October 5, 2015

October 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my ninth response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). I agree with the authors who write that “Our subject matter—behavior—is not defined by its magnitude or by the ability of observers to agree on its occurrence. Rather it is any activity of the organism that can enter into orderly relationships with environmental events.” I invite these authors to have a conversation with me in which they can finally discriminate between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) as well as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). If they would talk with me, they would agree that only SVB enters into an “orderly relationship with environmental events.” Although NVB is as predicable and as “orderly” as SVB, it shouldn’t be described in that way as it creates nothing but chaos.

In NVB the speaker verbally abuses the listener. Indeed, there is no order at all in the hierarchical relationship which is enforced by the intimidating NVB speaker. The reason that people have accepted such speakers is because they were unable to analyze such speakers in terms of how they sounded. Only the SVB speaker sounds good, but the NVB speaker sounds terrible. The NVB voice is described as authoritarian, forceful and also aggressive, because the NVB speaker speaks at the listener, not with him or with her. The “eye blink is an overt behavior”, which can be “measured, recorded and agreed upon by disinterested observers”, but the sound of the speaker can also be listened to and categorized as SVB or NVB. It should be noted that the authors give an example of a visual stimulus, but not, as I do, an auditory stimulus. As stated, visual stimuli, such as graphs and pie-charts, are common to scientific publications, but auditory stimuli, produced by listening while we speak, are lacking. Yet, we can hear the difference between SVB and NVB and “The probability of overt responses is altered by contingencies of reinforcement only because the nervous system is.”

Yesterday, I was participating in a leadership seminar. It was boring. The seminar leader did most of the talking and all the participants were ready to go home. The presentation had lots of text-slides and video footage. Although he spoke in a friendly tone, he was still having NVB. However, when he explained the term ‘paradigm paralysis’, he caught my attention, because as he spoke, he repeatedly made references to visual stimuli, such as: ‘let’s take a look at’; ‘the way we see the world’; ‘people were blind-sighted by the fact that the market had changed’ and ‘they didn’t see it coming’. He gave examples of companies whose stock value had tanked as they ‘saw things in a habitual way’ and lost the competition. He then showed slides with a single number on it and asked us to add them without writing it down. First slide 1000, second slide 40, third slide 1000, forth slide 30, fifth slide 1000, sixth slide 20, seventh slide 1000 and eight slide 10. Most people had added these numbers to 5000, but that answer was wrong, because it adds up to 4100. Why did we make this mistake? Presumable it was because of ‘paradigm paralysis.’ I remarked that this so-called paralysis is caused by conditioning processes and if these numbers had been given to us not and as visual, but as auditory stimuli, it would probably not occur.

I will test this hypothesis with my students.  Although he praised me for my remark, the presenter didn’t interact with me. He only superficially talked about the importance of listening as a way to dissolve ‘paradigm paralysis.’ Special attention had to be given to our self-talk, which, according to him, contains our ‘hidden beliefs.’ He summed up ways of ‘distorted thinking’, known in cognitive behavioral therapy as ‘cognitive distortions’: all or nothing thinking, over-generalization, mental filter, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, magnifying and minimizing, emotional reasoning, should statements, labelling and mislabeling and personalization. He spoke of the inner causation of behavior and was obviously ignorant about radical behaviorism.  He asked: why is it so difficult to listen? I agreed with him that our culture conditions us ‘not to believe what comes out of our mouth’. However, we don’t live in a ‘post-trust-era’, but we repeatedly engage in NVB. Our presumed ‘paradigm paralysis’ is maintained by a way of talking which biases us against auditory stimuli. In NVB we are punished for paying attention to auditory stimuli. Thus, NVB is maintained by visual stimuli, that is, by the speaker’s and the listener’s fixation on words.

The presenter was just as visually biased as these behaviorist authors. My reference to this seminar is related to their paper. Let’s follow their text minutely and focus on their overemphasis on visual stimuli. “The environment only sees the overt response, and so can arrange contingencies of selection only for the eyeblink.” Even the distinction between overt and covert responses itself is based on visual stimuli.  “However, the enduring changes brought about by the contingency surely happen at [motor neurons], and elsewhere in the network. The probability of overt responses is altered by contingencies of reinforcement only because the nervous system is.” The notion of overt and covert behavior is maintained by NVB, but would change once we are introduced to SVB. In other words, the environment does not only see the overt response, but it also hears the overt response. Therefore, the environment not only arranges contingencies of selection for the eye-blink, but it also arranges contingencies of selection for the sound of the organism’s voice. Our response to overt auditory stimuli, that is, the listener’s response to the sound of the speaker’s voice, tells us a lot about what we say to ourselves covertly. What we can see is as real as what we can hear, but as long as we remain obsessed only with what we can see, we will not recognize this fact and our rate of listening cannot increase. What we say is as real as how we say it.

“The overt response is no more the ‘‘real’’ response than its neural precursors are. . . . We believe that we are justified in considering covert events . . . in our interpretation of complex behavior provided that we do not introduce ad hoc principles that are not founded in the experimental analysis of overt, measurable, quantifiable behavior. . . . Inferences about covert events should follow from behavioral laws, not serve to mask their inadequacy” (LCB, pp. 275–277).  SVB covert speech or positive self-talk, has to be a function of SVB overt speech.