February 21, 2015

February 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer borrows some behaviorological explanations to illustrate the  distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as two subsets of verbal behavior. These two subsets are much-needed extensions of Skinner’s work on verbal behavior. This extension is valuable, because it is a listener’s perspective of the difference between aversive and reinforcing spoken communication. Only a speaker who reinforces the listener is valuable to the listener. It is important to know that when this is not the case, so that such an aversive, coercive, abusive, dominating speaker can be identified and avoided.  

  

“Ethics” denotes “the behavior of respecting rights claims for unfettered access to valued reinforcers” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 426). When Ledoux writes  about such “rights claims” it seems as if he talks about these with others, who, supposedly are also willing and capable of talking about it, but, the reality is that most people aren’t willing to read about it, let alone talk about it. It should be clear to behaviorologists that most people are incapable of talking about it and they should explain why this is the case.

Before listeners can have “unfettered access to valued reinforcers” speakers need to first talk with them and reinforce them. However, this is not going to happen unless speakers are able to recognize the distinction between SVB and NVB. Only when speakers can demonstrate to listeners how they sound, can they teach this distinction to them. SVB refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement. NVB, on the contrary, refers to all the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. Listeners are used to the latter, but what does “unfettered access to reinforcement” sound like? 

As long as speakers keep busy with “values”, that is, with what they say, they may be talking about reinforcement, but that is not the same as being reinforcing. Likewise, speakers can talk about “rights” until the listener is blue and discuss what supposedly gives the listener “access to reinforcers”, but such talk is not the same as being reinforcing to the listener. And, even if speakers study, write, read, think and talk about “ethics”, unless their talking directly provides this “unfettered access to valued reinforcers”, it is based on the make-believe reinforcement, which never comes. Only reinforcing talk is SVB, but talk which is not reinforcing is NVB. Those who talk, the speakers, must be reinforcing the listener to have SVB. There is an immense difference between conversations in which speakers talk in a demanding, passionate manner about values, rights, ethics and morals, in order to let the listener gain access to reinforcers later and conversations in which the speaker reinforces the listener immediately. In the later, in SVB, the speaker controls the behavior of the listener, because he or she is capable of this, with positive reinforcement.

In the former, the speaker necessarily controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency, because he or she hasn’t learned the repertoire that is needed to be able to control the listener by means of positive reinforcement. In other words, a speaker’s NVB has nothing to do with the presumed absence of values, rights, ethics or morals, but with the speaker's lack of repertoire which mainly makes NVB possible.  The “ethical behavior” of a speaker, which shows respect for the “rights claims” of the listeners can only be SVB. The NVB of a disrespectful speaker always signifies the speaker’s inability to reinforce the listener.

February 20, 2015

February 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

In the United States people presumably have freedom of speech. Also life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are believed to be unalienable rights. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence document the rights of citizens to have access to what reinforces them, to what they value. 

It is important to recognize that historical contingencies of oppression, deprivation and coercion evoked the verbal behavior to compose these rights. Although, supposedly, these rights were given by their creator, in reality there was of course only a bunch of people, who decided in a natural process of verbal behavior they and now we have these rights. 

“These rights statements often take the form of claims regarding unhindered access to valued reinforcers.” (Vargas, 1975; Krapfl & Vargas, 1977) In essence then, SVB is the listener’s scientific claim to his or her right on reinforcement during spoken communication. The listener who accepts NVB is by definition an unscientific listener, who, inadvertently, will become him or herself sooner or later a NVB speaker. NVB is always maintained by accumulated deprivation and has historically prevented us from having access to what reinforces us. 

Scientific knowledge about our verbal behavior, which is SVB, is incredibly reinforcing, but NVB has kept us ignorant about its beneficial possibilities. SVB is based on the scientific fact that nothing prevents reinforcement from occurring.  In other words, SVB is a complete break with our past. It can be seen as a cure for a disease. And, the medicine works: NVB, our superstitious way of communicating will extinguish as SVB replaces it. 

