December 18, 2015

December 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my second response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). Since much behavior was replaced by technology “Pleasing consequences” have “eclipsed strengthening consequences.” Yet, our verbal behavior also suffers due to technology. We text, tweet, face-book and use social media, but we miss out on the pleasing consequences of face-to-face interaction. Consequently, spoken communication is no longer strengthened. Presumably, we get stuck in a “consumption trap” as we “search for happiness through activities that are simply pleasing,” but it is our way of talking which prevents us from returning to “a simpler life.” 

If we talk at all, we mainly engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the kind of interaction in which the speaker and the listener remain separate. We think of this dissociative activity as pleasurable, but once we have been introduced to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) we agree that it wasn’t pleasurable at all. Once the distinction has been made between SVB and NVB there is unanimous agreement that only SVB is pleasurable and only SVB can result in the strengthening of our relationships as only in SVB the speaker and the listener are connecting. 

The author doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about why the successes that have been achieved in “planned communities” have not been widely duplicated. “Promoting the movement to a sustainable life-style (Grant, 2010) (i.e., one that can be supported with renewable energy while maintaining a livable steady state environment for those in the future) will need to be accomplished in stages.” Not a word is being said about how the promotion of such “successive approximation” works in real life, where we would still need to talk about these matters. Surely, “a major difficulty is that all group efforts run into the problem of complex and conflicting established reinforcers for their members”, but it should have been clear that the rubber hits the road in how we we talk with each other. 

“Behavioral momentum, (Nevin, 1995) which refers to the persistence of behavior and its relation to the rate of reinforcement in the context” is important and “temporal (or delayed) discounting (Critchfield & Kollins, 2001) is also relevant.” However, nowhere is instant gratification more evident than in our conversations. While we eat, polute, watch TV, take drugs and “tend to behave in ways that produce immediate but small consequences rather than ways that produce large but delayed consequences”, we also produce high rates of NVB.