October 4, 2015

October 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my eight response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The authors remind the reader that “No matter what population of neural activity produces the behavioral response, the reinforcer strengthens the environmental control of that response and, in so doing, changes the synaptic efficacies that mediate it. As Skinner noted, neuroscience fills in the ‘‘gaps’’ (Skinner, 1974, p. 237) between the environment and behavior (Mc-Ilvane & Dube).” The reinforcer that strengthens the environmental control of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is the listener. The SVB speaker depends for reinforcement on the SVB listener, who becomes a SVB speaker. The SVB speaker will only be reinforced for his or her SVB speech if the SVB listener responds with SVB. The NVB listener cannot and does not reinforce the SVB speaker.

There is a great difference between the reinforcement that is received by the SVB speaker from the SVB listener who remains a SVB listener or from the SVB listener, who becomes a SVB speaker. Both reinforce the SVB speaker, but the latter reinforces the SVB speaker more than the former as only the latter talks with the SVB speaker. It is great, if one speaks Russian, to be understood by someone who understands it, but even greater if one can have an actual conversation with that person.

This signifies the developmental difference between the beginner and the more advanced speaker. A child learns how to speak by being reinforced for tacting, but it gains more environmental control as it begins to mand. Conversely, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speakers can only be reinforced by NVB listeners, who sometimes become a NVB speaker. The great difference between SVB and NVB is the SVB listener is stimulated by the SVB speaker to become a SVB speaker, but the NVB speaker often doesn’t even allow the NVB listener to be a NVB speaker.  

The NVB speaker doesn’t like competition from another NVB speaker, but he or she always stimulates it. The NVB speaker always elicits some kind of counter-control in the listener who is not allowed to become a speaker. The NVB speaker is reinforced for his or her coercive speech by the obedient NVB listener, whose covert negative self-talk signifies the aforementioned counter-control. When oppressed, vengeful NVB listeners eventually become NVB speakers themselves, they will have outpaced the oppressiveness and insidiousness of those speakers who conditioned them. Intergenerational cycles of violence have not only been perpetuated in this way, but have also worsened. All our mental health problems are stimulated and reinforced by coercive NVB speech.  

Instead of talking about “synaptic efficacies” and presumed ‘chemical imbalances’, we should be talking about the imbalance between the speaker and the listener, which gives rise to NVB. No matter how far it advances, neuroscience will never be able to fill that gap. In SVB, such imbalance doesn’t even arise. In SVB, something can stabilize, which couldn’t stabilize in NVB. Many people, who have been raised in environments with high rates of SVB, go through life suffering without understanding how this suffering is maintained. If one grew up with high rates of SVB, one is bound to suffer more than if one grew up with high rates of NVB. NVB makes people insensitive and makes them abuse others. NVB is a form of verbal abuse. What has been going on historically in the name of human interaction was often verbal abuse. Skinner is right on the mark: the real gap is “between the environment and behavior”, that is, in NVB, between the speaker and the listener.

I cut and paste many parts of this paper to give myself the opportunity to respond as closely as possible. “The observability of a response is not determined by its intensity or magnitude, but by the characteristics or tools of the observer.” The new tool of the observer is the distinction between SVB and NVB. Yesterday, during my evening class, I again let 38 students listen to sound samples of SVB and NVB in Dutch, French and German. Based on my previous English explanation of the SVB/NVB distinction, after 9 weeks, that is, 9 trials of teaching, the entire class was able to accurately discriminate between SVB and NVB in three unknown languages. If a group of college students can be conditioned by a SVB speaker like me, there is no reason why behaviorists can’t be made aware of this important distinction, which will allow them to separate the wheat from the chaff.

A lot of conversation is not conversation, but NVB. “Many venerable dependent variables . ., such as changes in skin conductivity, blood pressure, heart rate, etc., are measurable only through instrumental amplification. . We must avoid the temptation to think of covert behavior as a kind of behavior, with properties essentially different from overt behavior. Rather, all behavior lies on a continuum of observability. . ” However, unless we say out loud what we are thinking and feeling, that is, unless private speech is included into public speech, what we covertly think to ourselves is not and cannot be listened to by the speaker-as-own-listener. We can only listen to ourselves while we speak. Yet, we can only listen to ourselves while we speak during SVB.

In NVB speakers are forcing listeners to listen to them, but they are not listening to themselves. Moreover, in NVB speakers aversively affect the listener whose covert speech is pushed out of the public speech. It should be clear to the reader that the SVB listener who is listening to the NVB speaker is experiencing many problems understanding this speaker as he or she is negatively affected by how he or she talks. NVB public speech will always result into NVB private speech and SVB public speech will always result into SVB private speech. As long as our private speech remains unexpressed, it seemingly has a different property as our overt public speech. In other words, at long last “the continuum of observability” will become ‘visible’ due to the SVB/NVB distinction. It was out of sight, that is, out of our hearing range, due to NVB and it comes into ‘auditory view’ with SVB. My work has demonstrated over the years, that the NVB speaker conditions the listener to tune-out the sounds which pertain to relaxation, well-being and positive emotions.