August 14, 2016

August 14, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my sixteenth response to the paper “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). I appreciate Day’s commitment to accurate descriptions of environmental variables that cause behavioral change. Only he could write “To precisely the same extend as one is interested in manipulation he becomes concerned with ways in which the environment is related to behavior.”

I am interested in the manipulation which causes the increase of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and the decrease and ultimately the extinction of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). I came to know about the SVB/NVB distinction as I was frustrated and hurt about my inability to control the behavior of others, yet I kept feeling controlled by their behavior. 

After endlessly blaming and trying to improve myself I found out about the fact that I wasn’t causing my own behavior, but that my behavior was a function of the environment, that is, of people I was with. 

As long as I still thought I was the problem, my behavior didn’t and couldn’t improve as I continued to think it was caused by me, but once I became informed about radical behaviorism, it became clear what I had always known, but was never able to put forth with conviction, was true: environmental variables, that is, other people, cause my behavior. 

Those who dare to say that others are actually causing their behavior are immediately punished. It is no coincidence that I have a long history with being rejected. I have been rejected so often that I became very interested in why it kept on happening. I am no longer concerned with myself, but with my environment.  I find myself in environments in which I can function optimally as I take note of it. 

I totally agree with Day, who writes “However, the radical behaviorist is interested in manipulation not only for its immediate effect upon the behavior he is attempting to control, but also because he wants the manipulation to have some effect upon his own behavior as a scientist.”

Only in recent times the manipulation involved in my teaching of SVB has begun to have a stabilizing effect on me. The positive effects of teaching SVB have made me investigate it and find out more about it. 

Only since I have been teaching classes as a psychology instructor, I have been working with groups of students for the duration of a whole semester, for eighteen weeks. In other words, I was able to shape the behavior of all my students as they were repeatedly available to me. 

As an instructor, I have eighteen week to instruct my students. The effects of my teaching are proportionate to the amount of times I am able to interact with them and that they can engage in SVB together. 

Also in my current work as a therapist, I have a steady flow of clients most of whom I see for a similar amount of time. Unlike in the past, in which I was trying to teach about SVB by organizing seminars and individual sessions, I currently need not make any effort to get clients.

Almost all my clients make significant progress; they learn and they recover and they enjoy working with me. They stay in class and in treatment as they are very satisfied with my influence on them. 

Another reason why I have only recently began to be effected by SVB, is that I have eight couples in my caseload. Each couple is benefitted and this also affects me in ways in which I was previously not affected. 

I appreciate the consistent exposure to appetitive or positive vocal stimuli which is having its stabilizing effect on me.  “The extent to which he is able to manipulate behavior successfully is perhaps the most important variable that acts to shape his own research activities.” 

As my ability to successfully manipulate the behavior of my clients and my students has substantially increased in recent times, my research activities have focused on reading and responding to this paper by Day. 

As the fall semester is about to start, it appears to me my work will have reached another level. I will be teaching three classes and seeing twenty seven clients a week as I have acquired the skill to handle it.

August 13, 2016

August 13, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifteenth response to the paper “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). With regard to “teaching machine programming”, Day writes “It generally requires very subtle environmental engineering to make it highly likely that the experimental student will emit the desired response.” 

I teach Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or conscious communication. If the emission of the student’s desired response is requiring such subtle environmental engineering, it should be clear here that only the most subtle and lively environmental engineering will reliably produce SVB.

The subtlety of the environmental stimulation received by the student is dependent on the sound of the teacher’s voice. Without attention for the sound of our voice SVB cannot be accomplished. The teacher must make the student aware of his or her sound, but also of their sound. 

The teacher’s voice must be perceived by the student as an appetitive stimulus. If this is not the case the teacher conditions the student with a forceful sound which maintains Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Unfortunately, most students are taught with NVB. This is, however,  not because anyone decides to have NVB, it is because we don’t know how to create and maintain the environments in which SVB will reliably occur. 

Once we know how to create and maintain the environments in which it can happen, we will have ongoing, effortless, energizing and enjoyable SVB. 

If SVB can happen it will happen. I am particularly interested in the environmental variables that affect the behavior of the listener. 

The difference between SVB and NVB is heard in the voice of the listener, that is, when the listener speaks and the speaker listens. 

“Whatever is done by way of any manipulation inevitably consists of some change in the environment of the person whose behavior is to be affected, and one has little reason to expect a manipulation to be successful unless it reflects some functional relation between behavior and the relevant environmental change.” 

The manipulation of the environment by the speaker that I am referring to is one in which he or she instructs his or her listeners to listen to his or her sound rather than to what he or she is saying. 

The verbal instruction to listen to oneself while one speaks describes how the speaker is affected by his or her environment, by the listener. 

The speaker and the listener always together either engage in SVB or in NVB, but in SVB they are joined, while in NVB they are set apart.

Manipulation does NOT involve a speaker who tries to produce the sound of SVB in an attempt to affect the behavior of the listener. 

The speaker is observing, listening to him or herself while he or she speaks and describing as accurately as possible what is happening. 

The speaker tells the listener how he or she is affected by the listener, but he or she also refers to the feedback that he or she is receiving from the listener about how the listener is affected by him or her. 

The speaker describes how he or she is affected by the listener and expresses how he or she thinks he or she is affecting the listener.

The accuracy of the description of the relationship between the speaker and the listener is determined by its bi-directionality. 

Only a speaker who is stimulated by the fact that he or she listens to him or herself while he or she speaks can describe bi-directionality.

Only a speaker who listens to him or herself while he or she speaks is able to respond to what he or she feels within his or her own skin.

Only a speaker who listens to him or herself while he or she speaks is able to express the connection between the speaker and the listener.

Only a speaker who listens to him or herself while he or she speaks is a conscious speaker, who addresses the oneness of speaker and listener.

