March 16, 2015

March 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is the second part of this writer’s response to “Verbally-Governed and Event-Governed Behavior” by E.A. Vargas (1986). The reader is informed about this paper, because it contains important descriptions which come close to what this writer calls Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Vargas writes “Unfortunately, we typically state that the organism is an agent for whatever action

it takes. This is especially the case when we speak of verbal behavior. Our language - the typically reinforced utterances of our verbal

community – impels us to describe action that way.” Vargas refers here to NVB. Although most of us would like to believe otherwise, we mainly engage in NVB. Only in moments in which we are completely at ease can we have SVB.  However, such moments are rarely prolonged while we speak.  

It is of great importance we acknowledge that most of our vocal verbal behavior is NVB. We will only be able to make progress with vocal verbal behavior, if we have an accurate description of it. However, we describe ourselves as agents for the actions we presumably take only when we feel threatened. Only for the person whose environment is safe and supportive, does it make sense that “The organism does not originate verbal behavior as "speaker" in any of its modes [topography], whether writing, talking, or gesturing” (italics added). Only when the mediator without any obstruction or effort, can become the verbalizer and can express him or herself in an uninhibited manner, will we transcend our ancient agential uptightness. 

By placing, as Skinner wanted, more emphasis on “the place of mediation”  rather than on “the place of emission”, will we be able to consider “the social behavior that mediates the contact of verbal behavior with its environment. The locality of the behavior that mediates has traditionally been called a "listener."” SVB is the listener's perspective of the speaker. 

“The analysis of verbal behavior properly concentrates on the behavior being mediated.” Yet, mediation is impossible if the mediator is prevented from becoming a verbalizer.  If the mediator is construed as someone who cannot become the verbalizer, this “dispenses with the special analysis we make of verbal behavior as behavior that is verbal because it is mediated.” Emphasis on mediation only makes sense if the mediator has been given the opportunity to become a verbalizer. Vargase writes “If the analysis takes place within the behaviorological theory of verbal behavior, then that "listener" is simply a "speaker," when the controlling relations at that locality are those of verbal behavior.” Only during SVB can verbalizers become mediators and mediators become speakers, but during NVB these roles are predetermined and cannot be reversed. Once these rules are changed, it is no longer NVB, it becomes SVB. It is therefore due to the mediator and not due to the speaker that more instances of SVB and less instances of NVB will begin to occur during a verbal episode. 

Vargas reminds us “It is important to keep in mind the non-autonomous nature of the behavior of the parties we choose for the current focus of our analysis.” The verbalizer behaviors as well as the mediator behaviors are “systems of variables – the mutual effects of response and stimulus interactions” (italics added). Vargas replaced the agential term “speaker” with “verbalizer" and “listener” with "mediator" as “they more accurately describe both the subject matter, and the relations addressed.” He moved in the right direction from which SVB and NVB can become apparent. 

In SVB we comprehend and accept the behaviorological account that we are not causing our own behavior, but in NVB we remain confined by our outdated agential fiction. As we are verbalizing “in a variety of modes”, not only “speaking, but also writing and gesturing” the “critical action of the mediator” is not “what he or she has heard what was verbalized.”

In vocal verbal behavior, on the other hand, “the critical action of the mediator” is “what he or she has heard what was verbalized.” What is heard in SVB is different from what is heard in NVB. SVB sounds good and NVB sounds awful. “Behavioral topographies gain significance only in their relations to controlling circumstances.” SVB can only take place under non-aversive circumstances, while NVB is always controlled by aversive circumstances. “Calling someone a behaviorist” denotes “respect” in SVB, but “contempt” in NVB. The great difference between linguistic and behaviorological analysis is that in the former “analysis results in a category of verbal utterances classified by the speaker”, but in the latter, analysis is about whether “the mediator behaves as he or she is asked by the verbalizer.” In verbal episodes rich with SVB instances there is almost no difference between the verbalizer and the mediator, but in episodes with high rates of NVB instances, the differences between and the separation of the verbalizer and the mediator become bigger and bigger.

