February 22 , 2016

February 22 , 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 211) Skinner writes “The direction of the controlling relation is reversed: a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him.” Indeed, “in the scientific picture a person is a member of a species shaped by evolutionary contingencies of survival, displaying behavioral processes which bring him under the control of the environment in which he lives (p. 211).” To bring about this “sweeping change” in our “traditional way of thinking” there MUST be a change in how we communicate which is as incredible as when we transitioned from vocalizers to verbalizers. 

Since this shift from Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) couldn’t yet occur, Skinner’s operant science unfortunately is known only by a small group of academics and is not as accepted and validated as Darwin’s theory of evolution.  In part the reason for this is that how we speak is considered to be of less importance than what is written.  Once we discriminate the two universal response classes SVB and NVB that occur in each language of the world, we realize that “our traditional way of thinking” could not change as long as our way of talking didn’t change. 

Our vocalizations became verbalizations in relatively comfortable environments, in caves, where there were no threats. Our high rates of NVB and our low rates of SVB indicate that we must be stimulated repeated by aversive environmental stimuli.  These threatening stimuli are certainly there, but our NVB way of talking doesn’t allow us to discriminate them as such. Likewise, our generally low rates of SVB indicate there aren’t many peaceful and stable environments which are conducive to higher rates of SVB. Rather than blaming each other or ourselves as we usually do, we must begin to look to the environment as to why human interaction is such a big problem around world. Only in NVB do we consider it a “loss of dignity and worth (p. 212)” that we can no longer “take credit or be admired” for what we do in our place in the natural world. In SVB, on the other hand, we realize how childish this actually is and we grow up. Our NVB temper tantrums will be extinguished once we have more SVB and create a new culture.