said was true. To me the effectiveness of speech is not a personal but an empirical matter. As we put together the necessary ingredients for SVB, it was self-evident that the things that were said by me and by the audience fit. 

There are many ways to describe that fit. What I said seemed to make sense because it fulfilled a need. Another way to describe it would be to say that I spoke a language which they could understand. I spoke as a fellow teacher. It could also simply be argued that I spoke English. As a function of all these environmental stimuli meaning could be communicated and reciprocated.

I kept thinking about our need not to listen to each other, but to ourselves... Ironically, relationships that work are those in which partners inadvertently have decided not to listen to each other. In such relationships there is a much higher probability that both partners begin to listen to themselves. This in turn will make them more true to what they think and feel and more likely to have an authentic relationship in which they will truly listen to each other.

This is not to say, of course, that all this occurs without problems or risks of breaking up. However, these risks would be drastically reduced if people had been told and stimulated to listen to themselves in the first place. Indeed, a lot of problems would never even occur and our relationships would be genuine and effective. We are free to choose not to listen to each other. Besides, our ability to admit that we are not willing to listen will make us better listeners.

We are often not listening to each other, because we don’t even seem to notice.. that we are not listening to each other. The fact that we are not listening must be acknowledged before we can again listen to each other. Moreover, that we are not listening, that we are not behaving in ways in which others would like us to behave, is a function of the stimuli that are available. 

If stimuli which produce the required behavior are present, that behavior will occur. The lawfulness of this environment-behavior relationship becomes evident when we give more thought to the fact that something or someone is always in control of what we do or do not do. Behavior never occurs out of the blue, it is caused. Our behavior is always a function of our environment.

Our language is a function of where we grew up. If we grew up in another environment, we might have spoken Arabic, because we learned how to speak, read and write in an Arabic verbal community. We learned our language from the verbal community in which we grew up, not because we adapted to that environment, but because we learned that language in that environment. As a response to stimuli, operant behavior is more or less likely to occur due to its consequences. In an Arabic verbal community mainly Arabic will be reinforced. This is not to say that English-speaking Arabs wouldn’t be able to reinforce English, they would, but only English-speaking Arabs would be able to do that. Without English-speaking Arabs nothing stimulates English.  

The idea that individuals of an English-speaking verbal community would be responsible for learning Arabic with no one to teach them is ludicrous. The teacher is the environment for the student, but the student is of course also the environment for the teacher. Whether or not the student learns, depends on whether the teacher creates the environment in which the student can learn.

Failure of the student signifies the failure of the teacher to create the proper environment in which the student can learn. Likewise, the doctor, not the patient, is responsible for the patient’s recovery from an illness. Those who possess the knowledge which other people don’t have are responsible for how they use that knowledge. They alone know how it works. That is why they speak.

Students in Math class don’t know what the teacher knows. They listen to the teacher who uses his or her knowledge and authority in such a manner that the student learns. Although the teacher speaks and the student listens, this isn’t uni-directional communication in which the teacher speaks at the student, not with the student. The teacher who teaches speaks with students and students sense that. They are in the same class, but the environment for the teacher is not the same as the environment for the student. The teacher has private speech which is mostly about the topic he or she teaches, but students have private speech, which may distract them from what the teacher teaches. In the latter, the student's private speech prevents learning. The teacher who wants to teach the student whose private speech distracts from his or her public speech, must realize that he or she must provide the necessary stimuli that will make this happen. It may be difficult, but it is not impossible to figure out what these stimuli are. There was distraction because the stimuli that evoke concentration were absent. This has to do with how the teacher speaks. If the teacher says that the student should read and study the chapter, this is not likely to maintain the student’s behavior of reading and studying the chapter. The teacher may become more adamant in instructing his or her students to read and study the chapter in response to finding that they are not reading or studying. Reminders often are perceived as a putdown. In behavioral terms, the teacher punishes the student.  

Punishment always leads to the decrease of behavior. If the teacher had wanted to create or increase reading and studying behaviors, he or she should have used positive reinforcement. To expect that behavior can be increased by punishment is as unrealistic as expecting that objects fall toward the sky. The lawfulness of human behavior is such that it will occur more often only if it is reinforced.  

Only the teachers who know how to reinforce can stimulate the right kind of behavior in their students. If teachers want the private speech of their students to match with their public speech, a necessary condition for learning, they must make those stimuli available that make this possible. One way to do this is to encourage the students to describe their distracting private stimuli. Many times the thoughts and feelings of students are about different things than what the teacher is talking about. Their inability to focus on the lecture, on public speech, is because of what occurs within their own skin, private speech. They may feel tired, sad, drowsy, fearful, anxious and experience a variety of negative emotions. However, teachers must provide stimuli that reliably generate positive emotions. Furthermore, they must be able to accurately describe the contingencies of reinforcement that make both positive and negative emotion possible, and they must provide only the stimuli that evoke positive emotions by talking about what makes them possible and what prevents them. If done correctly, this process will be enhanced by their students, who contribute to and are rewarded for their elaborations about their experiences of positive emotions.