December 1, 2015

December 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

In “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (1998) Donohoe quotes Skinner, who said “the bodily conditions [that] we feel are collateral products of our genetic and environmental histories. They have no explanatory force; they are simply additional facts to be taken into account" (Skinner, 1975, p.43). Donohoe writes that “your beliefs, desires, attitudes and intentions cannot be shown to have a causal role in your behavior. The ability to manipulate environmental variables directly allows the behavioral researcher to demonstrate prediction and control in a way that internal constructs such as belief and thought do not.” I am not interested in your convictions or overrated gut-feelings. I care about the sound of your voice, which is different under different circumstances. If you listen to yourself while you speak, you will begin to notice this.

By listening to yourself while you speak you hear a different voice than when you are not listening to yourself while you speak. In the former, you engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and your voice will be experienced as an appetitive stimulus by the listener, but in the latter, you engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and your voice is experienced as an aversive stimulus by the listener. The manipulated observable environmental variable is your voice and this manipulation involves the speaker-as-own-listener. Thus, in NVB the speaker-as-own-listener is absent, but in SVB the-speaker-as-own-listener is present.

The presence of the speaker-as-own-listener is achieved by describing our loud to yourself the fact that you listen to yourself while you speak. Nothing else or no one else is needed. The prediction that you will sound different when you listen to yourself while speak is true and you must verify this. The verification process, which activates the speaker-as-own-listener, stimulates a new behavioral control, which is not achieved because you make yourself sound in a particular kind of way. Although you are not causing yourself to sound a certain way, when you listen to yourself while you speak, you sound different than when you were not listening. Also, the conversation which becomes possible due to the stimulation of the speaker-as-own-listener is very different from the so-called interaction in which no such stimulation happens. In SVB all the communicators agree that they sound good. Once SVB has been achieved all the communicators acknowledge that in NVB the listener experiences the speaker’s voice as a noxious stimulus from which they want to and try to move away. In SVB the speaker-as-own-listener aligns his or her rational and emotional expression, but in NVB, such alignment cannot occur.