March 13, 2015

March 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today’s writing is second part of this writer comments on “Separate Disciplines: The Study of Behavior and the Study of the Psyche” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas. Before he will go into responding to this paper this writer wants to write about the conversation that took place in the Principles of Psychology class which he teaches at Butte College.

Yesterday the students had their Midterm. Since it didn’t take them longer than one hour to complete the exam, this writer had planned an extra credit opportunity for his students. They received 20 extra credit points for staying 20 minutes and engaging in an exploration of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Unlike in the previous evening, this time the entire class stayed. The 20 minutes went by fast and no one got up to leave. 

The mini-seminar went on for 45 minutes and everyone contributed. Even those who didn’t talk enjoyed it. They nodded in agreement, laughed and followed what was said by others and this writer. When 45 minutes had passed there was an atmosphere of peacefulness which was felt by everyone and each student who had talked gave a concluding remark. 

One person said in almost all other classes students are not allowed to speak and are expected not to speak. She even stated that she felt afraid to ask a question. While acknowledging the well-being created by our SVB, she made a statement about the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we are all used to and conditioned by, with which everyone agreed. Although she was speaking with herself and thinking out loud, she was asking this writer “If SVB is so easy, so simple, so relaxing and so reinforcing, why do we..” she paused.. then finished her sentence “continue to...abuse each other?” 

Here was a student, who was reinforced for her newly acquired SVB by the newly created verbal community, the class. Another student asked “but, you must be conscious first before you can have SVB?” She then rephrased that into “wait....SVB makes you conscious.” A third student, her face beaming with joy, said “I am in harmony.” A fourth one wondered out loud “but how do you apply this?” This writer asked him to express what he thinks how this might work? He said slowly “So, when SVB can keep going, it applies itself to whatever we are talking about?” He added “So, it can be applied to learning, relating, working, parenting..?” 

Although nobody answered, the answer was there. Someone connected NVB with “survival of the fittest”, but then went on to describe SVB as “the conversation we have when there is no longer the need to struggle to survive.” Another student said “when in NVB you can’t say what you want to say, you feel as if you are not supposed to exist.” This writer agreed that NVB is basically dissociative in nature. When the talk was over, it was evident that everyone was quiet and content. 

This accumulative effect was a surprise to one student, who had been working that day at her job in customer service. She had learned “not to respond to negativity, to the NVB which so many people express.” Her remark reminded others of the question how to apply SVB and the ability to distinguish between SVB and NVB. She said “Unless customers ask me a question, I basically try not to respond, because unless they express their real concern I can’t help them anyway.” 

During SVB we express our real concern. Not every question is equally necessarily. Viewed from the SVB/NVB distinction, most of our questions are unnecessary and negative demands. The more we know about SVB, the more we realize that many of our NVB questions are best completely avoided. They don’t need to be answered and will fall by the way side. 

“Separate Disciplines” (1986) by Fraley and Vargas should have been about SVB and NVB. Although they describe the serious problems and negativity  involved in NVB, they don’t view talking as the reason why people do what they do and why, in spite of its relative success, behaviorology hasn’t gotten much traction. They write “In only a few institutions out of hundreds has the behavioral faction been able to attain a political majority and give its department a behavioral tone” (italics added). Although they refer to how behaviorists sound, they only do so figuratively, not literally. 

This writer insists on the literal interpretation of what can and should be called the “behavioral tone.” Only that tone can enhance our vocal verbal behavior and relationship, because it is not and cannot be aversive. If it is, then it is not a “behavioral tone.” Such a tone of voice has to be different from “a political majority”, from the “developmentalists, Freudians, Rogerians, so-called humanists, information theorists, brain-mind epiphenomenalists, and so on-in short, cognitivists of all sorts.” Stated differently, the “behavioral tone” transcends all nonsense that goes on in the name of politics. Moreover, behaviorology has to be distinguished from psychology, in the same way that SVB has to be separated from NVB.   

Since nobody identified NVB as our political way of talking, which is full of slight-of-hand tricks, the appropriation of behavioral principles by those who only wish to promote unscientific foolishness, continues to this day. Thus, cognitivists can keep on exploiting behaviorism by translating it into “their work, their literature and by speaking of it in their terms”, because NVB has not been addressed. This would have never been possible if the “behavioral tone” had not been ignored. Endless laments about “the operating style whereby the political majority appropriates control of the knowledge base, insures control over the professional recognitions, the acclaim, the enhanced opportunities, and even wealth” didn't work and never had any positive effect as it represented and perpetuated NVB. 

How people talk has far-reaching consequences. Branch and Malagodi (1980) stated that “a behavioral faculty member, isolated among assorted cognitive psychologists, eventually succumbs to the reinforcement and punishment practices of the immediate verbal community.” Theoretically more SVB-inclined behavioral faculty members are affected by the dominant NVB community. In other words, they are not reinforced for their SVB, but punished for it. At issue was not and is not the “necessary political compromises and necessary accommodations forced upon behaviorists”, but our way of speaking. NVB “obviously occurs under nonscientific contingencies.” It can easily be seen, heard and measured, but behaviorists have looked at, listened to and measured other things, which supposedly were more important. What do Fraley and Vargas mean when they say that many behaviorists have “become smooth-tongued accommodators?” (italics added). 

The NVB verbalizer’s movements of his or her tongue produces a response product, a sound, that aversively controls the mediator’s verbalizing behavior, but the SVB verbalizer’s tongue, by contrast, produces a very different sound, which positively reinforces the mediator’s verbalizing behavior. How does this nonverbal “slippage from [verbal] contingencies of scientific work” occur? Are behavioral psychologists really “deprived of the opportunity" or did they "lack the courage of their convictions by not getting very good at convictions in the first place?” This writer thinks too much emphasis has been placed on what has already been said. Since we haven’t had SVB for a reliable period of time, there is, other than actually doing the experiment, no way of knowing, what we would say or what we would be able to come up with, when we would have one hour, two hours, three hours of SVB. It is 2015 now and we still haven’t started our SVB conversation, because the distinction is not yet know to most scientists.

Like Skinner, this writer claims something new. During his first year at Harvard Skinner (1928) wrote “But my fundamental interests lie in the field of Psychology, and I shall probably continue therein, even, if necessary, by making over the entire field to suit myself” (italics added). In SVB the verbalizer suits him or herself, because he or she speaks only with a sound, which he or she experiences as positively reinforcing.