November 6, 2015

November 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Students,

This is a third response to “Effectiveness as Truth Criterion in Behavior Analysis” by Tourinho and Neno (2003). Before further exploring this paper, I want to emphasize something about the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Once you know you can have SVB by yourself, you get a better understanding to what extent it is made possible or not so possible due to your own behavioral history. Each time habits prevent you from having SVB, you will achieve it by exploring these habits out loud. You will find out on our own, that your speaking and listening behavior can be synchronized without any effort. 

When your speaking happens at a higher rate than your listening or when your listening happens at a higher rate than your speaking, you will have NVB, by yourself. During the former, you experience that you as the speaker, have a negative effect on you as the listener. In the latter, however, you will find that it is hard to say anything out loud as you judge yourself already before you have said it. During the latter, your listening to yourself is self-critical and self-censuring to your speaking. Obviously, this thinking-habit, this negative private speech, was conditioned by your involvement in and your repeated exposure to NVB public speech. Similarly, the extent to which you will find yourself having SVB is also a consequence of your previous exposure to SVB. If you experience a lot of instances of SVB on your own, this means you have already been conditioned to have it, but if you will have a lot of NVB instances, this indicates that your previous environments must have conditioned you to have thought like that. 

Whether you have high rates of SVB or NVB on your own is not the point. What matters is that you become more realistic and accurate about the conditioning effects of your previous environments. Each time your assessment is correct, you overcome the negative influences from your previous environments and you will be able to acknowledge and validate those influences that were positive for you. Familiarizing yourself with SVB and NVB, by talking out loud on your own, inevitably and effortlessly results into an increase of SVB and a decrease of NVB. 

This happens as you realize that SVB is not just some technique, but a natural phenomenon, which, depending on the circumstances, either can happen or can’t happen. Since you have become more familiar with the circumstances in which it can happen, it will happen more often, as you will now know what these circumstances are. When you are again with others, you will be able to recreate these circumstances which made it possible for your to have SVB while you were on your own. The conditions that make SVB possible are the same regardless of whether you are on your own or with others. You don’t and can’t have SVB with others for the exact same reasons that you don’t and can’t have SVB with yourself. Stated differently, when you are alone, the speaker and the listener either engage in and maintain SVB together or they engage in and maintain NVB together. Similarly, when you talk with others, you will know based on your self-experimentation that the speaker and the listener either engage in SVB or in NVB. There is never simultaneously a speaker who is engaging in SVB and a listener who is engaging in NVB. 

There will never be simultaneously a speaker who engages in NVB and a listener who engages in SVB. They can go back and forth between the two, but higher rates of SVB will only happen if this going back on forth can happen more often. Because of your self-experimentation you will know that you, that is, the speaker who is the listener, don’t have that problem of going back and forth between SVB and NVB. When you are with others, you will find that their behavioral history is such that they can’t allow this shift. You don’t need to change them. You give up trying to change them as you know the speaker can’t change the listener; the speaker and the listener are always together involved in SVB or in NVB. 

By noticing when that happens, the informed person will create more opportunity to experience SVB and make it available. The person who doesn’t have the necessary behavioral history can’t make that happen. The person who knows SVB is responsible for it and those who create NVB are responsible for their NVB. By simply letting things be the way they are, the shift from NVB to SVB becomes increasingly possible. The facts are the facts. In NVB we don’t care about the facts, but in SVB we become behavioral scientists, who consider their own behavior as data. 

Let me now comment on Tourinho’s and Neno’s paper. These authors refer to other behaviorists and to Skinner to “illustrate the notion of knowledge as behavior (contingency-shaped or rule-governed), from which the supposition results that “to impart knowledge is to bring behavior of a given topography under control of given variables.”” The term rule-governed behavior is used when responses are controlled by a verbal description rather than the contingency itself. The latter would be contingency-shaped behavior. In SVB and in NVB our voice (a given topography) is under control of other people (contingency-shaped). The more we learn about the SVB/NVB distinction, however, the more we describe our environment (the contingency) verbally and the more SVB is achieved as rule-governed behavior. During SVB we sound different as our voice (our topography) is controlled by different variables then during NVB.