January 12, 2015

January 12, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer 

Dear Reader, 

How we can learn Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is a more important question than how we can stop Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It seems people are forever side-tracked by their problems and never get to explore the spoken communication that is without problems. Unbelievable as this may sound, SVB is without problems. NVB, by contrast, consists only of problems, which do not get solved and which only get bigger. It makes sense to accept the possibility of SVB. Our refusal to investigate this hypothesis not only denies the possibility to understand our problems, it perpetuates the communication which maintains our problems. 

Although many aspects of SVB are often already known to us, we have no idea of how this behavior actually works. As a consequence, this behavior does not and cannot occur. This in itself is a huge problem, since we have a hard time admitting that we don’t know how spoken communication actually works. We are so used to NVB that we rather continue to pretend that we know how human interaction works, than that we give ourselves and each other the opportunity to learn how it works. Real human interaction is SVB, but since we feel so embarrassed to find out that we don’t know it, we continue to mistake NVB for SVB. The learning process of creating, exploring and verifying SVB has to be initiated by someone, who knows exactly how SVB works, who can detect when SVB is happening, who can reinforce the response class members of SVB and who will extinguish all those response class members that constitute NVB. This writer is that person and the reader can become that person too, if the reader would talk with this writer.

Let's be clear about this, although we are somewhat familiar with it, for most of us SVB only occurs accidentally. This writer or anyone else, who really knows about it, can only reinforce it, if it already naturally occurs. The small amounts of SVB that naturally occur do not happen deliberately, skillfully or consciously, like writing these words. If SVB occurs, it happens because the situation momentarily existed in which could occur. To this writer's knowledge  nobody has analyzed SVB and NVB like he did and thus nobody can reliably and consistently create and maintain the environment in which SVB can and will occur. As of yet, there is not much SVB to be reinforced. 

If we have SVB, we know that we have SVB and if we don’t know whether we are having SVB, we are not having SVB and we are having NVB. This either-or-function is another phenomenon we need to get used to. Either we are having SVB or we are having NVB. There is nothing in between. When SVB is on, NVB is off and when NVB is on, SVB is off. These universal response classes of verbal behavior are mutually exclusive. Another way of saying this is that each time SVB begins, NVB ends, but each time NVB begins again, SVB ends. Although human interaction fluctuates between SVB and NVB, we have not yet given full attention to this phenomenon. Most people are completely taken by surprise, when they for the first time take note of this simple distinction, which, once made, makes such a great difference. Each of the response class members of SVB must be separately reinforced, because the complete SVB response pattern doesn’t yet exist. The complete NVB response pattern, on the other hand, does already exist.

'Our usual way of communicating’ is something which, if we want to have SVB, needs to be extinguished. Our NVB has to be stopped, before SVB can begin. People who go through this process realize they no longer do what they usually do. Although they are initially instructed by this writer, they consent and then they instruct themselves. They find by listening to their own sound while they speak that they can stop their usual way of communicating. Once they are able to stop their own NVB, they begin to produce more SVB. There must be someone like this writer, who shapes the verbalizer's behavior with the method of successive approximation. 

Similarly to a sculptor, who chips away at a piece of rock and then makes a statue emerge, this writer, and later, the verbalizer him or herself, prunes the NVB until the SVB begins to occur. However, the student of SVB doesn’t yet know what SVB sounds like, because he or she wasn’t reinforced for it. Perhaps he or she was reinforced for aspects of SVB, but never for the response pattern as a whole. The analogy of the sculptor is useful, because sculpting involves a skill, which as it accumulates is reinforcing because of its positive consequences. A skilled sculptor wouldn’t knock off a piece of rock of a statue where the nose was supposed to be. The approximation of the target behavior, in this case a proportionate face, requires many trials in which the master instructs the apprentice. If the instruction is appropriate, if the apprentice produces better and more proportionate faces, his or her skill will become perfected. Similarly, a range of responses will be reinforced, because they come close to SVB.

“In essence, shaping is the repeated use of differential reinforcement for conditioning a behavior that is initially not occurring” (Ledoux, 2014, p.312). Variations of behavior are bound to be evoked by this writer, when he begins to explain the SVB/NVB distinction. People talk for all sorts of reasons, but the basic function of spoken communication is instructional. The math teacher is only a good math teacher if his or her students understand him or her and become proficient in math. Similarly, this writer’s instruction is specific and always results in ongoing SVB. This is not bragging, but a fact that can be verified. Students, who are in his psychology class for the duration of a whole semester, describe in their papers that they experience, understand, practice SVB and explain it to others. In each class meeting the accumulative effects of SVB can be observed. Repeated use of differential reinforcement shifts the student’s behavior to “the center of the variation range of the current” and, over time “toward the target behavior” and conditions “a series of new response variations toward an initially non-existing target behavior (Ledoux, 2014, p. 313).