November 7, 2014

November 7, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer likes to read and respond to what he is reading. He also likes to listen and respond to what he is hearing. He likes to write and respond to what he is writing and he likes to speak and respond to what he is saying. Reading, listening, writing and speaking are related behaviors, but their relatedness is seldom the topic of what is read, listened to, written or said. 

Attempts at addressing the relatedness of these four behaviors fail when reading, listening, writing and speaking occur at different rates. Integrated understanding results from these behaviors occurring at the same rate. Equalization results from noticing what one is writing in response to what one is reading, from noticing what one is saying in response to what one is hearing, from noticing what one is writing in response to what one is writing and from noticing what one is saying in response to what one is saying. The relatedness of these four behaviors only reveals itself if we are conscious.

One only notices the above when one speaks about them. Speaking makes listening, reading and writing possible. Lack of speaking leads to the disintegration of these four behaviors. Our pretension of speaking can’t bring about integration. Conversations in which talking, listening, reading and writing are linked are needed to solve the problems which result from their separation. 

Our pretention of speaking is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), because it negatively affects our listening, reading and writing. NVB leads to the pretention of listening, the pretention of reading and the pretention of writing. We are familiar with the pretention of listening, but few of us are familiar with the pretention of reading and writing. Not much is heard about the pretention of reading and writing, because we hardly ever speak about it.

The goal of pretentious reading and writing is to not speak about it, or rather, to only speak about it in a pretentious manner. People may read all sorts of stuff, but it didn’t and it couldn’t lead to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), because SVB can’t be learned by reading and writing. Most people read more than that they write. Others supposedly are writing for them. Similarly, most people listen more than that they speak, because others supposedly do the talking for them. Surely people may speak a lot, but as most of what they say is NVB, they don't . They are the crowd of readers to whom books can be sold. The majority of them doesn’t write. Only those who supposedly are important write.

In spite of our different ways of talking we have never thoroughly analyzed our conversation. This author argues that NVB, our dominant way of talking, is unscientific and that only SVB is scientific. If we keep setting the stage for NVB, we can’t be scientific. This is particularly apparent in disputes between behaviorists and cognitivists. Presumably behaviorists focus on the functional relations between environmental events and behavior, while cognitivists are interested in the structure and organization of behavior. These opposing perspectives also present in our two different ways of talking, but this so-called structural difference obfuscates the functional account of verbal behavior. 

Cognitivists, who purport that behavior is caused by an inner self, keep having the upper hand as long as behaviorists remain closet-behaviorologists. Behaviorists claim to adhere to the natural science of human behavior, but they didn't yet apply it to their own way of speaking. The coming-out of the behaviorists as behaviorologists, requires a new way of talking, which of course goes much further than the verbal behavior alterations in writing, which had to be made to shine the light on the nature of human behavior. The step which hasn’t yet been taken, but which has to be taken to highlight the difference between cognitivists and behaviorists, involves changing the behaviorist's way of communicating. To legitimize themselves behaviorologists must talk differently than behaviorists and cognitivists, but this different way of talking can only be achieved by changing NVB into SVB. 

Behaviorologists, without bothering about structure, that is, without bothering too much about the words they use, should try to address the consequences of how they speak. “It is not what you say, but how you say it” describes why what we say makes sense, because how we say it doesn’t have any aversive effect. The shift from verbal to nonverbal behavior, which occurs when we shift from NVB to SVB, sheds light on the fact that our verbal behavior is a function of our nonverbal behavior. 

Only during SVB will the behaviorological language of antecedent and postcedent stimuli and responses inform us about why we understand each other. We keep distracting each other from what we say as long as we keep stressing each other out with NVB, with a way of speaking in which we aversively affect each other. Our misunderstanding and our unwillingness to understand are consequences of previous misunderstandings and are caused unknowingly by aversive experiences. 

SVB is explained by the three-term contingency: antecedent, response and consequence. What sets the stage for SVB, which only occurs under particular circumstances, is determined by previous consequences. If our attention is only going to what we say, we keep setting the stage for NVB, but in SVB, we can pay attention to what we say as well as to how we say it, because we are aware that we are in a safe environment. In a safe environment our nonverbal and our verbal expressions become aligned. If such an alignment, which is not learned, which naturally occurs, was repeatedly followed by negative consequences, it is less likely to occur in the future, even if the environment is safe.