March 15, 2015

March 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is based on “Verbally-Governed and Event-Governed Behavior” by E.A. Vargas (1988). This paper explains elegantly how the reader of this writing mediates this writer’s writing behavior. “The first organism contacts the mediating agency.” These written words make that possible. “The mediating agency, a second organism or group of organisms - a verbal community in the case of the human organism - contacts the environment.” The reader looks at and recognizes these words, since he or she is already part of the English verbal community. “The result of that contact, the response of the mediating agency, determines in large measure the behavior of the first organism to the environment.” The reader reads and because he or she understands, is inspired by, and changed by these words, he or she is likely to continue reading and studying this blog about the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). This mediation leads the writer to write more. This writer becomes more and more skilled in his written verbal behavior, because he delights in and is reinforced by the predictable fact that the reader can understand what he is writing. 

“An individual learns to talk and write and gesture about many things he or she never encounters.” There is no need to reinvent the wheel again and  much verbal behavior is caused by or “under the control of other verbal stimuli.” Indeed “most of what we know of the world, we know through others. We do not directly experience it.” Therein lies also a big problem. Verbalizer’s can easily make it seem as if they were “directly describing contact with events” and mediators unknowingly reinforce non-existing realities such as the inner behavior-causing agent or some higher power, which supposedly causes the organism’s behavior. The vocal verbal behavior we have while we talk superstitiously, is called NVB. Although we claim to be in touch with reality, with NVB we dissociates from it. 

Without Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) communicators remain incapable of verifying whether what they are talking about is part of the natural world. Since scientific verbal behavior requires the scientist to choose his or her words carefully and provide accurate descriptions. This could and according to this writer should result in SVB, but this doesn’t necessarily happen. Even most behaviorists and behaviorologists engage in NVB. The reason for this is that they, like everyone else, fixate on what they say  while they speak. Each time when what people talk about becomes more important than how they say it, NVB is produced. The verbalizer, who is unaware of his or her direct nonverbal impact on the mediator, doesn’t realize that the aversive sound of his or her voice determines whether the listener will listen or not. If the mediator only does as the verbalizer says he or she should, that is, as long as the mediator is only following orders and do as he or she is told, such a mediator is listening in a different manner than the mediator, who is invited by the verbalizer to become a verbalizer and to participate in the conversation. This, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean that the mediator will always produce public speech, because in SVB, the mediator’s private speech actively participates in the conversation, while in NVB, the mediator’s private speech is kept out of public speech, because presumable it is of no real importance. 

 

Vargas describes NVB when he writes “reactions to fictional events as if they were actual events leads some analysts to confound words with objects, to argue that we react to words as we do to objects.” Without SVB we are simply incapable of acknowledging that “words about events are not the events themselves” or that we “behave to words” in a different way as “we do to objects.” Because of aversive contingencies which reinforce NVB and punish SVB we have continued to “behave to verbal behavior about events as we do to the events themselves.” We can all understand that we react differently to the word elephant than to the real elephant, but things become messy when we talk about our so-called values, believes and politics. When it comes to discussing these we have mainly NVB as our conversation is determined by an aversive reality.

The verbalizer’s control of the behavior of the mediator with an aversive contingency is the norm rather than the exception. The exclusion of our private speech from our public speech characterizes NVB, but inclusion of our private speech in our public speech characterizes SVB. This is a much more parsimonious explanation for why people are “cognitivizing”, as it makes us realize there is a difference between a NVB (de) mand and a SVB mand. Since most people most of the time cannot say what they would like to say, their private speech is so often excluded from their public speech that it is inevitable that it seems to be having a live of its own. 

Also the opposite is true: when people can speak freely again and without fear, their false sense of agency is replaced by a natural sense of social togetherness. Vargas writes “To ignore the mediational quality of this behavior leads to a cognitivizing of the analysis of verbal behavior since mediative relations are hypothesized as a set of special operations in the mind of the speaker or the listener that are responsible for either the listener's or speaker's performance.” Stated differently, it is not ignoring “the mediational quality of this behavior” that leads to “cognitivizing”, but the aversive contingencies. While the focus of verbal behavior isn’t changed and remains “behavior reinforced through the mediation of another person specifically trained to do so by a verbal community” two crucially important subsets of verbal behavior are added (SVB and NVB), which characterize direct-acting nonverbal effects of the contingency.

Nonverbal or pre-verbal influences played a huge role in the evolution of our species. Since language is a relatively new phenomenon in evolutionary history, our bodies are genetically more determined by the mediation of nonverbal rather than by recently developed verbal behavior. “Mediational behavior must have strong adaptive advantages. It is quite prevalent in a variety of animal species. It is exhibited through a variety of social behaviors, phylogenetically controlled and shaped through natural selection. The individual organism is predisposed to mediate in certain ways by the visual, aural, and gestural cues of its biological community.” 

According to Wilson (1975, p. 176) “Biological communication is the action on the part of one organism (or cell) that alters the probability pattern of behavior in another organism (or cell) in a fashion adaptive to either one of the participants. By adaptive I mean that the signaling, or the response, or both, have been genetically programmed to some extent by natural selection. Communication is neither the signal by itself nor the response; it is instead the relation between the two.” (italics added). Vargas notices “Wilson’s definition of communication comes close to Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior”, but also realizes how they are different. Skinner and Wilson agree on “selection by consequences.” ” It is the “prime mechanism by which probability change occurs.” However, Skinner “emphasizes cultural selection” whereas Wilson “emphasizes natural selection.”

This so-called difference is that “mediative behavior” which “appears as prevalent in other species as it does in the human one” is “not shaped by ontogenetic contingencies, but by phylogenetic ones.” However, when we consider the continuum on which “all behavior is shaped by selection by consequences”, we must view ontogenetic development as a subset of phylogenetic development.  By acknowledging that each verbal episode is based on a ratio of SVB and NVB instances, we begin to see there is no dividing line between phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. 

Vargas realizes this and that is why he contrasts Skinner and Wilson. He  suggests “The ratio of phylogenetic to ontogenetic controls over this behavior simply differs. Each type of behavior is a subset of the other: verbal behavior is a subset of social behavior, and social behavior is a subset of behavior.” This explains the relatively high number of NVB instances and low number of SVB instances in verbal episodes. Mediation is as apparent in phylogenetically controlled social behaviors as it is in our ontogenetically controlled behaviors. With the SVB/NVB distinction, we can analyze a verbal episode in terms of its phylogenetic and ontogenetic contributions and see how they enhance or prevent each other.