In the conclusion of his paper Vargas gave an illustrative example. “Let's say a person turns his head to a shout in another language, for example, "hombre."” Italics are added to emphasize that the verbalizer and mediator are not and cannot be on the same page as they don't speak the same language. This is identical to the mediator’s response in NVB, whose behavior is controlled by the verbalizer with a negative contingency. “He turns due to the loudness and sharpness of the noise, just as he would to any other sound with those characteristics. The noise, we would say, has no "meaning" for him, even though he may mediate the verbalizer's demand by stopping, and then turning his head. The sound, as [a noxious] stimulus, would not be verbal any more than the sudden bang of an object that fell, or the bark of a dog, or the noise made by an animal.” Many italics were added to emphasize the aversive nature of the sound that is involved in NVB. “Only if he were a member of the same verbal community, would it be possible to mediate his (the mediator's) behavior.” Members of the non-aversive (SVB) vocal verbal community cannot and do not mediate the verbal behavior of members of the aversive (NVB) vocal verbal community. Someone familiar with SVB will not even turn his or her head anymore as he or she knows such sounds weren't meant for him or her. 

March 15, 2015

March 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is based on “Verbally-Governed and Event-Governed Behavior” by E.A. Vargas (1988). This paper explains elegantly how the reader of this writing mediates this writer’s writing behavior. “The first organism contacts the mediating agency.” These written words make that possible. “The mediating agency, a second organism or group of organisms - a verbal community in the case of the human organism - contacts the environment.” The reader looks at and recognizes these words, since he or she is already part of the English verbal community. “The result of that contact, the response of the mediating agency, determines in large measure the behavior of the first organism to the environment.” The reader reads and because he or she understands, is inspired by, and changed by these words, he or she is likely to continue reading and studying this blog about the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). This mediation leads the writer to write more. This writer becomes more and more skilled in his written verbal behavior, because he delights in and is reinforced by the predictable fact that the reader can understand what he is writing. 

“An individual learns to talk and write and gesture about many things he or she never encounters.” There is no need to reinvent the wheel again and  much verbal behavior is caused by or “under the control of other verbal stimuli.” Indeed “most of what we know of the world, we know through others. We do not directly experience it.” Therein lies also a big problem. Verbalizer’s can easily make it seem as if they were “directly describing contact with events” and mediators unknowingly reinforce non-existing realities such as the inner behavior-causing agent or some higher power, which supposedly causes the organism’s behavior. The vocal verbal behavior we have while we talk superstitiously, is called NVB. Although we claim to be in touch with reality, with NVB we dissociates from it. 

Without Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) communicators remain incapable of verifying whether what they are talking about is part of the natural world. Since scientific verbal behavior requires the scientist to choose his or her words carefully and provide accurate descriptions. This could and according to this writer should result in SVB, but this doesn’t necessarily happen. Even most behaviorists and behaviorologists engage in NVB. The reason for this is that they, like everyone else, fixate on what they say  while they speak. Each time when what people talk about becomes more important than how they say it, NVB is produced. The verbalizer, who is unaware of his or her direct nonverbal impact on the mediator, doesn’t realize that the aversive sound of his or her voice determines whether the listener will listen or not. If the mediator only does as the verbalizer says he or she should, that is, as long as the mediator is only following orders and do as he or she is told, such a mediator is listening in a different manner than the mediator, who is invited by the verbalizer to become a verbalizer and to participate in the conversation. This, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean that the mediator will always produce public speech, because in SVB, the mediator’s private speech actively participates in the conversation, while in NVB, the mediator’s private speech is kept out of public speech, because presumable it is of no real importance. 

 

Vargas describes NVB when he writes “reactions to fictional events as if they were actual events leads some analysts to confound words with objects, to argue that we react to words as we do to objects.” Without SVB we are simply incapable of acknowledging that “words about events are not the events themselves” or that we “behave to words” in a different way as “we do to objects.” Because of aversive contingencies which reinforce NVB and punish SVB we have continued to “behave to verbal behavior about events as we do to the events themselves.” We can all understand that we react differently to the word elephant than to the real elephant, but things become messy when we talk about our so-called values, believes and politics. When it comes to discussing these we have mainly NVB as our conversation is determined by an aversive reality.

The verbalizer’s control of the behavior of the mediator with an aversive contingency is the norm rather than the exception. The exclusion of our private speech from our public speech characterizes NVB, but inclusion of our private speech in our public speech characterizes SVB. This is a much more parsimonious explanation for why people are “cognitivizing”, as it makes us realize there is a difference between a NVB (de) mand and a SVB mand. Since most people most of the time cannot say what they would like to say, their private speech is so often excluded from their public speech that it is inevitable that it seems to be having a live of its own. 

