March 25, 2015

March 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I will respond to “Using Social Representations to Negotiate the Social Practices of Life” (1994) by Bernard Guerin, because it helps clarify some of the things I claim about how we talk with each other. Guerin points out that the contingency which best explains human behavior is our social environment. Although most behavior analysts would agree, this agreement has, according to Guerin, remained primarily theoretical. To date, not much literature exists about the study of “social practices of a group of people” which looks at “how social representations are used to regulate social behavior.” Such a study could explain why human beings engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

I absolutely agree with Guerin, who writes “We only learn such responses (strictly speaking such contingencies) through other people, and the interactions which maintain such responses are with other people.” SVB and NVB are perhaps not best treated as different behaviors, but as different social contingencies. By emphasizing the ubiquity and the importance of social mediation, we are more likely to discover SVB and NVB, two subsets of vocal verbal behavior. 

Indeed “our attitudes, attributions and excuses about our own actions are also negotiated through social groups” and “what our social groups allow us to get away with saying and doing.” For instance, in Afghanistan, a mentally ill woman, who may have said something about a book she didn’t like, was accused of insulting the Koran and was kicked and beaten to death by a mob of young men. Yet, this is nothing new. We haven’t been able to eradicate much of this violent fanaticism, because we are still looking at behavior in a de-contextualized manner. Unless we take into account the social basis of such fictitious rule-governed behavior, we will continue to be inclined to demonize other people for doing exactly the same thing what we are also doing, that is: “maintain a social group.” 

Maintenance of our way of interacting as well as “much of our everyday life depends upon the groups and communities we live in, not with contacting the objects we might talk about or represent.” The horrific act described above is not explained by referring to religious beliefs, because the “maintenance of such fictions comes about from social negotiations.” It is impossible to address “fictitious ‘knowledges’ and social representations” if we don’t recognize they are mediated “through our social groups.”

In my early 20s I traveled a lot and have seen many countries and experienced and enjoyed many different cultures. One thing I will never forget, which made travel and its discomforts so attractive in the first place, was the high rate of SVB responses I experienced, often with people who were living in less affluent environments than I had been raised in. I was moved by the kindness, hospitality, innocence, liveliness, pride, openness, genuineness and helpfulness of relatively poor people. These experiences changed my view of human beings forever. It was already clear to me then what I am only now writing about. Stated simply, when people need each other, they will have more SVB. The less they need each other, the more NVB they have. The individualistic way of viewing life of the Western world that we don’t need each other (which, as we know now, is socially maintained), had devastating consequences for how humans communicate. By analyzing the rates of SVB and NVB in different societies, we can study social practices and acknowledge that “social representations are only made possible by prior social power relations.” We detect the “conditions of social practice under which we would want to class any talk as a social representation.”

The rates of SVB and NVB predict the conditions which set the stage for people from collectivistic as well as from individualistic cultures to “talk about fictitious events”, have “ritual talk”, “talk about unknown or unknowable events” or “talk which closely involves the resources and supplies of a social group.” The echo-chambers of  social media that perpetuate the pre-scientific notion that individuals cause their own behavior are as fictitious as any religious doctrine.

Conditions which create and maintain higher rates of SVB and lower rates of NVB produce social representations that make consensual agreement within the group possible. On the other hand, conditions which create and maintain higher rates of NVB and lower rates of SVB produce social representations that make consensual agreement impossible. Conditions in which social representation was “consistently held by all the members of social group” would either inform us “about the extreme [NVB] social power relations of that group than about the content of that representation” (word and italics added) or it would demonstrate real agreement about the content of our SVB representation, which sustains our mutually reinforcing relations. 

I agree with Guerin’s emphasis on the need for “consistency of the social situations themselves, not in some person-originated “need for consistency””, but I claim that the pursuit of this need is a defining characteristic of NVB. Aversive contingencies that maintain “extreme [NVB] power relations” in which “consensual agreement (about social representations) is never likely”, always give rise to counter-control. That this may have led to the Western belief in individualism, was based on higher rates of SVB. Stated differently, NVB is not based on consensual agreement. Counter-control was initially based on higher rates of SVB, because it used to be more reinforcing to disagree and assume individuality, but this is no longer the case. 


That we continue to hang on to this socially negotiated fiction may very well involve the demise of Western culture. Since only in SVB we can “talk about an event in such a particular way” that this “functions to keep the group together and to facilitate interactions”, we need to know the contingency which makes it happen. “Shouting at rocks doesn’t make anything happen. Words only have effects on people, and that applies to all words.” In NVB, we treat each other as rocks, but we are people, who will only respond well to SVB.