April 27, 2014

April 27, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

These words are written under discriminative control of the most recent experiences of this writer. His experiences can be described and when this is done, it will be clear that this writing was somehow produced by these antecedent stimuli. Nothing this writer has ever written came out of nowhere. There were always circumstances with discriminative stimuli which set the stage for certain responses to occur. When there were good consequences, these responses began to happen more often if these circumstances occurred again, but when there were bad consequences, these responses became less. Thus, the responses that were not reinforced over time seized to exist, while only those that were, began to occur more often. 

Over the last year, many behaviors of this writer have drastically decreased or, surprisingly, completely disappeared. As a result, he experiences more peace and happiness. There is no tendency to go back to these behaviors, because it has become clear to this writer how they were enhanced by environments to which he is no longer exposed. And, even if these environments or aspects of these environments reappear, it is clear to him what they result in and need to be avoided. In other words, this writer seems to have improved his discrimination for what reinforces him and what doesn’t. He can now recognize without effort whether circumstances are enhancing or are preventing reinforcement. 

An experience of love and compassion produces this writing. These are good things which can happen to many people. This writer likes to think about how that changes our spoken communication. When the way in which we talk is reinforcing us we have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). This writer teaches and preaches SVB. His teaching is his preaching. There would be no preaching if there was no teaching, but most preaching is without teaching. Most preaching doesn’t teach the correct kind of behaviors and the behaviors which are increased by most preaching can’t produce the peace and happiness this writer is talking about. Most of what is preached creates only a resemblance of goodness, which is hard to differentiate from real goodness. The preaching without teaching doesn’t translate into improvement of how we talk with each other. It affects how we speak with one another, but the safety and peace that is obtained derives from limiting us in what we are allowed to say to each other. This is not the case with SVB during which people can say more than before.

We could be saying so much more than we currently do, but instead we are saying less and less. This writer, who, due to his discovery of SVB began to say more and more, realizes how afraid people are to say what they want to say. There have been many, many circumstances in which what we had wanted to say was punished. This has drastically decreased our willingness, our ability to say it and it has diverted what we had wanted to say into all sorts of ridiculous activities. These other activities are basically escape behaviors which take us away from saying what we want to say. We still want to say what we want to say, but we don’t want to be punished for it. We limit what we want to say with social conventions that fit with our behavioral history. Sadly, while we imagine that we are expressing ourselves freely, we mainly limit what we want to say on our Facebook, in our church or in the social groups that we belong to. 

The good we have experienced, which we want to experience again, is no longer experienced. What we experience is only the resemblance of the good for which we have settled. We know that we are missing out, but we console ourselves thinking that the resemblance is better than nothing. We are hanging on for dear life, because our beliefs are all we got. Behaviors that supersede our beliefs were not reinforced and  we prevent frustration by limiting ourselves and others.  We want and need others to believe what we believe in, otherwise our belief no longer prevents our frustration by means of limitation. Moreover, we sacrifice our independence and conform to the rules in the hope that others do the same. We don’t feel the frustration of being limited as long as we are surrounded by those who think like we do. Our limitation can only become apparent when we are confronted with those who don’t think like us. Of course, we think that they are wrong and that we are right, but they think exactly the same, they also think  they are right and we are wrong. Thus, we all have our own version of what is right, but we limit ourselves by what we say and think. Our frustration with limitation is with those who don’t think like us.

What we say is very much determined by our culture, which tells us what we are allowed to say. In America one is not allowed to say that hero-adoration is actually quite childish. We keep hearing these blown-up stories about heroes who have saved lives, who have fought battles, who in spite of great adversity have survived and we are told that these are our role-models. In other cultures, pious saints are examples of how we should behave. We should be as simple, humble and unassuming as Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa. And, then there is Jesus Christ, who presumably died for our sins on the cross.The fact that Muslims believe something different bothers Christians, but also atheists want religious people to go away, because their presence reminds them what they believe in is not believed by them. Moreover, those who don't believe like we do, don't talk like us. We don’t talk like them. Spiritual heroes like Jesus, Mohammed or the Daila Lama compete for our attention.and we, with our belief, also compete for the attention of others while we talk. This ongoing struggle for the attention of others, which characterizes most interaction, is not getting us anywhere. This writer calls this way of talking Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Those who have NVB are not communicating. 

