July 26, 2014

July 26, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

This writer loves to swim. Recently, he bought a pair of goggles, which he now uses each time he goes swimming. What an improvement. For many years, he was troubled by the chlorine that got into his eyes each time he swam, but now he can swim without being bothered by that. The quality of his swimming became better because he spends more time in the pool and he swims more laps. It is remarkable how this cheap new tool completely changed his experience. 

This is an example of how a small environmental change can lead to major behavioral change. Although he has always liked swimming, he could never fully enjoy it because of the aversive chlorine. Today he swam thirty laps. He was never able to do this before. While swimming, he was also experimenting with his stroke. Instead of only breathing to the left, as he was used to, he tried to also breathe on the right. Initially it was a feeling strange, but after a while it went much better. He can now alternate and is able to breathe left and right.

His endurance has improved. The other day he talked with another swimmer and asked her how to turn at the end of each lap. One flips under water and then pushes off on the side of the pool. This writer had never before been able to accomplish this although he tried it many times. This other swimmer, who was  experienced, told him that her teacher once told her to get it right one must at least make eighteen hundred turns. She demonstrated to this writer how to do it.

When this writer tried it after this conversation, he amazingly made a perfect turn. The lady laughed approvingly and he was feeling very proud. Ever since this perfect turn he has practiced many more turns. Some go better than others and most are pretty mediocre, but once in while a good one happens. Within one week his turns have improved. As a consequence, his speed is not broken up by each turn.  Whenever he does it correctly, he smoothly flips, just before he gets to the other side of the pool, pushes off and then speeds off. Also, because he can now look underneath the water, he monitors his stability.

July 25, 2014

July 25, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

This writer is now in the habit of writing every day about the things that he is thinking about. Because he mainly reads about behaviorism, he thinks a lot about it. His thoughts and feelings are no longer reinterpreted as being caused by him, but by his environment. Although he understands this premise, this understanding is also mediated by his environment and this means that in certain environments this understanding is enhanced and acknowledged, while in others, it is punished and misunderstood. It is important to realize that those who punish and have punished this writer’s understanding, do so and did so not because they individually decide or decided to do so, but because their behavior too was, is and will always be a function of environmental variables. 

To understand and to know this scientific truth changes a lot about how this writer thinks and feels. Many thoughts and feelings, which this writer was having in the past, were troubling him because he thought and felt that only he was responsible for having them. He constantly thought and felt that he needed to control or change himself or others. This inevitably led to a set of behaviors which are not all of a sudden stopped because he now knows about behaviorism, but which have slowly began to decrease because he is now aware that these behaviors are and were maintained by previous and current environments.  The common way of describing this process would be that this writer is trying to get his mind around this idea that his behavior is caused by his environment. 

As long as this writer keeps using this kind of language, he is unlikely to see much change in his behavior.  It is a conundrum because, although he has read a lot about behaviorism, he has not yet fully acquired the behavioral terminology that would make him speak and write in a different way. Changing himself, which sadly was the motto of the first 55 years of his life, is now out of the door. What is slowly replacing this anxiety-provoking life style is the steady comfort that comes from understanding something most people don’t understand. It is in his capacity as  a case manager with parolees and as an instructor of psychology at college that this writer is currently consolidating this knowledge.  

July 23, 2014

July 23, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Not much attention is given to the fact that we already agree non-verbally and that all our disagreements are therefore verbal. The reason for this is that we are in denial of our nonverbal nature, which we have in common with nonverbal animals. Human beings are verbal animals. Our language is embedded in adaptations which have nothing to do with language and which predate the arrival of language.  Since language is a behavior to which we have not fully adapted, most of us grow up with the verbal coercion of our nonverbal, animal nature. 

If we want to be able to make sense to each other verbally, we must know more about the nonverbal foundation that gave rise to our verbal behavior. We have overrated the importance of language and are continuously carried away by it, without knowing it. The reason for this is that we know very little about learning without words. We hate to hear about rats running through a maze to find food and we feel insulted by pigeons in a Skinner box, whose behavior is reinforced by pecking a key. As we, unlike them, are verbal, supposedly, we have nothing to learn from them. However, our behavior is affected by consequences in exactly the same manner as rats and pigeons. Of course, we are biologically different. Rats are different from pigeons too, but both animals are equally affected by the consequences of their behavior. 

