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.