Friday, January 19, 2018

January 3, 2018

Dear Reader,

Today 2018 is still new, but soon it will be old again. The jolly hype of the ‘Happy Holidays’ dies down and everything will be back to normal. People only seem to have an occasion to be nice to each once a year. We are not allowed to have ‘too much of a good thing’ and although we have had a little bit of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), it wouldn’t last, no matter what our new year’s resolutions might have been.

People generally don’t realize that their behavior is determined, not by an autonomous self, but by the environment which stimulates and maintains it. Time magazine had as the ‘Person of the Year’ the many women who spoke out against sexual harassment. These women are temporarily elevated to hero-status as they have endured and overcome great adversities. However, anyone who knows about the science of human behavior can see the problem involved with the #metoo-campaign: we only celebrate negatively reinforced, but not positively reinforced behavior.

Obviously, speaking out and speaking up is a form of counter-control elicited by aversive behavior control. Thus, the whole issue of ‘pushing back’, ‘raising your voice’ and ‘speaking truth to power’ always involves NVB. People like to believe that change is happening, but in reality NVB continues at a higher response rate than before. The good thing is that these powerful people got called on their abusive behavior as people nowadays talk more together on social media and felt supported to acknowledge what is really happening.

Social media can play a big role in bringing about real change if people begin to understand the difference between SVB and NVB and their written counterparts Sound Writing Behavior (SWB) and Noxious Writing Behavior (NWB). The difference between these two ways of talking and writing matters as SVB and SWB are controlled by positive reinforcement and NVB and NWB are controlled by negative reinforcement. Many other behaviors will change once we create and maintain the environments which allow us to shift our NVB and NWB to SVB and SWB. This change in the way in which we communicate heralds he end of mankind’s unaddressed, misunderstood, destructive cycle of aversive control versus counter-control.

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