To communicate, we have to leave behind our way of communicating. It doesn’t matter what our way of communicating entails, what matters is that it must be stopped. Unless it is stopped, we are reinforcing each other's NVB with our different languages. Whether we are talking about Christianity, Environment, Science, Buddhism, Republicans, Art, Democrats or Social Media, we can’t have SVB as long as we make it seem as if all of these exist separate from each other. They are part of one and the same reality. In the newspapers or the magazines, we can read about each of them in one language, in English, but what we read is written language. SVB, however, makes us speak about each one of these languages in in one language, but it is not English, but a new way of communicating. In NVB we all speak a different language, but in SVB we speak the same language. We can all learn to have SVB and we can know that our language is not the same as someone else’s language. This knowing is the goodness that is reinforced when we  acknowledge the limitation of our language. The understanding that knowledge itself is always limited results in SVB. NVB insists that we know it all, but SVB insists that our knowledge is limited. 

 

Once our way of communicating becomes a function of our movement through different environments or different fields of knowledge, it will be no longer limited to one environment. The verbal community that each human being grows up in inevitably sets the stage for our limitations. These limitations are normal and must be acknowledged scientifically. Only after this has happened, can our way of talking come under control of contingencies of reinforcement that pertain to all human beings. We discover these contingencies if we are brave enough to transcend what we are familiar with, but are constricted by. There is a new way of talking with each other, which is totally different from anything anyone has been used to. It is called SVB.

In SVB we don’t talk like we usually do and we have a very different way of expressing ourselves. However, we don’t know and can't know what SVB is like until we do it. When we have SVB, we know that we have it, because it is unlike NVB. We know it is unlike what we are used to. We agree whenever this is the case and because we mutually benefit from SVB, we are going to want to make it happen again.

The notion that we can’t know what SVB is beforehand is exciting as well as threatening. In SVB, we leave the safety and familiarity of what we are used to. In place comes an enriching experience which, although it may be slightly anxiety provoking, is energizing and inspiring. There are other benefits than those that are immediately obtained by familiarity, but these benefits become clear only when one continues to immerse oneself in new communication experiences. 

In SVB one has new experiences and one will be able to understand what makes these experiences possible. Once one embarks on SVB, one realizes what was missing in NVB. In NVB circumstances are totally  different than in SVB. In NVB there is no movement and no expression of positive emotions. In NVB we are all stuck with negative emotions that are always involved in our attempts to pretend that our way of communicating is the only way. This self-defeating characteristic of  NVB becomes funny once we have SVB, because it is so common, yet so little understood. Our lack of humor, our fanaticism and our inability to laugh at ourselves, is part of NVB, but in SVB we are capable of recognizing and accepting that we were all stuck.

SVB gives us the assurance that we can overcome our differences. SVB organizes the world in a different way than NVB. Once we have SVB, we realize that our NVB was not very sophisticated. We kept having it because we didn’t know any better. Once we know better, there is an incentive to maintain SVB or to find it back again if we loose it.

April 13, 2014

April 13, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

I have just woken up from a wonderful sleep. As I went into the office, Kayla, our cat, walked with me and greeted me, by touching my legs. When I sat down, she sat on my lap and began purring, while occasional turning her pretty face to me. She squinted with her eyes and seemed perfectly in tune with my good mood. I love our cat. Yesterday, as I was standing in the kitchen and was talking with my wife Bonnie, Kayla was at the other side of the living room. She saw me standing near the fridge and came running into the kitchen. Then she jumped on the counter, on me and then on top of the fridge, where she sat in her little bamboo basket. It was so funny that my wife and I were laughing. Kayla likes to use us as a stepping stone to jump to higher places. However, this doesn’t always work out though. Not too long ago, I was in the office standing near the book shelves. She wanted to jump on me and  then onto the shelves. I didn’t want her to knock over the pictures which are on the shelves, but she had already decided to jump on me and she scratched my shoulders and that was very painful and annoying. 

Today I will give another seminar. Bonnie and I had nice work out this morning and we went to have lunch together afterwards. We ate Chinese: spicy ribs and chow fung and took home the left overs in a little box. It tasted delicious. Today I will experiment with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) in a way that I haven’t done before. I will still describe SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but then, as a discriminative stimulus, I will hold up my left hand or my right hand to indicate that we are having SVB or NVB. This nonverbal signal is hypothesized to avoid lengthy explanations and get everybody aboard a bit quicker. Also, I will let others raise their left or right hand so that we all begin to discern it from each other. This new form of discrimination learning seems more pragmatic to me than using verbal explanations to refer to the nonverbal.

