June 19, 2016
Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer
Dear Reader,
This is my fifth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical
Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). When people have trouble understanding
each other and one party is trying to explain things, while the other is trying
to understand, this often does NOT result in understanding.
The more attention people give to explaining things with what we say, the less
attention they have for how they say
it.
The more those who try to understand what is being said focus on what
is being said, the more they are distracted by how the speaker speaks. During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the
speaker fixates on what he or she
says. There can be no congruency between the content and how he or she
speaks. The difference between what
we say and how we say it is the
difference between our verbal and our non-verbal expressions.
Listeners only make an effort to understand NVB speakers. They
don’t need to make any effort to understand a Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)
speaker as such a speaker will be effortlessly understood. We don’t notice or
acknowledge this, but the listener’s effort that is involved in understanding
the speaker is always a consequence of NVB.