November 1, 2015

November 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader,

Although behaviorism’s understanding of private events of what we think, is slowly evolving, it has yet to acknowledge the behavioral cusp which involves distinguishing Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). A more complete understanding of private events requires deeper involvement in our spoken communication, specifically in how we sound while we speak. In SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks and in NVB the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. The SVB speaker finds him or herself in a very different situation than the NVB speaker. 

We find ourselves in different situations every time we switch back and forth between SVB and NVB. The more often this switching occurs, the higher our rate of SVB will be and the less often this switching back and forth occurs, the higher our rate of NVB will be. However, we can only notice the possibility of this switching back and forth if we acknowledge the difference between SVB and NVB. We already unconsciously go back and forth between instances in our verbal episodes in which the speaker makes the listener feel safe and at ease and induces positive emotions and instances in which the speaker makes the listener feel stressed and fearful and therefore induces negative emotions. We would go through these changes more consciously if we identified the former as SVB and the latter as NVB. This would once and for all make clear to us that in NVB communication actually stops, while in SVB it continues. In NVB talking may continue, but we don’t communicate. 

SVB can only begin to increase once we have repeatedly observed what is preventing this. SVB is not prevented by NVB, but by our lack of skills.  We so often engage in NVB as we simply don’t know anything better. Once we have experienced SVB we know something better and this motivates us to experiment and engage in SVB more often. In that process it will become evident that going back and forth between SVB and NVB in the past couldn’t result in an increase of SVB as most of our attention was still going to NVB. Increase of SVB only occurs once our attention is naturally and effortlessly drawn to SVB. Acknowledging that due to conditioning our attention was drawn to NVB is a necessary step before we can increase our SVB. By noticing our over-involvement in NVB, we slowly but surely withdraw from the circumstances in which this occurs. Most likely, we stop seeking proximity of those with whom NVB keeps happening. Moreover, we will be experimenting with SVB and NVB on our own, since only few people are capable of increasing our SVB. By talking out loud and by listening to how we sound while we speak, we can join and equalize our speaking and listening behaviors, which become so readily disjointed in our conversations with others. 

Due to self-experimentation (N-of-1) we will familiarize ourselves with the SVB/NVB distinction and then we will be able to recognize how others, like us, also continue to go back and forth between SVB and NVB. Since our self-experimentation will make SVB effortlessly available to us, our attention will no longer mostly be going to NVB, as it does in most of our so-called interactions. Even our engagement in NVB will at some point begin to stimulate us to switch back to SVB and our ability to switch, by changing the situation, will also increase. As the rate of switching between NVB and SVB will increase, our involvement in NVB will begin to decrease and our involvement in SVB begins to increase. 

Self-experimentation, in which we can identify and verify the SVB/NVB distinction, is the solution to the problem of inaccessibility of private events to public direct observation. Although Skinner himself was all about self-experimentation, most behaviorists don’t seem to recognize how crucial this is for the implementation of behaviorism. Behaviorism has yet to be fully implemented and disseminated as most behaviorists rather experiment on others than on themselves. How can behaviorists be sure if private events acquire stimulus functions other than by self-experimentation? It should be a central part of education, but it isn’t. 

Behaviorists mainly write about the world that is within our own skin. They don’t talk so much about it. If they did, they would have to refer to the world which is within their own skin, that is, they would have to stop thinking about the world within the skin of someone else. The fact that an observer cannot establish the same contact with the world within the skin as the individual him or herself, is produced by writing, not by talking. Rather than emphasizing they cannot have contact with what happens within the skin of someone else, why don’t behaviorists emphasize that they can have contact with what happens within their own skin? If they did that, they would have something very interesting to talk about. The world to which each person only him or herself has access only makes sense to the behaviorist to the extent that he or she has access to that world him or herself. It is the world to which only we ourselves have access, which can give us a better understanding of the world to which we don’t have access. Since we are always dependent on verbal behavior which we have learned from the members of our verbal community, there is, as far as how verbal behavior is caused, no real difference between public and private stimuli. Different levels of accessibility to these stimuli is determined by our rates of SVB and NVB.