May 5, 2014

May 5, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Today I gave a fiery lecture about the Milgram Obedience study. I brought home the powerful message that our behavior is not, as most of my students are inclined to believe, caused by ourselves, but by our environment. I was congratulated for my presentation. The message hit home and a dynamic, lengthy discussion occurred. We talked about evolution and the extent to which our individual survival is often overemphasized, while the importance of social survival behaviors is  often underestimated. Another issue was the fear of being called crazy or of going crazy when one deviates from the norm. In addition, we analyzed culture and how it relates to our belief in and need for authority and conformity.

Our behavior can be arranged in any particular way. We can use this to determine positive outcomes. I referred to my seminar yesterday as an example. At the start I told participants what was going to happen and it happened exactly as I said it would. This is because I know how Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) works. If what I said didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen, because certain things were overlooked. If these things, such as discriminative stimuli, reinforcement history and operant conditioning etc., terms belonging to behaviorism, would have been taken into consideration, we should be able to predict the outcome. If I didn’t get the outcome I said I was going to get, I didn’t know what I was talking about.

As a teacher, I have the authority to convey this message, which many have never heard. One student, who was argumentative and repeatedly interrupted me, admitted that he had never been able to differentiate between talking WITH versus talking AT each other. Because I affirmed that I was talking AT him and because I agreed with him that I was talking AT him, he was able to grasp the difference between talking AT and talking WITH me and then he felt that I was talking WITH him. 

This confrontational process of teaching is important because without this intense interaction he and the rest of the class wouldn’t have been able to make this distinction and their verbal behavior would not have been shaped into understanding the distinction between SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The aforementioned student also stated that people often pretend to be talking WITH each other, while in reality they are talking AT each other. This pretension is a form of bullying. As we feel intimidated and are often socially not in the position to address this matter, we are never capable of putting our finger on it. It took a person like this writer, who would risk being rejected, to discover that such a difference exists and is tangible.

Those who talk AT others, but who pretend to be talking WITH them, do not allow those who they talk AT to discover and pinpoint that they are lying. Whenever a person, the listener, who feels that he or she is being talked AT, complains about this, by becoming a speaker, the person who talks AT them accuses the person who refuses to be talked AT, that they are talking AT them. The thing which goes often goes completely unnoticed in this picture is that the speaker, who initially talked AT the the listener (the other person or persons), who pretended to be talking WITH that person, is actually correct!!! When he or she is saying that the person who complains is talking AT them, he or she is 100% right. In other words, he may have been lying before, but in that moment he is not lying because, unlike his lying behavior, his current behavior is shaped by the listener, who became the complaining speaker. The fact that the person who initially talked AT the other person (or persons) is able to turn the table on the person who doesn't want to be talked AT, doesn’t change the fact that those who complain, also talk AT others, that is, to the person who was talking AT them. Because the difference between talking AT and talking WITH each other has not become clear, people often end up talking AT those who are talking AT them. In their attempts to talk WITH others, listeners who become speakers inadvertently start acting exactly like those who talk AT them.