April 12, 2014

April 12, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

No matter how tired I may be, I always have the energy to write something about our spoken communication, although I prefer to speak about it. This prediction summarizes how I have been and how I am likely to be in the future. I don’t doubt this, I trust in my abilities to bring attention to how we communicate, no matter how dismal the circumstances may be. Last night, in my dream, I was once again a student in the classroom. I didn’t like the discussion that was going on and I spoke about it with my teacher, who smiled at me and let me take over the discussion. Then, I spoke with my fellow students, who listened to me and who agreed with me that there is more to be said than our phony discussion. In this dream, I transformed from being a student to being a teacher.  

This dream became a reality: I am a teacher and I was, but also still am a student. Writing from a first-person perspective is like taking a holiday from the third-person perspective, which in recent times I have endorsed. I have never connected the first-person perspective with being a student and the third-person perspective with being a teacher, but it now makes sense to see it that way. Due to my dream, I am revisiting my first-person perspective, which has become enormously enriched by my third-person perspective. In the dream, I carried a woman on my back. I was sexually attracted to her and I was dancing around with her. To show my strength, I jumped in the air. This made her lift off my shoulders and fall back on them again. I could have easily tossed her off, but I didn’t because her weight grounded me. Besides, she seemed to enjoy my powerful dance.

My public speech has changed because of the inclusion of my private speech in public speech. My private speech has also changed because I understand it as a function of public speech. Likewise, my third-person perspective began to explain my first-person perspective and my first-person perspective began to support and enhance my third-person perspective. My dream, which brought me back to being a student, showed me how I became a teacher. I became a teacher by being a student. It fills me with happiness to know that I am still that student. It helps me to be a better teacher. I became the teacher I never had, but always wanted to have. I also longed to be taught by the teacher who I am for myself. I have never given that thought much thought. At some point in my life, I developed the longing to become a teacher. I became a teacher, because I could become a teacher.

I became a teacher because I know something which others don’t know. It is not my love for teaching, but the fact that I know something, which legitimizes my teaching. The so-called love for teaching is  deceptive in that it hides the lack of knowledge on the part of the teacher. I would never speak of my love for teaching, but I would rather talk about my love for knowledge. My teaching is my love for knowledge. The two-letter sentence “I know” sums up what I am about and who I am. It is not arrogance which makes me say this, but knowledge. My knowledge connects the objective with the subjective as well as the subjective with the objective. The objective can only become closer to the subjective if the subjective is involved in becoming more objective. Self-reflection that doesn’t lead to a more realistic picture of one’s self isn’t worth anything, because it will be against objective knowledge. In the past, I have struggled with those who were into unrealistic types of self-reflection, because they were in essence against learning. Today I don’t struggle with them any longer, but I still remember that those who are too hung up on their own subjective experiences always down-play the natural sciences. I became a teacher because my learning has led to the knowledge of the happiness which is worth sharing.    

April 11, 2014

April 11, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

I have always been writing about the same process. I can speak about it as well, but I want the reader to know that speaking about it is completely different from writing about it. This writing about speaking is not the same as speaking about speaking. Writing about speaking easily derails into writing about writing, which, paradoxically, may make the reader think that the author is speaking about speaking. Speaking about speaking isn’t possible in writing. 

I am writing about the mistaken notion that the reader thinks that he or she is experiencing speaking. Although I am writing about speaking, I don’t want the reader to think that I am speaking. I am not speaking when I am writing these words. When the reader reads these words, the reader is not engaging in a conversation with me. When I write these words, I am not talking with the reader. Because I am not speaking, my focus to write about speaking changes into writing about writing, even without me noticing it. It is difficult to write about speaking without losing track of the simple fact that one is only writing and not speaking.  

Perhaps the reader doesn’t care about this distinction? Perhaps the reader imagines that I am speaking with him or with her? Perhaps the reader reads something into these words, which wasn’t written, and, more importantly, which couldn’t be written? Perhaps the reader has been fooling him or herself all along that not only this writer, but any other writer was speaking with him or her, when in fact nothing like this was ever the case? Perhaps, all our books and all our written publications have totally distracted us from the fact that we are not talking?

