August 14, 2014

August 14, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist 

Dear Reader,

Today this writer wishes to criticize the aberrant operant called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Someone has to open his or her mouth by saying something about this total distortion of our spoken communication, which has been going on since time memorial. It dismays this writer that applied behavior analysis has become the treatment of choice for problems of language development, but hasn’t aimed any of  its energy at improving our spoken communication and relationship. 

Behaviorists and behaviorologists have been dancing around the elephant in the room. How do we communicate? Do we actually communicate? What goes on in the name of human relationship? Can that be called communication? This author doesn't think so. Most of what we hear, are involved in and are conditioned by, is NVB. We don’t get along and we are unable to work out our differences. 

NVB has flourished while Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) has remained virtually unaddressed.  The  opening of one's mouth is a function of multiple causes. Our words may come from an experience of love and bonding, but they may just as well derive from fear or absence of respect. That we became literate in the language of our verbal community could have and, in the opinion of this writer, should have, resulted in SVB. The fact that it didn’t goes unnoticed. However, it didn’t because it couldn’t. If literacy could have resulted in SVB, it would have done so.  Literacy may set the stage for SVB or NVB. It has until now mostly resulted in NVB.

 

  

From a behaviorological perspective the ubiquity of NVB is nothing surprising. It is simply a function of our environment. Human beings act the way they do based on the contingencies that make their behavior possible. All of our conflicts are caused and can be explained, not by our beliefs, our politics, our inequalities, our races, our misunderstandings or our failure of communication, but by the variables in our environments, which set the stage for the perpetuation of tragedy and suffering. 

Certainly, the human condition continues to be caused by what we say, but, we will only be paying attention to the functional analysis of our verbal behavior when something in our environment stimulates us to investigate how we speak.  

  

The explanation of behavior in terms of a stimulus, which causes a response, is incomplete. The belief that some higher power created this world in seven days is flawed, not so much because of the lack of evidence that god exists, but because there is something causally wrong with this picture. Neither god nor any other entity could have caused anything. Also, we human beings don’t cause our own behavior.

Because we assume that we cause our own behavior, we believe that others, even our gods, cause their own behavior. Since Darwin, however, we have known about selection by consequences, but evolutionary theory is resisted everywhere to this very day. This resistance is not only based on the fact that there is no need for a creator, but on the principle of causation itself. We created our God's in our own image and we resist the science which tells us we don't cause our own behavior.

Skinner built his theory of operant conditioning on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Like species, behaviors are selected by environments. The implications of this finding are far-reaching. In terms of talking, it can simply be said that we can only talk in such a way, as we are allowed by our environments, that is, by those other people who make up our environment. Depending on our environments, on other people, certain experiences can be said or not, can be remembered or not, can be understood or not, can be accepted or not and can be overcome or not. 

     

It is certainly true, as Skinner has said, that a child’s vocal response, which makes it say A or B, is not a reflexive behavior, like salivating to an orange. The sounds that a child makes are differentially reinforced by members of his or her verbal community. Salivation to an orange is an example of stimulus-response or respondent conditioning. Saying A or B, after reinforcement, is an example of response-stimulus or operant conditioning. Thus, Pavlov’s work was linked to  Darwin’s work and is included in and explained by Skinner’s work. 

Consequences of behavior determine whether that behavior is more likely to occur in the future or not. They call it operant behavior, because the response, the behavior, operates on the environment and the stimulus that was present when this behavior occurred, is likely to make this behavior occur more often in the future, if it is again present in the environment. Although no child was born to say A or B reflexively, it can be conditioned to do so. The reason most people accept NVB as normal, is because they have heard it since they were born. Their potential of becoming fully verbal has been hindered by NVB, but it couldn’t be stopped. 

After writing the aforementioned, this writer was reminded of the great paper “The Psyche As Behavior” (2013), which was written by his dear friend from Colombia, Arturo Clavijo. This paper elaborates on how the concept of behavior has changed and continues to change. It traces how different behaviorists through the years, based on their extensions, interpret what they have observed. They all stick to observable, measurable behaviors. Watson based his work on Pavlov, who based his work on Darwin and Skinner based his work on them. Thus, we can see the progression from the S-R psychology of Watson to the R-S molecular psychology of Skinner, which then gave rise to the molar perspective of Baum. All of this work was and continues to be a response to contingencies that were and that are controlling it. 

The categories of SVB and NVB are an additional conceptual improvement, which allow scientists to have inclusive, more productive discussions about the giants on whose shoulders we stand. For the temporal pattern of behavior, the molar perspective, choice is fundamental, because the nature of one particular activity is explained by availability or absence of other activities. Herrnstein’s (1961) matching law, which states that the rate of responding tends to match the reinforcement rate, also applies to the presence or the absence of SVB and NVB. 

When there can be SVB, when SVB is reinforced, it will occur and when there can be NVB, when NVB is reinforced, it too will appear. We switch back and forth between SVB and NVB from one moment to the next, because the contingencies of spoken communication are more fluid than those which pertain to written words. Another way of saying this is that there is more emotional involvement in our spoken communication than in our written communication, especially since feelings are better expressed in how we sound than in what we say with written words. 

Our environment immediately acts on how we speak and listen and how we speak and listen determines what we say and can say. In safe environments we learn the components of SVB and we find over time that these components can be chained together. In unsafe environments, however, we learn elements of NVB, which also over time are pieced together into stable NVB patterns of behavior. The molar perspective, which the molecular and the S-R behaviorists are not interested in, explains the selection of patterns of responses, which become SVB and NVB.