June 25, 2016

June 25, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my tenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Even today, in 2016, we still have creationists, who argue that “the species were fixed because

God would only make a perfect creation.” The authors state “the notion of an ever-changing species contained in Darwin's account ran directly counter to this theological view.” As one person is saying this and the other person is saying something else, all our attention goes to what we are saying and presumably we then have a difference of opinion. 

Nobody is listening to anybody when our so-called communication is based on a struggle for attention.  Moreover, we all want others to listen to us. While we emphasize the importance of listening to others, we have Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in which we are NOT listening to ourselves. We only do that during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

We are familiar with the saying: it is not what you say, but how you say it, but this saying doesn’t make any difference in monitoring how we sound while we speak. Such a saying expresses a listener’s perspective which is generally not listened to by the speaker. Speakers are bound to be offended when they are made aware by the listeners of how they dominate and force the conversation with the way in which they sound.

Telling speakers that they need to sound better doesn’t result into SVB. It only stimulates more NVB, which is always based on 1) struggle for attention, 2) outward orientation, and 3) fixation on the verbal. We, the speaker and the listener, can only come together during SVB in which each speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

The paper, which is a written version of NVB didn’t make a dent in dissolving “epistemological barriers.” It is because of NVB “the student of psychology comes to the field with commitments rooted in folk psychological beliefs.” Teacher’s need to address how he or she speaks!