Also the opposite is true: when people can speak freely again and without fear, their false sense of agency is replaced by a natural sense of social togetherness. Vargas writes “To ignore the mediational quality of this behavior leads to a cognitivizing of the analysis of verbal behavior since mediative relations are hypothesized as a set of special operations in the mind of the speaker or the listener that are responsible for either the listener's or speaker's performance.” Stated differently, it is not ignoring “the mediational quality of this behavior” that leads to “cognitivizing”, but the aversive contingencies. While the focus of verbal behavior isn’t changed and remains “behavior reinforced through the mediation of another person specifically trained to do so by a verbal community” two crucially important subsets of verbal behavior are added (SVB and NVB), which characterize direct-acting nonverbal effects of the contingency.

Nonverbal or pre-verbal influences played a huge role in the evolution of our species. Since language is a relatively new phenomenon in evolutionary history, our bodies are genetically more determined by the mediation of nonverbal rather than by recently developed verbal behavior. “Mediational behavior must have strong adaptive advantages. It is quite prevalent in a variety of animal species. It is exhibited through a variety of social behaviors, phylogenetically controlled and shaped through natural selection. The individual organism is predisposed to mediate in certain ways by the visual, aural, and gestural cues of its biological community.” 

According to Wilson (1975, p. 176) “Biological communication is the action on the part of one organism (or cell) that alters the probability pattern of behavior in another organism (or cell) in a fashion adaptive to either one of the participants. By adaptive I mean that the signaling, or the response, or both, have been genetically programmed to some extent by natural selection. Communication is neither the signal by itself nor the response; it is instead the relation between the two.” (italics added). Vargas notices “Wilson’s definition of communication comes close to Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior”, but also realizes how they are different. Skinner and Wilson agree on “selection by consequences.” ” It is the “prime mechanism by which probability change occurs.” However, Skinner “emphasizes cultural selection” whereas Wilson “emphasizes natural selection.”

This so-called difference is that “mediative behavior” which “appears as prevalent in other species as it does in the human one” is “not shaped by ontogenetic contingencies, but by phylogenetic ones.” However, when we consider the continuum on which “all behavior is shaped by selection by consequences”, we must view ontogenetic development as a subset of phylogenetic development.  By acknowledging that each verbal episode is based on a ratio of SVB and NVB instances, we begin to see there is no dividing line between phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. 

Vargas realizes this and that is why he contrasts Skinner and Wilson. He  suggests “The ratio of phylogenetic to ontogenetic controls over this behavior simply differs. Each type of behavior is a subset of the other: verbal behavior is a subset of social behavior, and social behavior is a subset of behavior.” This explains the relatively high number of NVB instances and low number of SVB instances in verbal episodes. Mediation is as apparent in phylogenetically controlled social behaviors as it is in our ontogenetically controlled behaviors. With the SVB/NVB distinction, we can analyze a verbal episode in terms of its phylogenetic and ontogenetic contributions and see how they enhance or prevent each other.

March 14, 2015

March 14, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is the third part of this writer comments on “Separate Disciplines: The Study of Behavior and the Study of the Psyche” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas. It is amazing that they as well as many others would accurately write “Instead of, as often said, behaviorizing the culture, the culture will cognitivize us.” They even refer to what is being said, but rather than looking for the independent variables of their communication response, they keep trying to argue back. Since this “behaviorizing” had to involve “technical terms even for everyday stuff” which to many “sound so odd and sterile, even inhuman”, it should come as a surprise that not much energy has gone into how behaviorism is actually talked about. 

Anyone who had a one-time exposure to SVB is capable of understanding and acknowledging that the more emphasis a person puts on what he or she is saying, the more horrible he or she sounds. Naturally, non-behaviorists are aversively affected by the behaviorist's tenacious “philosophically uncompromising approach of human affairs.” Not much has changed because, like everyone else, behaviorists are completely tone-deaf. NVB is everywhere and we don't even acknowledge that it is a problem to us.

Fraley and Vargas (1986) write “It is a matter of controls over our verbal behavior and of the kind of verbal community we arrange to provide those controls.” They refer to securing their written verbal behavior, but their vocal verbal behavior is only indirectly mentioned. While “assuming that debate sharpens the wits” they continue to “listen respectfully” to people who “tell us how wrong we are.” This is an example of how NVB obliterates SVB and continues to do so unless we pay attention to what is happening. 