When the speaker mistreats the listener, when he or she doesn’t reinforce him or her, there will be NVB, which is not communication. In the same way that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was not a reaction against the tyranny of creationism, SVB is not a reaction against NVB, but stands on its own as a scientific fact. Once we have SVB, discussions about rights become irrelevant, because we have access to reinforcement while we speak. When we are safe with each other and respected by each other, there is no need to have the right to bear arms. Moreover, there is no need to say anything offensive, which then has to be protected by our so-called freedom of speech.These are all measures of counter-control which could only bring us limited safety. Real safety will only occur when no counter-control is elicited. 

In his book “Walden Three” R. Ardila states “Operant psychology has the principles and the laws to change the world, but it doesn’t have the power” (p. 20). It doesn’t need to have the power. In SVB the issue of power is viewed in a new light. Our obsession with power, like our fixation on words, will only arise due to NVB. People have historically fought for their rights, that is, for access to reinforcers, but this process has always involved counter-control of the previous coercive contingencies. 

Any thoughts or discussions about the adoption of coercive behavioral technologies can only arise from the aversive conditions, which no longer occur during SVB. Likewise, nobody thinks anymore that the world is flat. Once we verify, agree and talk about the fact that in SVB the speaker controls the listener with positive reinforcement and realize that verbal behavior can pave the way to reinforcement for everyone, we know that the environments in which speakers still control listeners with aversive contingencies make SVB impossible.   

None of our counter-control measures have resulted in SVB. They have only perpetuated NVB. Similar to scientists, who are not waiting for the approval from people who are ignorant about it, those who know about SVB will create and maintain the environments in which it is possible. And, the more often they do this, the happier and the healthier they will be.

February 19, 2015

February 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Our need for scientific spoken instead of written conversation, in which we can finally ask questions about the probability of evocative effects of stimuli that cause our verbal behavior and find our answers in the actual circumstances and conditions in which these conversations occur (which are not based on the ideological, hierarchical, artificial, predetermined, exploitive, meaningless and problematic separation of our verbal and nonverbal behavior) demands a new way of talking, in which our behavior of concern is how we communicate with each other. 

The patterns of behavior that we refer to as attitude are apparent in our nonverbal behavior. However, our verbal behavior often distracts us from our nonverbal behavior. What we say often takes our attention away from how we say it. Moreover, our verbal fixation effects how we sound. This observation is a listener’s-conception of the speaker as being capable of two subsets of verbal behavior: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The energy traces from a speaker’s voice are directly mediated by a listener’s body. SVB refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement. On the contrary, NVB refers to all the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. Since SVB or NVB are not determined by the speaker, but by the contingencies, we ask why one speaker is capable of controlling the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement, while the other is incapable of that and thus uses an aversive contingency? This brings us to the issue of values, that is: to what is reinforcing for the speaker. 

  

NVB is not about what the listener finds reinforcing, but about what the speaker finds reinforcing. In NVB the speaker uses the listener as a means to his or her own end. In SVB, by contrast, the speaker and the listener are always reciprocally benefitting each other; what is reinforcing to the speaker is also reinforcing to the listener. Put differently, in SVB the speaker and the listener share the same value, but in NVB they have different values. We never got to this important matter as long as we couldn’t talk more scientifically. The contingency keeps obfuscating the fact that during NVB only the speaker is reinforced.

Another way of viewing the contrast between SVB and NVB is that in the latter only the value of the speaker counts. In other words, in NVB, the listener is seemingly valueless. Of course, this is the inaccurate speaker’s perspective.  In NVB the speaker devalues the listener and, whether he or she is aware of it or not, the listener feels diminished. In SVB, on the other hand, the speaker values the listener. One’s values directly translate into one’s behavior. Thus, in NVB it is only the value and therefore the behavior of the speaker that matters, but in SVB, the behaviors of both the speaker and the listener matters. And, since behaviors also function as stimuli, which produce reinforcers, the reinforcers for the speaker, which become available for him or her in NVB, become available to the listener only in the future, if he or she learns how to speak as aversively as the speaker. “The things we value, need, appreciate, hold dear, maintain access to, and so on, function as reinforcing stimuli” (Ledoux, 2014, p.422). The focus of SVB is on stimuli, that is, on sounds, which we produce while we speak, which instantaneously and simultaneously provide access to reinforcement for the speaker and the listener and which thus makes a conversation possible that articulates the rights of the listener.

