March 26, 2015

March 26, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I have discovered how better conversations are working. When I say better, I mean better than what I was used to. What I was used to is not very different from what most people are used to. The only difference between me and most other people is that I apparently felt so bothered by it all that I was compelled to figure out why human beings generally have such bad communication. 

In my estimation, most conversations which go on everywhere fall into the category of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). This means they are based on negative emotions. It is astounding that we don’t object to the situations which keep creating and perpetuating these negative emotions. This could only continue for so long because we remained inaccurate about the full expression of our emotions. 

The accurate expression of our emotions requires an environment of safety, support, sensitivity, openness and acceptance. Only in such an environment can we have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). People are not evil, but environments cause them to behave the way they do. We neither cause our own SVB nor do we cause our NVB.

Anyone can figure out that the categories of SVB and NVB really exist. Anyone can, based on their experiences, distinguish between these two subsets of vocal verbal behavior. I don’t offer anything new in terms of experiences which are available, but I make use of what we have in a different way. I stimulate you to do the same.  However, I’m not interested in making you do exactly as I do. When you will have SVB, you will say different things than I do and that is perfectly all right. 

When we engage in SVB, although we will say different things, they will fit together. They fit together, because we say them for the same reason; we talk to create and maintain SVB. The fact that things don’t fit together in NVB is not accidental. They can’t fit together, because the reason that people engage in NVB is not to fit things together. The reason that we engage in NVB is to set ourselves apart and negative emotions are needed to do this. 

 

We have all experienced conversations that contained a lot of SVB instances and only few NVB instances and conversations that were mainly contained NVB instances and hardly any SVB instances. It is my observation that most of us have only had minimal amounts of SVB and large amounts of NVB. I know how we can change that. Verify what I say and see for yourself if what I say is true. 

I dedicate myself to SVB, but realize that without knowing NVB, we will not be able to have it. I increase the SVB which is already there and I decrease the NVB which was troubling us. Since we don't know about the SVB/NVB distinction, we don’t know what we are missing and we are continuously putting up with NVB. Once the SVB/NVB distinction is clear, we don't put up with NVB anymore. It also becomes apparent to us that only SVB is worth our while and that NVB is basically a total waste of time. 

SVB is not something magic, it either happens or it doesn’t happen, it either can happen or it can’t happen. And, if it can happen, it will happen. It didn’t happen, because it couldn’t happen. Unless what it takes is available, we keep fantasizing and idealizing about something that is actually possible, but which can only come about, if we pay close attention to how we communicate with each other. 

It is not that we can’t make the arrangements that are necessary for SVB or that it is very difficult to make these arrangements, but it is because we don’t know what it actually takes to have SVB that we keep repeating NVB. We will create more SVB only if we are sick and tired of NVB. This is how I began my journey. The expression of my negative emotions simply wasn't working. It isn't working for anyone. Upon realizing this SVB is going to increase.

March 25, 2015

March 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I will respond to “Using Social Representations to Negotiate the Social Practices of Life” (1994) by Bernard Guerin, because it helps clarify some of the things I claim about how we talk with each other. Guerin points out that the contingency which best explains human behavior is our social environment. Although most behavior analysts would agree, this agreement has, according to Guerin, remained primarily theoretical. To date, not much literature exists about the study of “social practices of a group of people” which looks at “how social representations are used to regulate social behavior.” Such a study could explain why human beings engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

I absolutely agree with Guerin, who writes “We only learn such responses (strictly speaking such contingencies) through other people, and the interactions which maintain such responses are with other people.” SVB and NVB are perhaps not best treated as different behaviors, but as different social contingencies. By emphasizing the ubiquity and the importance of social mediation, we are more likely to discover SVB and NVB, two subsets of vocal verbal behavior. 

Indeed “our attitudes, attributions and excuses about our own actions are also negotiated through social groups” and “what our social groups allow us to get away with saying and doing.” For instance, in Afghanistan, a mentally ill woman, who may have said something about a book she didn’t like, was accused of insulting the Koran and was kicked and beaten to death by a mob of young men. Yet, this is nothing new. We haven’t been able to eradicate much of this violent fanaticism, because we are still looking at behavior in a de-contextualized manner. Unless we take into account the social basis of such fictitious rule-governed behavior, we will continue to be inclined to demonize other people for doing exactly the same thing what we are also doing, that is: “maintain a social group.” 