Only a speaker who listens to him or herself while he or she speaks is able to determine whether he or she or others engage in SVB or NVB.

August 12, 2016

August 12, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fourteenth response to the paper “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). One of the cornerstones of radical behaviorism is “the focal awareness of the importance of environmental variables.” 

I would like to advocate for a vocal awareness of the importance of environmental variables, which change how we sound while we speak. Such awareness makes us realize we can’t sound how we would like to sound under certain circumstances. 

Although we may still be capable of saying something friendly while we find ourselves in circumstances in which we are treated with hostility and disrespect, our sound will ALWAYS tell a different story. 

We may say polite, sociable, responsible and pleasant things while we  sound on guard, fearful, anxious and held back. As we are not used to listening to our own sound while we speak, we often fail to notice that the tone of our voice contradicts what we are saying. 

When what we say opposes how we say it, we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Only in the absence of aversive stimulation can we engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which the sound of our voice matches what we say and nonverbal and verbal behavior is congruent.

Someone familiar with SVB and NVB ALWAYS knows the difference between whether someone is lying or not. This is both a blessing as well as a curse. In NVB the speakers and the listeners are constantly lying. 

Those familiar with SVB perceive that in NVB the speaker is not really speaking and the listener is not really listening. We are so used to NVB that we don’t notice that we constantly fabricate our tone of voice. 

In NVB, speakers pretend to sound in control, powerful, knowledgeable and conscious, while they don’t realize they are responding to aversive environmental variables. As anyone who has publicly spoken will know, these stimuli are often not the audience itself, the listeners outside the skin of the speaker, but these stimuli are most of the time inside the skin of the speaker. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we have been mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB. 

As long as the body of the speaker produces the stimuli that set the stage for NVB, no friendly, welcoming, receptive audience will affect the speaker’s tone of voice. If, however, the speaker finds him or herself repeatedly in front of such an affable audience, such a speaker gets better at producing the sound such an audience would like to hear. 

Even the friendliest audience could NOT cause the speaker to produce SVB. The speaker can only produce SVB to the extent that he or she is his or her own audience, that is, to the extent that he or she listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Thus, in in SVB listening to one self is considered to be more important than listening to others. 

SVB teaches us that listening to ourselves makes listening to others possible. As long as listening to others or making others listen to us remains our focus, we inadvertently engage in NVB. 

Only an audience that stimulates a speaker to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks conditions the conscious speaker. Such an audience has only sporadically existed as it could only evolve as a verbal community that is familiar with SVB. It is my goal to create such a community. 

Each audience member must have SVB to be able to condition a newborn speaker into becoming a conscious speaker. During SVB we constantly renew and replenish ourselves. 

The oneness of the speaker and the listener, which is made possible by the harmonization of our speaking and listening behavior, is a new form of meditation. SVB is the spoken communication which makes us and which keeps us conscious.   

August 11, 2016

August 11, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my thirteenth response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). Day raises the important question “Even in circumstances where the behavior of immediate interest is preserved intact, as in the verbal protocols used in content analysis, how frequently is the experimenter himself in the position to observe the specific stimulating conditions under which the behavior has been emitted?” He is talking about the position of participation. 

In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we either participate as a listener or as a speaker, but in SVB we participate as both the listener and as the speaker. NVB, which separates the listener from the speaker, inside and outside the skin, is a coarse-grained behavior which prevents  awareness of “the specific stimulating conditions under which behavior has been emitted.” SVB, by contrast, is a fine-grained behavior in which speaking and listening happen at the same rate and are joined. 

Absence of aversive stimulation makes us realize that we often mistake coercion, intimidation, domination, exploitation, oppression, alienation and dissociation as communication. SVB is communication, but NVB is not. Day wonders “Without the most skillful practices of observation on the part of the experimenter himself, why should one expect a relation between stimulus and response ever to be perceived?” 

SVB, in which the speaker realizes that his voice occurs in the here and now and his listening to his voice also occurs in the here and now, is conscious communication. Indeed, SVB stimulates “The most skillful of practices of observation on the part of the experimenter himself.”

Day makes a very interesting point. He is not against “the conventional experimental method”, but he wants psychologists to “take advantage of the opportunity to inspect both behavior and its controlling stimulation as closely as the might.” Unfortunately, inspection doesn’t get as close as the SVB/NVB distinction. Visual stimuli distract us from the controlling stimulation of our vocal verbal behavior. 

“Cumulative records are valued by Skinner precisely because he feels they make certain interesting changes in behavior conspicuously visible” (italics NOT added). Although this is true, only the distinction between SVB and NVB can make certain changes in our vocal verbal behavior conspicuously audible. Neither Skinner nor Day was aware or became aware of these two important subclasses of vocal verbal behavior. 

It makes no sense to make visible what we hear if this procedure makes us overemphasize seeing over listening. As long as the radical behaviorist “merely hopes that what he sees will come to exert an increasing influence on what he says” he is on the wrong track. It is not going to happen, it hasn’t happened and it couldn’t happen. 

What one hears will come to exert an increasing influence on what one says only as one pays more attention to how one speaks, that is, to how one experiences one’s own sound. In other words, one will say different things because of how one speaks. Therefore, one doesn’t “hope” for this controlling effect to occur, one simply knows it will occur and others agree with us when this is the case. In SVB communicators agree they have SVB, but in NVB they don’t agree they have NVB. 

“The radical behaviorist feels as free to observe or otherwise respond to his own reactions to a Beethoven sonata as he is to observe someone else.” In this auditory example Day’s words are incongruent with what he is describing.  He should have said he feels as free to listen to and to talk with his own reactions to a Beethoven sonata as he is to listen to and talk with someone else. However, such freedom is only available in SVB, in which listening to oneself makes listening to others possible.