December 4, 2015

December 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my fourth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). I will pick and choose some lines from this paper to elaborate on the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The common belief that “behavior originates within the person rather than in the environment” makes you think, when you speak, that you cause speaking and, when you listen, you cause listening. Neither one is true. 

You only speak and listen simultaneously if the environment stimulates you to do so. If this is the case you will have SVB, but if this is not the case you will have NVB. In SVB speakers and listeners acknowledge that they are neither causing their speaking nor their listening behaviors, but in NVB, the speaker and listener insist they cause their ‘own’ behavior.

NVB is of course also determined by environmental variables, but by entirely different environmental variables than SVB. However, when we engage in NVB, neither the speaker nor the listener is interested in the environmental variables that cause it. Such an interest is only possible in an environment which is free of aversive stimulation, which gives rise to SVB. In other words, we can only understand NVB if we have SVB and as long as we keep having NVB, we can’t understand it.

Why we have SVB or NVB is explained by me, as a radical behaviorist, “by environmental events, not by events within the individual.” It isn’t difficult to understand that safe and supportive environments give rise to SVB and hostile and threatening environments elicit NVB. To talk about these very different environments and not about what is presumably “inside the organism” requires a behavioristic language which can lead “to a description of environmental contingencies.” 

You are not used to the open, sensitive and intelligent conversation in which what you say or listen to is explained by the environment you are in and have been in. To the contrary, you have been conditioned by the environments you have been in to believe that you cause your own behavior. This is why you mostly engage in NVB and only have SVB once in a while. In other words, you are used to being in and maintaining the environments that produce NVB, but you don’t know how be in and how to maintain environments which make SVB possible. This is why, when you engage in SVB for the first time, you may think that you are having some kind of exceptional spiritual experience, which happens without any doing on your part and affects “the organism as a whole.”