October 2, 2014

October 2, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

By speaking about behavior, not as caused by ourselves, by our beliefs, by our personalities, by our motivations, or, by the extensions of our idea of ourselves, our significant others, our authorities, our role-models, our leaders and our gurus, and not as caused by the group to which we supposedly belong, wish to belong or no longer belong, we begin to look at behavior objectively and we free ourselves from the way in which our language seemingly divided up the environment.

During Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) we come in contact with ourselves and each other and we recognize that Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is a way of speaking in which we separate from ourselves as well as from each other.

   

When we feel safe, happy, supported, respected, accepted and acknowledged, when we experience and share positive emotions, our sense of self and isolation is temporarily lifted. This common truth shows that in, what should be considered our natural sense of well-being, our homeostasis, we feel connected to ourselves and to those who are in our environment. 

If our way of talking captures this, we are going find out how our behavior works. We have not done that and to the extent that we have done that, we realize that the presence of NVB brings an end to SVB. However, regardless of all our NVB, SVB  emerged. Regardless of our reflexive respondent behavior, operant behavior evolved. Indeed, respondent behavior doesn’t fully capture the complexity of our behavior. This was B.F.Skinner's great contribution; he discovered that the consequences of our behavioral response affects the future probability of that behavioral response.

While SVB clarifies the co-occurrence of and intereraction between respondent and operant behavior, NVB keeps us stuck with respondent behavior. The previously mentioned limitation, worded as the assumption that we cause our own behavior or that others are causing our behavior (which is an equally problematic version of causation), is more accurately described by how involuntary, respondent behavior constrains voluntary, operant learning. In SVB such constraints are decreased. The contrast between SVB and NVB illustrates this enormous important difference. Another way of saying this is that SVB is practical and experiential and not only theoretical. NVB wrongly makes us believe that theory is causing our behavior.