February 18, 2015

February 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is about the bad attitudes that people still have about the way in which they communicate. From a natural perspective, no individual has ever possessed any such thing as a bad attitude. Such an agential explanation has no scientific value whatsoever. It hasn’t, didn’t and couldn’t bring us any closer to describing and thus communicating, the scientific behavior, which only becomes possible to the extent that we no longer adhere to the superstitious patterns of behavior, which are the inevitable remnants of multiple pre-scientific cultural contingencies.

Because the scientific account of verbal behavior, like evolution by natural selection, is so often pushed aside by those who are unfamiliar with it, who, therefore, enforce their pseudo-explanations, that people continue with all sorts of nonsense, which a  heart-surgeon, civil engineer or baker could never afford. Heart operations would fail, bridges would collapse, and we would go hungry, as nobody knew how to bake a bread. Although we have become scientific about many things, there continue to be so many conflicts, because we are unscientific about how we communicate. 

Even if our scientific descriptions in terms of having a predisposition “refer to nervous-system parts that have the particular structures, from genetic or past conditioning that, when energy traces from the relevant evocative stimuli reach them, readily mediate the particular behavior patterns that we call attitudes” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 420), such explanations didn’t and couldn’t improve our communication and human relationships. 

It goes without saying that there is a neural basis for our verbal behavior, but it makes more sense, if, during our conversations, rather than in our writings, we would “define the term attitude as a verbal-shortcut term for particular behavior patterns that stimuli, thematically-related to the behavior pattern, evoke and consequate, with the theme appearing in the name of the attitude” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 420). By talking about attitude in this way, the notion of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as two subsets of verbal behavior becomes relevant. The former can be described as a positive attitude and the latter as a negative attitude. We are talking here about the attitude of the speaker.

Stated differently, SVB refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement. On the contrary, NVB refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. The common discrepancy between saying and doing, found when researchers ask in verbal survey questions about the participant’s nonverbal behavior, is an artifact of NVB. SVB sets the stage for congruence between saying and doing, whereas NVB predicts incongruence between these two. 

 

When researchers would ask and participants would understand the question, not in a printed survey, but in a conversation: “What is the predicted extent of any evocative effects of such and such conditions or circumstances on ‘your’ behavior” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 421), there would be a situation in which a speaker asks a listener how he or she would respond if the speaker speaks in a particular kind of way. The presence of the speaker has a different, more immediate, evocative effect on the listener, than the presence of the writer-researcher, who is asking the reader to write to a researcher, who is neither seen nor heard.

February 17, 2015

February 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

The situation that sets the stage for spoken communication is different from culture to culture. As individuals from different cultures become exposed to unfamiliar contingencies, they soon realize what is punished in one culture is reinforced in another.  In addition to phylogenetic (caused by evolutionary processes) and ontogenetic (caused by processes occurring during an organism's life time) processes, B.F. Skinner pointed to culture as the third component to be considered in explaining behavior. 

This writer stimulates the reader to consider the different sounds of these different cultures. German sounds different from Hindi and Russian sounds different from English. However, we can also find similarities in how different cultures sound. This is where the distinction between Sound and Noxious Verbal Behavior as two subsets of verbal behavior becomes important. It doesn’t matter whether we speak Hindi or Russian, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement. In both  English and German, however, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. It is pragmatic to consider SVB and NVB as languages from different cultures, because they too occur in different environments. A hospital, in which nurses and doctors are trying to take care of patients, is a different communication environment as a battlefield on which soldiers are trying to kill each other. We have not been able to see similarities in cultures, because our differences between SVB and NVB inevitably got personal. That is, SVB and NVB explain human verbal behavior at the level of the individual organism.  

Although different topics, such as work, art, science, politics, family, finances or sports, may characterize our spoken conversation, limited interaction is possible when people don’t speak the same language, that is, when they don’t sound the same. Swedish sounds don’t make any sense to a French person who has never been exposed to Swedish sounds. 

