February 19, 2015

February 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Our need for scientific spoken instead of written conversation, in which we can finally ask questions about the probability of evocative effects of stimuli that cause our verbal behavior and find our answers in the actual circumstances and conditions in which these conversations occur (which are not based on the ideological, hierarchical, artificial, predetermined, exploitive, meaningless and problematic separation of our verbal and nonverbal behavior) demands a new way of talking, in which our behavior of concern is how we communicate with each other. 

The patterns of behavior that we refer to as attitude are apparent in our nonverbal behavior. However, our verbal behavior often distracts us from our nonverbal behavior. What we say often takes our attention away from how we say it. Moreover, our verbal fixation effects how we sound. This observation is a listener’s-conception of the speaker as being capable of two subsets of verbal behavior: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The energy traces from a speaker’s voice are directly mediated by a listener’s body. SVB refers to the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement. On the contrary, NVB refers to all the verbal episodes in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. Since SVB or NVB are not determined by the speaker, but by the contingencies, we ask why one speaker is capable of controlling the behavior of the listener with positive reinforcement, while the other is incapable of that and thus uses an aversive contingency? This brings us to the issue of values, that is: to what is reinforcing for the speaker. 

  

NVB is not about what the listener finds reinforcing, but about what the speaker finds reinforcing. In NVB the speaker uses the listener as a means to his or her own end. In SVB, by contrast, the speaker and the listener are always reciprocally benefitting each other; what is reinforcing to the speaker is also reinforcing to the listener. Put differently, in SVB the speaker and the listener share the same value, but in NVB they have different values. We never got to this important matter as long as we couldn’t talk more scientifically. The contingency keeps obfuscating the fact that during NVB only the speaker is reinforced.

Another way of viewing the contrast between SVB and NVB is that in the latter only the value of the speaker counts. In other words, in NVB, the listener is seemingly valueless. Of course, this is the inaccurate speaker’s perspective.  In NVB the speaker devalues the listener and, whether he or she is aware of it or not, the listener feels diminished. In SVB, on the other hand, the speaker values the listener. One’s values directly translate into one’s behavior. Thus, in NVB it is only the value and therefore the behavior of the speaker that matters, but in SVB, the behaviors of both the speaker and the listener matters. And, since behaviors also function as stimuli, which produce reinforcers, the reinforcers for the speaker, which become available for him or her in NVB, become available to the listener only in the future, if he or she learns how to speak as aversively as the speaker. “The things we value, need, appreciate, hold dear, maintain access to, and so on, function as reinforcing stimuli” (Ledoux, 2014, p.422). The focus of SVB is on stimuli, that is, on sounds, which we produce while we speak, which instantaneously and simultaneously provide access to reinforcement for the speaker and the listener and which thus makes a conversation possible that articulates the rights of the listener.