Behaviorology’s separation from psychology, like a married arguing couple,  seems necessary, because the two can’t communicate with each other. However, both parties are equally impaired by NVB, and neither one of them is aware of this. The lack of SVB makes it seem as if a separation would solve the problem, but it couldn’t and it didn’t. 

      

Behaviorologists as well as people in mainstream psychology are mostly engaged in NVB and thus they all “talk funny” while they are trying to “do the right things.” Actually, it is more accurate to say that they all talk in an unnatural way. Insistence on the importance of the scientist’s verbal behavior hasn’t contributed as far as improving human relationship. 

SVB and NVB have been present since human beings became verbal, but we have yet to take notice of this fact. Such is the power of our culture, it doesn’t matter which culture. The authors state “That shared culture, called radical behaviorism, denotes, with respect to our verbal behavior, the controls that determine how we will react to a given body of facts, and even what will be admitted as facts.” It is astounding that behaviorists and behaviorologists haven't gotten to the SVB/NVB distinction yet.

The paper by Fraley and Vargas (1986) was to establish an academic home. Perhaps this academic home today is still lacking, because behaviorology hasn’t found its own sound? It took a long time for behaviorologists to be comfortable enough with themselves to be able to establish their own separate science, which “profoundly differs from any other discipline.” At stake is not only behaviorology’s identity and independence, but the identity and independence of every human being. SVB is needed to talk about that in a way that we all come together like my students in my class. 

The paper ends beautifully with the sentence “Independence is simply the name for the sorts of controls we prefer and under which we would prosper.” This ties in with SVB, because we only prosper with SVB. Nobody prospers in NVB. What has been going on in the name of prosperity was, as one student put it, simply “abuse.” SVB involves mutually reinforcing interactions. As long as NVB abuse, masquerading as human interaction, is not properly addressed we will fall victim to it without even knowing it. Moreover, behaviorology cannot exist, let alone flourish, in an aversive contingency. It is not about the sort of controls behaviorologists prefer, but about what makes human interaction possible. 

Only SVB can give behaviorology or behaviorism its right tone, its own sound. Communication problems between behaviologists and practitioners from the field of psychology can and will be solved and behaviorology will be fully acknowledged. SVB advances scientific exploration exponentially.

March 13, 2015

March 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today’s writing is second part of this writer comments on “Separate Disciplines: The Study of Behavior and the Study of the Psyche” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas. Before he will go into responding to this paper this writer wants to write about the conversation that took place in the Principles of Psychology class which he teaches at Butte College.

Yesterday the students had their Midterm. Since it didn’t take them longer than one hour to complete the exam, this writer had planned an extra credit opportunity for his students. They received 20 extra credit points for staying 20 minutes and engaging in an exploration of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Unlike in the previous evening, this time the entire class stayed. The 20 minutes went by fast and no one got up to leave. 

The mini-seminar went on for 45 minutes and everyone contributed. Even those who didn’t talk enjoyed it. They nodded in agreement, laughed and followed what was said by others and this writer. When 45 minutes had passed there was an atmosphere of peacefulness which was felt by everyone and each student who had talked gave a concluding remark. 

One person said in almost all other classes students are not allowed to speak and are expected not to speak. She even stated that she felt afraid to ask a question. While acknowledging the well-being created by our SVB, she made a statement about the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we are all used to and conditioned by, with which everyone agreed. Although she was speaking with herself and thinking out loud, she was asking this writer “If SVB is so easy, so simple, so relaxing and so reinforcing, why do we..” she paused.. then finished her sentence “continue to...abuse each other?” 

Here was a student, who was reinforced for her newly acquired SVB by the newly created verbal community, the class. Another student asked “but, you must be conscious first before you can have SVB?” She then rephrased that into “wait....SVB makes you conscious.” A third student, her face beaming with joy, said “I am in harmony.” A fourth one wondered out loud “but how do you apply this?” This writer asked him to express what he thinks how this might work? He said slowly “So, when SVB can keep going, it applies itself to whatever we are talking about?” He added “So, it can be applied to learning, relating, working, parenting..?” 

Although nobody answered, the answer was there. Someone connected NVB with “survival of the fittest”, but then went on to describe SVB as “the conversation we have when there is no longer the need to struggle to survive.” Another student said “when in NVB you can’t say what you want to say, you feel as if you are not supposed to exist.” This writer agreed that NVB is basically dissociative in nature. When the talk was over, it was evident that everyone was quiet and content. 

