July 22, 2016

July 22, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my thirty-seventh response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The general focus of research in psychology on group design is not because of folk psychology, but because of how we talk. In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), one’s subjective experience apparently doesn’t matter, but in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) our subjective experience make us objective about how we talk.

“Skinner argued that the intense focus on single subjects provides the researcher the information psychologists generally want to know about organisms: The conditions under which an organism will emit a type of response and the likelihood of that event changing as a function of manipulating the environment” (Skinner, 1956, 1963, 1971). It is only during SVB that we discriminate the difference between SVB and NVB.

As I explored the role of my own voice and my way of communicating and how I, as N-1, was affected by the communication of others, I began to realize that in every language there are in fact two languages: SVB and NVB. The increase of my SVB and the decrease of my NVB, which is apparent in all my relationships and activities, is not the result of my participation in groups, but of my solitary, self-management approach.

Unless one adopts Skinner’s self-management approach, unless one is able to be alone, one will not be able to discriminate between SVB and NVB. Regardless of how individualistic people in Western cultures believe themselves to be, it is the denial of the individual which continues to give rise to NVB in which we cannot be ourselves as all the communicators fight and struggle to demand and dominate each other’s attention.

In SVB there simply is no need to struggle and everyone is aware that they are benefitted by this. SVB, which is the speech of those who are at peace with their own lives, is much less common than NVB. Unless people explore SVB on their own, they will continue to have NVB. Dissatisfaction with the artificiality of NVB sets the stage for one’s development of SVB.