January 25, 2015

January 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Given his high and steady rate of responding and the fact that only once in while this writer is postcedently reinforced, his Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) can be said to be on a variable ratio (VR) schedule of reinforcement. Approximately, as little as three out of hundred of his SVB responses are praised. When he was full-time employed, he would have said five out of hundred, but lately reinforcement dropped to almost nothing and the rate of responding, as usual under this VR-contingency, has gone up, leading to a bit of a burn-out.  Even thinking about SVB at this point is punishing to this writer. Just as a gambler who is losing money, while operating the slot-machine that pays out a response-to-reinforcer ratio of one out of thousand, this writer now feels very sad, spend and run out of resources.  

Like a gambler, who lost his shirt, this writer hoped for reinforcement, but he lost his job. He was made to believe that he would win the jackpot: he was hired and praised for his SVB. Of course, he ‘won’ a couple of times: they praised him and they liked him and then he got hooked, in spite of the fact that over time, their reinforcement became and less and less. He has lost friends, family, jobs, opportunities and years of his life in this process.  There is not enough reinforcement for SVB. 

Although right now he is feeling depressed, this author knows that once the school semester has started, he will feel reinforced again for his SVB by his students. This prediction is reliable and it gives him solace to think of this. Right now, however, since the semester hasn’t started yet, and since he has no employment other than this part-time teaching job, he hasn’t had much reinforcement for almost a whole month. 

The call he received from Stephen Ledoux wasn’t reinforcing, but punishing. Ledoux, whose book he is reading, doesn’t realize that SVB is behaviorism and behaviorology.  Once this writer is again in front of his class, due to his behavioral engineering, SVB will be on a different schedule of reinforcement.  Right now, however, reinforcement for his SVB depends on his wife and the very few people he may run into here or there, who happen to have a similar behavioral history, due to which they are open to his SVB and are capable of reinforcing it. Attempts to meet them have, as they have done in the past, led to a lot of rejection. Ledoux is a case in point. Even though Ledoux can sense this writer has identified something important, he insists SVB only matters if it is written about. He even invited this writer to submit a paper to the behaviorology journal.

When this author was younger, he would ride his bicycle all over town and change from one environment to another multiple times because he was so mobile. He would visit different people and places, sometimes he enjoyed the crowd and other times he appreciated just being alone. His genetic predisposition equipped him with a vibrant body. Although his lifeliness was reified and dispositionalized as ‘restlessness’, reinforcers would accumulate faster since his presumed ‘urgency’ for SVB produced such a high rate of responding. He was literally all over the place to be able to tell everybody about SVB, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Even though he didn’t call it SVB back then, he knew he was onto something because enough people had reinforced him. However, life is catching up with this writer. He is no longer rides his bicycle through town like he used to.  Besides, he emigrated to the United States and started a new life in this totally different environment. This led him to go back to school and study psychology and eventually behaviorism and behaviorology. Now the “counter-controlling contingencies” (Ledoux, 2014, p.339) like paying  mortgage of the house, wanting a steady job and thinking about old age and having money for retirement, compete with those needed for SVB.