Maintenance of our way of interacting as well as “much of our everyday life depends upon the groups and communities we live in, not with contacting the objects we might talk about or represent.” The horrific act described above is not explained by referring to religious beliefs, because the “maintenance of such fictions comes about from social negotiations.” It is impossible to address “fictitious ‘knowledges’ and social representations” if we don’t recognize they are mediated “through our social groups.”

In my early 20s I traveled a lot and have seen many countries and experienced and enjoyed many different cultures. One thing I will never forget, which made travel and its discomforts so attractive in the first place, was the high rate of SVB responses I experienced, often with people who were living in less affluent environments than I had been raised in. I was moved by the kindness, hospitality, innocence, liveliness, pride, openness, genuineness and helpfulness of relatively poor people. These experiences changed my view of human beings forever. It was already clear to me then what I am only now writing about. Stated simply, when people need each other, they will have more SVB. The less they need each other, the more NVB they have. The individualistic way of viewing life of the Western world that we don’t need each other (which, as we know now, is socially maintained), had devastating consequences for how humans communicate. By analyzing the rates of SVB and NVB in different societies, we can study social practices and acknowledge that “social representations are only made possible by prior social power relations.” We detect the “conditions of social practice under which we would want to class any talk as a social representation.”

The rates of SVB and NVB predict the conditions which set the stage for people from collectivistic as well as from individualistic cultures to “talk about fictitious events”, have “ritual talk”, “talk about unknown or unknowable events” or “talk which closely involves the resources and supplies of a social group.” The echo-chambers of  social media that perpetuate the pre-scientific notion that individuals cause their own behavior are as fictitious as any religious doctrine.

Conditions which create and maintain higher rates of SVB and lower rates of NVB produce social representations that make consensual agreement within the group possible. On the other hand, conditions which create and maintain higher rates of NVB and lower rates of SVB produce social representations that make consensual agreement impossible. Conditions in which social representation was “consistently held by all the members of social group” would either inform us “about the extreme [NVB] social power relations of that group than about the content of that representation” (word and italics added) or it would demonstrate real agreement about the content of our SVB representation, which sustains our mutually reinforcing relations. 

I agree with Guerin’s emphasis on the need for “consistency of the social situations themselves, not in some person-originated “need for consistency””, but I claim that the pursuit of this need is a defining characteristic of NVB. Aversive contingencies that maintain “extreme [NVB] power relations” in which “consensual agreement (about social representations) is never likely”, always give rise to counter-control. That this may have led to the Western belief in individualism, was based on higher rates of SVB. Stated differently, NVB is not based on consensual agreement. Counter-control was initially based on higher rates of SVB, because it used to be more reinforcing to disagree and assume individuality, but this is no longer the case. 


That we continue to hang on to this socially negotiated fiction may very well involve the demise of Western culture. Since only in SVB we can “talk about an event in such a particular way” that this “functions to keep the group together and to facilitate interactions”, we need to know the contingency which makes it happen. “Shouting at rocks doesn’t make anything happen. Words only have effects on people, and that applies to all words.” In NVB, we treat each other as rocks, but we are people, who will only respond well to SVB.

March 24, 2015

March 24, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I reread some of my writings from last year and liked what I wrote with this “Latha” fond. It visualizes Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), my way of talking, which leaves space between the words. There is a transparent quality to this letter type. I am inclined to speak in plain words when I write with this fond and this goes together with writing from a first person perspective. It has been useful for me to write from a third person perspective and to refer to myself as “this writer”, but it is a relief to not do that anymore. In other words, it is more reinforcing for me to write that I like to write like this. My friend Arturo from Colombia suggested this change and it felt like an invitation. Although it has helped me to write from a third person perspective, it leaves out something that is essential to SVB: my subjective experience. Writing from a third person perspective is artificial, as it presumes it is more important than writing from a first person perspective. There is a big problem with speech in which we supposedly are not personal. I call such mechanical, inhuman conversation Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In NVB we can neither feel or be ourselves nor do we feel each other.

As a sensitive male, I am aware that male or female speakers produce different vocal verbal behavior with audiences of men or women. Different environments, due to the gender of the audience, reinforce different verbal behavior of the speaker. For instance, Wolfson (1984) found different rates of compliments by men and women. Interestingly, Carli (1990) found that females who spoke more tentatively were more influential with males than with females. Culture shapes the vocal verbal behavior of men and women and it is no coincidence that a special feminine style of speech (Tannen, 1990) results in relatively lower levels of power (Lakoff (1973). 

