November 29, 2014

November 29, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

An incomplete and therefore unscientific account about how human behavior is caused has kept us stuck with the antecedents, with stimuli, which supposedly produce our behavioral responses. Our sense of self has been narrowed down by this outdated view. Since this stimulus-response account only refers to respondent conditioning, it keeps excluding and downplaying the effects of postcedent events. Consequently, the range of human behavior has remained limited by our reflexive responses. 

The fact that no eliciting stimuli could be found for a broad range of our behaviors, created the contingencies, which evoked in Skinner the discovery of operant conditioning. As it turned out,  consequences of operants have little bearing on our respondent behaviors. Moreover, our old way of explaining behavior in terms of cause and effect has also kept us entrenched in and imprisoned by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the interaction that is based on hierarchical biological and social differences. Simply stated, NVB is about survival of the fittest. In the slave-owner-slave relation, the slave owner is always right and the slave has to defer to what the slave-owner demands. Similarly, the boss is always right and those in power, supposedly, are always right.

NVB, of course, has nothing to do with science and historically has always been the biggest stand in the way of its development and implementation. The old adage knowledge is power tells us how knowledge has been hijacked by a few, who presumably benefitted from it. We may be inclined to think of them as the happy few, but when we know more about the SVB/NVB distinction, it becomes very clear to us that those with NVB cannot be happy and can at best only pretend to be happy. Those who are in power may continue to believe that they cause their own behavior, but behaviorology, the natural science of human behavior, demonstrates that is simply not the case. A novel social structure would begin to emerge once this fact about our behavior becomes more widely known. However, the elucidation of and adherence to scientific facts requires an entirely different way of communicating. We will only be able to become scientific if we can change the contingencies, so that we can become more objective. The transition from NVB to SVB involves a change of contingencies. Contingencies, which have previously favored cognitive, explanatory fictions of psychology, have also perpetuated NVB. It is NVB which results in ignorance about and rejection of Skinner's  radical behaviorism.  

it was because he withdrew from his Ph.D.-study in psychology that this writer was able to discover radical behaviorism and then behaviorology. He felt reinforced by empirical evidence that validated his SVB approach. As he became more knowledgeable about behaviorology, he found out that the problems involved in communicating this science, are identical to the problems that are involved in teaching the distinction between SVB and NVB. Since, for a long time, he had already explored the contingencies of our spoken communication, it was crystal clear to him, that the gap which exists between spoken and written communication, was of greater importance for the dissemination of behaviorology than the gap which once existed between respondent and operant conditioning.

NVB, the communication of intimidation, domination, exploitation and coercion, is an anti-scientific way of communicating. Since NVB is based on elicitation and maintenance of negative emotions and since aversive stimulation is NVB’s central theme, it has severely impaired development of human relationship and progress. NVB madness is only going to be stopped by accurate knowledge about how behavior actually works. Many operant behaviors, which were, until now, still unaccounted for by the dominant, but incomplete respondent-conditioning-stimulus-response paradigm, can, due to SVB, now finally be validated. NVB has invalidated and excluded the behavior of millions of people and has destroyed and marginalized entire cultures. Moreover, the theoretical gap between respondent and operant conditioning could only be closed by operant processes. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is an operant process in which at long last we come to terms with our respondent conditioning. SVB makes us realize that NVB is a troublesome vestigial remnant of our evolutionary history. 

Although this writer used to believe that spoken communicating could only be changed by a different way of communicating, he no longer thinks this way. Alignment of behaviorological knowledge with his findings about spoken communication is now pushing him to write these words about speaking. Because of the importance we have given to written words – something which certainly has made us less inclined to pay attention to how we speak – reading about talking is more likely going to change human interaction than talking about talking. This writer is convinced that the reader is more likely to talk about the SVB/NVB distinction by first reading about it. The unwillingness to talk about it, which has existed as long as human beings have been alive, was based on the aversive experiences this evokes. Given the fact that most of us, regardless of our place in the hierarchy, day in day out, are exposed to and conditioned by NVB, we experience the absence of the structure which we are used to as threatening. This threat only subsides once the response rate of SVB begins to increase. As the rate of SVB increases, the rate of NVB decreases. SVB and NVB are inversely related, as one goes up the other goes down and visa versa. Behaviorology explains why our attempts at reducing aversive stimulation during our spoken communication have until now utterly failed.