Most writing is based on the illusion that we are having a conversation. Writers maintain this illusion because they remain unaware of the obvious, yet easily missed fact that they are only writing. So, the writer and the reader actually engage in a follies a deux, a shared illusion. Given the way in which we communicate, it is not surprising that most of our writing and most of our reading is that way. Perhaps it is so hard for us to see that writing isn’t speaking and that reading isn’t the same as being part of a conversation, because the way in which we usually communicate itself is already creating the illusion that we are having real interaction?  

I think that most of our communication is not communication at all, but only the pretention of communication. I call it Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). I call it NVB because it doesn’t sound good. If you would care to listen, you would agree with me. I don’t know if we will have the chance to explore this while we speak with each other, but I hope we do. If you don’t agree with me, you are only disagreeing with this writing. If you don’t agree with my written opinion, that most spoken communication isn’t spoken communication, please realize that what is written here isn’t spoken communication. Disagreeing with me in spoken communication is something entirely different from disagreeing with me in writing. All our disagreements in writing have taken our attention away from the obvious, but easily ignored fact of life that we still need to talk with each other. Just as students postpone doing their homework, we are dragging our heels, we procrastinate by reading, but we don’t talk.  

The writing which mostly distracts us from speaking is the writing which makes us believe that we are speaking. Our eagerness to believe this complicated illusion is based on our hunger for interaction. Since this need was not fulfilled by conversation with others, this unfulfilled need can be exploited by writers. Most reading is because of our unfulfilled need for interaction. If we knew that we were being bamboozled, we would read less and talk more, but the opposite is the case, we read more and we talk less and the little talking we do is mainly NVB. 

  

Do you see, my dear reader, how easy it is to believe that I am talking with you, while you are only reading something which was written? Do you realize that the more entrenched this tragic illusion becomes, the more what is written is only about what is written and what is read is only about what is written about what is written and completely dissociates you from the reality? Do you notice while you are reading these words that you understand something which perhaps before you didn’t understand? Are ready to talk about mis-understanding? In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we talk about these matters. Moreover, in SVB, we recognize that for the most part, human interaction hasn’t happened yet. When SVB is happening, you can’t help but notice how little it has been happening and how good it is that it is actually happening. 

This writing may make you interested in SVB, but to engage in SVB is entirely different than to  read about it. To have it, skills are needed, which you can’t develop by reading about it. It is huge misunderstanding to think that we become more informed. Our communication skills are not cultivated by what we read. To improve our communication skills, we must be speaking about speaking, not reading about writing about writing. We must engage in spoken communication long enough to be able to speak about speaking and we must stop being afraid to speak about speaking about speaking. Our fear of speaking is because we were not listened to. Our fear of speaking has made us into readers, not speakers. Those who do most of the talking fear SVB,  because their NVB is being exposed. Those who do most of the writing are the least interested in having a conversation, even if they proclaim to be writing about it. I want to have SVB with you.

April 10, 2014

April 10, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Instead of being caused by an inner agent, speech, like any other behavior, is caused by an outer agent, by another human being. Public speech doesn't make sense if it was caused by an inner self. To the extent that speech doesn’t make any sense, this is caused by our belief that we cause our own behavior. In the light of this huge social problem, it is useful to think of what is known as the fundamental attribution error, our common tendency to overestimate the causal influence of someone else’s internal characteristics on behavior, while overestimating the causal influence of the situation, when considering our own behavior. When explain the actions of others, we tend to think of what kind of a person he or she is, but when we explain our own behavior, we come up with all sorts of outside causes, such as social influences or situations.

By giving this phenomenon a name, however, social psychologists have NOT explained why we judge actions of others fundamentally differently than our own. The term actor-observer bias seems to refer to what Skinner spoke of as events that occur inside or outside of our skin. It is this distinction between what occurs inside and outside of our skin, which explains our behavior, because it describes the continuum of behavior, which comprises public as well as private events. The ubiquity and persistence of this unexplained fundamental attribution error should give us pause, because it is believed to have revealed something  troubling about human nature. When we hear about the Milgram Experiment, in which teachers are instructed to give electro shocks to learners, we believe there must be something wrong with these teachers instead of explaining their behavior within the circumstances of a coercive situation.