This accumulative effect was a surprise to one student, who had been working that day at her job in customer service. She had learned “not to respond to negativity, to the NVB which so many people express.” Her remark reminded others of the question how to apply SVB and the ability to distinguish between SVB and NVB. She said “Unless customers ask me a question, I basically try not to respond, because unless they express their real concern I can’t help them anyway.” 

During SVB we express our real concern. Not every question is equally necessarily. Viewed from the SVB/NVB distinction, most of our questions are unnecessary and negative demands. The more we know about SVB, the more we realize that many of our NVB questions are best completely avoided. They don’t need to be answered and will fall by the way side. 

“Separate Disciplines” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas should have been about SVB and NVB. Although they describe the serious problems and negativity  involved in NVB, they don’t view talking as the reason why people do what they do and why, in spite of its relative success, behaviorology hasn’t gotten much traction. They write “In only a few institutions out of hundreds has the behavioral faction been able to attain a political majority and give its department a behavioral tone” (italics added). Although they refer to how behaviorists sound, they only do so figuratively, not literally. 

This writer insists on the literal interpretation of what can and should be called the “behavioral tone.” Only that tone can enhance our vocal verbal behavior and relationship, because it is not and cannot be aversive. If it is, then it is not a “behavioral tone.” Such a tone of voice has to be different from “a political majority”, from the “developmentalists, Freudians, Rogerians, so-called humanists, information theorists, brain-mind epiphenomenalists, and so on-in short, cognitivists of all sorts.” Stated differently, the “behavioral tone” transcends all nonsense that goes on in the name of politics. Moreover, behaviorology has to be distinguished from psychology, in the same way that SVB has to be separated from NVB.   

Since nobody identified NVB as our political way of talking, which is full of slight-of-hand tricks, the appropriation of behavioral principles by those who only wish to promote unscientific foolishness, continues to this day. Thus, cognitivists can keep on exploiting behaviorism by translating it into “their work, their literature and by speaking of it in their terms”, because NVB has not been addressed. This would have never been possible if the “behavioral tone” had not been ignored. Endless laments about “the operating style whereby the political majority appropriates control of the knowledge base, insures control over the professional recognitions, the acclaim, the enhanced opportunities, and even wealth” didn't work and never had any positive effect as it represented and perpetuated NVB. 

How people talk has far-reaching consequences. Branch and Malagodi (1980) stated that “a behavioral faculty member, isolated among assorted cognitive psychologists, eventually succumbs to the reinforcement and punishment practices of the immediate verbal community.” Theoretically more SVB-inclined behavioral faculty members are affected by the dominant NVB community. In other words, they are not reinforced for their SVB, but punished for it. At issue was not and is not the “necessary political compromises and necessary accommodations forced upon behaviorists”, but our way of speaking. NVB “obviously occurs under nonscientific contingencies.” It can easily be seen, heard and measured, but behaviorists have looked at, listened to and measured other things, which supposedly were more important. What do Fraley and Vargas mean when they say that many behaviorists have “become smooth-tongued accommodators?” (italics added). 

The NVB verbalizer’s movements of his or her tongue produces a response product, a sound, that aversively controls the mediator’s verbalizing behavior, but the SVB verbalizer’s tongue, by contrast, produces a very different sound, which positively reinforces the mediator’s verbalizing behavior. How does this nonverbal “slippage from [verbal] contingencies of scientific work” occur? Are behavioral psychologists really “deprived of the opportunity" or did they "lack the courage of their convictions by not getting very good at convictions in the first place?” This writer thinks too much emphasis has been placed on what has already been said. Since we haven’t had SVB for a reliable period of time, there is, other than actually doing the experiment, no way of knowing, what we would say or what we would be able to come up with, when we would have one hour, two hours, three hours of SVB. It is 2015 now and we still haven’t started our SVB conversation, because the distinction is not yet know to most scientists.

Like Skinner, this writer claims something new. During his first year at Harvard Skinner (1928) wrote “But my fundamental interests lie in the field of Psychology, and I shall probably continue therein, even, if necessary, by making over the entire field to suit myself” (italics added). In SVB the verbalizer suits him or herself, because he or she speaks only with a sound, which he or she experiences as positively reinforcing.