July 7, 2016

July 7, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my twenty-second response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). In college many students dread taking math classes. They find it so difficult that they postpone taking math classes as long as they can. If, however, these students get the help they need, work with a tutor or take a math lab, they find out that the problem was not with math, but with how math was taught.

If someone, other than the teacher, instructs and helps the students, they learn to solve math problems. The exact same is true for radical behaviorism. From an educational perspective it is not productive to say “many such barriers do exist, and that these barriers can make it more difficult for individuals to accept radical behaviorism.”

Learning doesn’t depend on the difficulty of some topic, but on the interaction between the student and the teacher. Once we have that clear, there are teachers as well as tutors, who, as speakers, induce positive and there are those, who induce negative affect in the listener, the student. The former teaches by means of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), while the latter cannot be a good teacher or tutor as he or she is teaching by means of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Responding to problems that people have in learning about behaviorism, Skinner himself reportedly once said “I wish to testify that, once you are used to it, the way is not so steep or thorny after all" (p.49). I think he made an unnecessary concession by acknowledging that the way of behaviorism is “steep” and “thorny.” There is nothing “steep” or “thorny” about any knowledge as long as it is taught with SVB. 

That even Skinner himself admits that his constructs are “steep” and “thorny” tells us something about what happens when in a conversation, that is, during teaching, knowledge is presented which contradicts and debunks our previous understanding. Even if the teacher teaches with SVB, responses of the nervous students can quickly turn it into NVB.