What is left out in the discussion of this experiment, which clearly illustrates that the situation causes our behavior, is the conclusion that human beings are NOT responsible for their own behavior. In other words, the shock that we experience upon finding out that ordinary people are willing to give shocks to these learners, is that we believe that we are responsible for our own behavior, in spite of the fact that this experiment proves us wrong. Even though these experiments have been replicated over and over again, we still don’t want to believe that we would do EXACTLY THE SAME under such circumstances. The conclusions of the Milgram Experiment, shocking as they may be, emphasize the effects of obedience to authority, but leave the issue of causation of our behavior by an inner agent untouched.

It is no surprise that researchers who looked for high levels of obedience as being associated with particular personality traits weren’t able to find anything. Given the known fact that situations cause behavior, it could have been predicted that most people, who are caught in a situation in which they are intimidated, oppressed and controlled by the powerful influence of others, go all the way and would administer the maximum amount of shock-level. Although participants didn’t report having negative psychological consequences and were glad they took part in the study, serious questions have been raised about the ethical issues involved in this experiment. How far should researchers be allowed to go to get an answer to their questions of interest? Even though this study made clear that behavior is caused by our environment in EXACTLY THE SAME way today as it was fifty years ago, the conclusion that this study should never be allowed to happen still stands. Apparently, people in power have a stake in preventing others from knowing that behavior is caused by environments. In a follow-up study participants stated they were happy to find out it was their environment which had caused them to behave the way they did.

Nobody talks about the fact that if 80% of the participants in the Milgram Experiment were actually happy to find out that their behavior had been caused by the situation, then such an explanation must have great importance for us. To call it bias is completely wrong. Why are we happy to know that we are not responsible for the bad actions we did? Many other explanations than behavior being caused by our environment can be given, but they obfuscate the cause of our behavior. We are always happy to know that we are not responsible for what we did, because we were made to do many things which we didn’t want to do. Nobody ever asked us if we wanted to do them. We were told, forced and threatened to do many horrible things.

The analogy of the Milgram Experiment with life itself is very compelling. Our tendency to defer to an authority figure is as strong as it ever was because this innate, involuntary behavior made us survive. This part of our behavior is explained by our phylogenetic history. Voluntary behavior, on the other hand, has to be learned during our life-time. Our ontogenetic history sets the stage for our ability to speak. When we are no longer allowed to speak, we revert back to biological mechanisms which predate the arrival of speech.

Those who don’t want others to know that behavior is caused by the environment basically don’t want them to know that their behavior is caused by them. Like magicians, they make it look as if things just disappear. What disappears when environmental causation of behavior disappears is our ability to see who is  controlling our environment. What disappears is that we don’t see that others, who are manipulating and exploiting us, are orchestrating and causing our behavior. The biggest trick being played on us is that we, not they, deal with the consequences of our behavior. In our struggle to free ourselves from this conundrum, we don't realize one behavior is causing another. The harder we try to shake our responsibility, the worse our situation gets. 

All human behavior is caused by others. The oppressed cause the behavior of the oppressor in the same way as the oppressor causes the behavior of the oppressed. We don’t see it that way because the oppressor and the oppressed agree on the causation of behavior. Although based on make-belief, we agree that our behavior is caused by each of us individually. And, we think we are not responsible for each other’s behavior. Our behavior is based on the ludicrous assumption that we are only responsible for ourselves. When we think of being responsible for others, we still don’t think of being responsible for their behaviors. Yet, even a little boy knows that when he has to be responsible for his little sister, he will have to deal with her behavior. Likewise, all who are entrusted with the care of others know that they are not dealing with individuals who cause their own behavior, but that they, as best as they can, cause the behavior of those who are in their care. 

Those who experience friendship, relationship or collaboration, feel responsible for each other’s behavior. Responsibility for each other’s behavior makes us happy, but responsibility for our own behavior makes us depressed. The reason for this is that with the former we are successful, but with the latter, we fail. Responsibility for the behavior of others doesn’t mean we will enable abuse, addiction or unhealthy behaviors, to the contrary, we will be enriched by it in multiple ways. However, this will not and cannot happen as long as we think that we are responsible for ourselves. Responsibility for each other’s behavior will create a better society than the one in which supposedly we are responsible only for our own behavior. In such a society, we simply keep passing the bucket. Societies have come and gone, but one thing has stayed the same: we talk as if we are not influenced by what other people are saying, as if it doesn’t matter. The earth is round and not flat. We must come to terms with the fact that how we think about the world is influenced by how others have talked with us.