The SVB/NVB distinction sheds light on the long-established power differences, which are maintained by the way in which men and women continue to communicate. It is obvious that males can have more effects or consequences on females than vice versa (Guerin, 1995). Thus, it is not the communication itself, but the male or the female context that is important, because this determines the power to apply contingent consequences. Indeed, consequences and the histories of consequences are the “power” behind audiences, words, and communicating activities (Ladegaard, 1995).

The above quoted research provides evidence for the fact that not only do men and women talk differently, their different vocalizations create and maintain hierarchical differences, which forces mediators into nonverbal subservient behavior. In NVB, mediators have to be on guard. They constantly have to watch who they are dealing with and must be cautious about every word they are saying. And, they should know when it is better not to say anything at all. As long as we cannot talk plainly about the elephant in the room, NVB, the environment within the mediator’s skin will be dis-regulated. 

NVB involves the sympathetic activation of the autonomic nervous system of both the verbalizer and the mediator. SVB, on the other hand, involves the absence of fight, flight or freeze responses and parasympathetic activation, because SVB and does not produce the stimuli which trigger these reflexes. Although mediators, during NVB, may be able to control these negative effects and will refrain from expressing them or reacting to them verbally, the stress-inducing, energy-consuming consequences of NVB are always there and take the attention away from what is being said. In NVB the mediators are coerced to pay attention to the verbalizers, who are reinforced for their ability to demand and hold the attention. Thus, in NVB compliments only comes from mediators, but not from verbalizers. 

March 23, 2015

March 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I described yesterday that paying attention to the consequences of our vocal verbal behavior equals paying attention to what we don’t like! Since we only pay attention to things to the extent that they are different from what we are used to, we are not that much inclined to pay attention to the consequences of how we talk. The reason we have this dilemma is because of previous occasions in which our vocal verbal behavior was reinforced by positive consequences or punished by negative consequences of our way of communicating. As long as we got what we want, we had no reason to be busy with the consequences, because they were, according to us, “good.” 

We have only been paying attention to our way of talking when it didn’t get us what we want, or rather, when it didn't get us what we were used to, when consequences, according to us, were “bad.” Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are respondent processes and can be seen as two different sets of paired stimuli. Verbal episodes determined by an abundance of SVB instances, were made possible by the circumstances in which communicators repeatedly experienced pairings of Voice II with supportive, positive, sensitive and comfortable experiences. By contrast, the verbal episodes in which NVB instances outnumber SVB instances, are caused by behavioral histories of communicators, who were repeatedly in situations in which Voice I was paired with a set of coercive, negative, insensitive, frightening and dangerous experiences. This pairing process of stimuli is called classical conditioning.  

March 22, 2015

March 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

People ask what Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is and want to know how these two subsets of verbal behavior are defined. They ask for an antecedent, for what causes one or the other, in the hope this will give them better understanding of these responses. Although something can and must be said about how SVB and NVB are caused antecendently, the behavioral perspective, to which I adhere, analyzes behavior in context and looks at what follows, to what happens postcedently, so that predictions can be made about the likelihood of these behaviors under similar circumstances in the future. Consideration of a stimulus which sets the stage for a response, which is followed by a consequence, which makes this response more or less likely in the presence of that stimulus in the future, is called operant conditioning.

By looking at what happens as a consequence of SVB and NVB, that is, at the postcedent events, we realize that the proportion of SVB/NVB instances in a verbal episode predicts whether we are going to have more SVB and less NVB or less SVB and more NVB in the future. In other words, the SVB/NVB distinction becomes apparent after these responses have occurred. By having a verbal episode, by talking, we can begin to acknowledge and experience the consequences of instances of SVB and NVB. These consequences stand out to the extent that they are different from the consequences of our usual pattern of communication. This means, if we are used to more instances of SVB then NVB, then instances of NVB will stand out. Conversely, if we are used to more instances of NVB then SVB, then SVB instances will stand out. The communication experiences which are different from what we are familiar with are perceived as negative. Since we don’t like what we are not used to, we are not paying much attention to the consequences of how we talk, because, by doing so, we would become more aware, more conscious of what we don’t like.