The same stimulus generalization principle that is involved in teaching a child to say “dog” to a German shepherd as well as to a Chihuahua, is at work in learning to speak a different language than one’s native language. In learning to say “dog”, in the presence of relatively different-looking creatures, the child responds, however, to the similarities. Thus, the child learns different concepts such as tool, food and transportation. Although a hammer looks very different than a saw, a hammer and a saw are tacted as a “tool”, because of what we use them for. Likewise, the common element class “as something eatable” evokes our ability to discriminate apple, bread and candy as “food.” However, "as research with nonverbal pigeons has often demonstrated, verbal behavior is not necessarily involved in such conceptual behavior" (Martin & Pear, 2007, p. 106). The principle of behavioral continuity is illustrated by the fact that pigeons can easily be taught to respond to concepts such as “fish” or “human.” Thus, when a child responds with “fish” upon hearing words such as shark, sardine and whale or seeing pictures of these, this child has learned “to emit the appropriate response to all the members of a stimulus common-element class and does not emit that response to stimuli that do not belong to that class” (Martin & Pear, 2007, p. 106). 

   

As long as the distinction between SVB and NVB has not been made, we are not fully verbal, that is, we are not showing the conceptual behavior that is necessary to call a spade a spade. Although we do have a vague  notion of them as subsets of verbal behavior, as evidenced by sayings such as: it is not what you say but how you say it, we often mistake NVB for SVB. The stimulus common-element class of NVB and SVB can only be correctly discriminated if we listen to how we sound while we speak. 

Voice I is the common element in NVB and Voice II is the common element in SVB. Voice I is called Voice I, because we will not be able to recognize Voice II without first identifying Voice I. Our mistake to view NVB as SVB is based on our unfulfilled need for peace, safety, stability and support, which functions as Establishing Operations for NVB. Unless we discriminate that the stimulus classes that comprise our negative and our positive experiences (regardless of our phylogenetic, ontogenetic or cultural heritage) always, everywhere and under all circumstances sound very different, we continue to mistake SVB for NVB and visa versa. 

SVB and NVB are two important equivalence classes which can be easily learned. What is needed is matching-to-sample. Only SVB can reinforce SVB and only SVB can shed light on NVB. In a simple stimulus equivalence experiment, a child may be taught during a couple trials to match number 2 with a picture of two ducks on it. In a second number of trials, the child is then reinforced for matching the picture of the two ducks with the word “two.” During the third trial the child will be tested to see if it has learned the equivalence class. If the child matches the word “two” with the number 2 then “members of this equivalence class are functionally equivalent in the sense that they all control the same behavior” (Martin & Pear, 2007, p. 106). We do more matching-to-sample training for NVB than SVB, because we don’t know SVB. We acquired equivalence classes, but don't see the negative consequences of stimulus generalization. “When a new behavior becomes conditioned to one member of an equivalence class, that behavior is likely to be controlled by other members of the class without explicit training” (Martin & Pear, 2007, p. 108). 

SVB and NVB are concepts which tell us about how we communicate. NVB has Voice I in common and SVB has Voice II in common. However, what we say in NVB pertains to the same equivalence class. What we say in SVB refers to an entirely different, for many new, way of communicating. As SVB is reinforced it will last longer. Its newness is proportional to the extent that it lasts longer than the previous time. Although most of us can recognize components of SVB, we have not experienced repeated trials in which components came together and stayed together for a longer time. For this we must arrange lab-like conditions in which we control for NVB. This will only be done if we see the need for it and the potential of it. 

Generalization is said to fail when the child says “doggie” to a hairy four-legged creature in the presence of a cat. Similarly, generalization fails as long as we accept as normal the way of communicating to which we are used, which we have come to expect and which we reinforce: NVB, in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. It is necessary that we teach discriminations and that we stop reinforcing aggressive or passive aggressive communication as a way of communicating. Although NVB is verbal behavior, as it is Noxious, listeners are aversively controlled by it and are bound to respond to it with some form of counter-control, escape or avoidance. 

Only SVB, in which the speaker controls the listener with positive reinforcement, is to be tacted as real communication. That is, SVB must be differentiated from NVB, because it is a different subset of verbal behavior. NVB may be better tacted as coercion, aggression, domination, exploitation, intimidation, but not as communication. A dog is not a cat.