The science of behavior pertains to verbal and nonverbal animals. Even while humans for various reasons are verbally obsessed and verbally fixated, their nonverbal behavior still has consequences.  The fact that we don’t pay attention to this doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening. And, surely, there are as many verbal consequences to our nonverbal behavior as there are nonverbal consequences to our verbal behavior. As long as what we consider to be our nonverbal behavior is completely distorted by our verbal behavior, we have no clue about how we are affecting others or about how others are actually affecting us. We can only differentiate between our verbal and our nonverbal behavior more accurately if we engage in the calm conversation which has the specific purpose to explore this difference. We shouldn’t predetermine and stress the verbal if our objective is to explore and experience the nonverbal! We do this during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

July 22, 2014

July 22, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

When we are not told by other people in our environment how to be happy, we will not be happy and we will have nothing to be happy with or about. When those surrounding us while growing up have no clue  who they are or why they do the things they do, we don’t and can’t grow up to be responsible for knowing who we are or why we do the things we do. If what we were taught was based on make-belief, we didn't learn anything about who we are and why we do what we do. We only manage to acquire such behavior once we leave our community of origins and are affected by the different discriminative contingencies, which can bring this self-knowledge about. Fact is, that we never voluntarily leave our  community of origin and only do so when we were pushed out. Over time, different behaviors were shaped, which created an attraction to contingencies that are different from the one with which we grew up. This inevitably created a separation and resulted in the rejection from our verbal community in response to our different behaviors.  

We may believe that we go on some kind of spiritual journey, but the reality is that we become part of a different verbal community than the one in which we grew up. Regardless of whether we immerse ourselves in different books, religions, music, sciences or cultures, we are attracted to and affected by people who behave verbally differently, who offer us new and increased opportunities for reinforcement. We therefore don’t search for ourselves, but we experience our different environments in which we are affected in novel ways. 


When the environment in which we find ourselves is causing the stabilization of our behavioral repertoires, there is less of an opportunity for reinforcement. Environments in which the same behaviors occur again don’t and can’t stimulate us do something else, something new. Environments in which novel behaviors are shaped are not the environments in which we can keep imagining that we are able to choose, that we decide how we behave. We think that we individually choose, but our freedom or choice is as much dependent on our environment as is our sense of imprisonment or our feelings of oppression. Although we grow up with the belief that only our belief is the right belief and that beliefs of others are wrong, we are nevertheless dependent on our environment for our beliefs.

July 21, 2014

July 21, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

For quite some time this writer has started every journal entry with the date and the announcement that whatever followed was written by him. It is odd to stare at a blank page and to write that something was written, which hasn’t even yet been written, which hasn’t even been thought and which is only thought while he is writing. This writer catches these thoughts of his private speech while he is writing in much the same way as he notices what he is thinking and feeling when he listens to himself while he speaks. However, the fact that he has written these words does not mean that he has caused or is causing them. 

By calling himself a verbal behaviorist this writer lets the reader know that this writing is caused by his environment. Since behaviorists are the only scientists willing to consider that scientific language is also caused by the environment, this writer considers himself a verbal behaviorist. There are multiple sources of causation which are producing these words, but this is summarized by the self-given title verbal behaviorist. The M.S., preceding this title, refers to the Master of Science in Clinical Psychology, which this writer obtained while he was still completely ignorant about behaviorism.  It is sad, but also comical to know that nothing of behaviorism was mastered during the years of arduous study for this pretentious degree, for which this author is still paying off huge loans. 

Since these words can be spoken, written, listened to and read, they are part of what B.F. Skinner (1957) called verbal behavior and they are not, as most people believe, things that refer to other things. When we say chair when we see a chair, it is a social affair. People from our verbal community produce the sound chair in the presence of a chair.  They are reinforced by producing this sound, for writing it, for understanding it and for reading it. Due to the reinforcement we receive when we use the language which is understood by the people from our verbal community, we are more likely to use the word chair. 

A long time ago, this writer wrote poems. One short one went like this:

they wanted chairs

poetry is like furniture

it fits or it doesn’t fit

if it doesn’t fit better not try it

people don’t like to sit on tables

on chairs they want to sit

The poem beautifully describes the behavioral perspective.  Chairs are made to sit on and tables are used to eat dinner at and to sit at with a chair. Their function pretty much describes the behavior that is involved. It is easy to see that one sits on a chair, but one sits at a table. One may of course also stand on a chair or on a table, but this is not their common usage. Chairs were made to sit on and tables were made to sit at. Likewise, a tennis ball is to be hit with a tennis racket, a baseball is to be hit with a baseball bat and a billiard ball is to be hit a cue. Of course, we can hit a tennis ball with a cue, a baseball with a tennis racket or a billiard ball with a baseball bat, but we don’t usually do that.  

The self-observation, which is at the core of this poem, is not magically caused by creativity or insight of the poet. It is the product of the discriminative contingencies that were arranged by the poet's verbal community. No one needs to decide by himself how tables and chairs are used. It is already decided and learning involves a process of familiarization with the ways in which things are done. Our habits, languages and cultures are behaviors.  If our verbal community is Russian, we are unlikely to learn English. If we grow up in a country that is plagued by war, chaos, poverty and exploitation, we are unlikely to be able to refine the accuracy and precision which are the cornerstones of science. We neither decide individually to learn Russian nor do we decide individually to fight for our survival. Our verbal community makes us believe the belief we happen to grow up in. This writer grew up in a Catholic family. He never asked to be born in sin and to feel guilty. The reinforcement which he didn't get at  home was found by him elsewhere.