March 20, 2015

March 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is the second response to “Analyzing Verbal Behavior Under the Control of Private Events” by Willard Day (1976). This writer noticed he is interested in papers about behaviorism that were written around the 70s. He was at that time in his 20s and all he could think of was to travel and see and experience the world. The papers by Day resonate, because he speaks in plain words and gives simple examples. 

Day states “Feelings can exercise a discriminative controlling relation with [vocal verbal] behavior, as when pains of a headache can set the occasion for my saying to someone “I have a headache”, or can lead me to get a bottle of aspirin” (words added).  He writes “Covert talking can function easily as the antecedent controlling term in a behavioral contingency.” Day agreed with Skinner “that one of the important characteristics of verbal behavior, presumably including covert verbal behavior, is its capacity to be reinforced by its effect upon the speaker himself.” An example of this is would be when one praises oneself for not getting upset in a situation in which one previously got upset. Here, one’s positive private speech has a regulating effect on one’s public speech. A third point is “how naturally images enter as controlling variables into contingencies of reinforcement.” Day gives an example of his participation in an exercise of “increased self-awareness” and “personal growth”, but, as a behaviorist, he finds “it was perfectly apparent to me that the having of images functioned in a very straightforward fashion much as any other reinforcer in providing differential reinforcement which enabled me to shape up satisfactory covert moves in "altering my consciousness," as they say, so that the rate of emission of symbolically significant images was increased.”

This writer is reminded of a guided-fantasy he once participated in. With others he was lying on the floor with his eyes closed. The person leading the guided fantasy was telling a story about travelling to the mountains to visit a guru. When the place where the guru lived had finally been reached, it turned out he wasn’t there. His cave was vacated. It was dark, but one could see a small box standing on a flat rock. Participants were told to carefully approach the box, pick it up and bring it out into the light. While seated on a ledge, overlooking the mountains, one was to open the box to  see what was in it. Each participant found something different in their box. This writer saw a root, others saw a diamond ring, a letter or picture. Supposedly, there was spiritual significance to each of these. This writer, however, recently celebrated his birthday and someone had given him a box of ginseng. It seemed explainable why he had found a ginseng root in that box. The symbolic meaning of this finding was clear to him: each time, before taking one of the little bags to make ginseng tea, he had looked at the beautiful golden ginseng package, which had a ginseng root printed on it. He had a dream in which he became enlightened and had fantasized this tea would help him on his path to self-realization. 

The guided-fantasy took place before this writer knew anything about behaviorism. Eastern spirituality, as behavior-controlling contingencies, determined his behavior in his 20s and 30s. It is good to revisit these pre-scientific experiences and put them in perspective, because, they laid the foundation for the conceptualization and understanding of SVB and NVB. If it wasn’t for the fact that this writer had practiced meditation, he would not have paid such close attention to his private speech. Instead, as most people do, he would have mainly been involved in public speech. His meditative behavior, which continued to be reinforced by more happy and peaceful experiences, paved the way for a form of talking with himself in which he felt no pressure, negativity, stress or struggle. Although such blissful conversation is possible others, it is not dependent on them. This is where SVB and NVB differ. In the latter, all the communicators make demands, because they depend on each other. In NVB people are yanking each other’s chain and getting under each other's skin, because they cannot leave each other alone. In SVB, by contrast, people can be alone, because they experience the verbalizer and mediator within themselves. 

Forty years ago Willard Day wrote “I have said earlier in these remarks that the talking I would be doing would be obviously under the control of private events in some sense. We are not in a professional situation at this time to say precisely what that sense is, yet the control is clearly in a certain degree different from the immediate environmental control exercised over the verbal descriptions we make in reporting direct observations. It is a mistake to regard anything which is not the report of direct observation or the experimental test of an hypothesis as simply speculation, with respect to which something further must be done.” This writer agrees with Day that talking about private events is “tacting”. 

Once we can tact SVB and NVB, we can create the professional situation in which we can “say precisely” in what sense our overt verbal behavior is controlled by our covert verbal behavior. SVB and NVB are “simple tacts” which “generally involve external environmental antecedent control” and “are generated under a kind of pseudo-audience control of an environmental setting in which the discriminative responding involved in tacting is appropriate.” 

Day wasn’t aware of the SVB/NVB distinction, but his writings show that 

he was very close. For example, he writes “I trust that it is not at all clear what I mean by "pseudo-audience control." That is because it refers to a category or class of antecedent controlling relations which it is now a part of my behavioral repertoire to be able to discriminate, or to respond differentially to, and yet which is not set apart as a special subset of antecedent controlling relations in Skinner's book Verbal Behavior.” 

Obviously, Day had a history of self-reflective, meditative behavior. The above is a succinct behavioristic formulation of what agential cognitivists have called “insight”. This writer hears Day’s call and s able to answer him. “What I am calling for is explicit and systematic effort on the part of the professional community to increase the refinement, sophistication, and subtlety of our capacities for discriminative responding that we can bring to bear on our assessment, or specification, of the variables involved in behavioral control. Clearly this effort should be empirically oriented”  (italics added). Such empirical work is done by this writer.  

“Ongoing verbal behavior that is emitted under environmental circumstances with which one is relatively familiar” seems to refer to NVB, our common way of communicating. We all know what it is like to be dominated, pushed around, coerced, humiliated, punished, exploited, manipulated, violated, stressed, intimidated, used, drained, ignored, misinterpreted, rejected, ridiculed, oppressed and disrespected. We also all know, at least a little bit, what it is like to have SVB and be understood, respected, listened to, validated, reciprocated, supported, reinforced, accepted, energized and loved. “Group analysis” of the subsets SVB and NVB will reliably lead to “increasingly more subtle discriminations.”