September 20, 2014

September 20, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

The success of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) – spoken communication in which verbalizers interact with mediators in such a way that they are in agreement that they are not themselves, individually causing their own behavior, but are causing each other’s behavior – is explained by the natural science of human behavior, called behaviorology. 

Although, the way in which individuals verbalize or mediate verbal behavior is a matter of a person’s unique history of conditioning, other human beings are the discriminative stimuli in the current environment, which set the stage for their current responses. 

What is elicited or evoked in mediators by how verbalizers speak or by what they say, requires a new form of communicating in which communicators are reinforced for observing, describing, predicting and controlling their own verbal behavior and that of others.

  

The tracking of the conditioning of the relevant repertoire parts, will give us an understanding of how SVB, like any other complex behavior, is simply the result of the recombination of previously conditioned components. When we look at what is needed to create and maintain SVB, it becomes evident that Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is merely the verbal behavior, which is elicited by default in the absence of the components to have SVB. 

NVB, in essence, is a primitive form of communicating, in which verbalizers and mediators believe that they cause their own behavior. Although they blame each other for their behavioral responses, they don’t really know that they are causing each other’s behavior. SVB, by contrast, is a more sophisticated way of communicating, which is based on the fact that we cause each other’s behavior.

The independent and dependent variables behaviorologists investigate must be natural, because events which fall outside the category of what is real are untestable. When we look at the two categories of speaking, we would like to measure how the listener, the dependent variable, experiences the SVB or NVB speaker, the independent variable. A complication arises from the fact that SVB as well as NVB are believed to be caused by ourselves, by our personalities or by our faith in a higher power. Behaviorologically, this disqualifies them as independent variables. However, this doesn’t make them any less real. When we engage in NVB, we are bound to exchange and perpetuate superstitious nonsense, but when we engage in SVB, we already learn about behaviorology, because we talk very differently.

However, it must be made clear that behaviorology by itself will not result in SVB. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient. This writer knew nothing about behaviorology until only two years ago, but he was already aware that the sound of the voice of the speakers during  positive, supportive, intelligent, bi-directional relationships, is completely different from the sound of the voice of the speaker in  coercive, hierarchical, exploiting, uni-directional relationships. 

The tone of the speaker's voice differentiates SVB from NVB. The different effects created by our voice have more to do with how we speak than with the content of what we say. In other words, the building blocks for SVB were already conditioned in this writer way before he was able to put them together in words. His childhood fear of, his disinterest in and his problems with following through on what was said, had set the stage for an early selection process, which favored a focus on how the things were said. It was only once this writer found out about behaviorology that his interest shifted to what was said, when he found the explanation for his own behavior.