January 26, 2016

January 26, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In his book “Freedom and Dignity” (1971, p. 58) Skinner writes “We recognize a person’s dignity or worth when we give him credit for what he has done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior.” The word conspicuous comes from the Latin verb conspicere, which means “to look at.” Since the cause of someone’s behavior is often not easy to see or notice, we are inclined to attribute the behavior to the individual, who is visible.  We then say that someone is attractive, intelligent or impressive.  In each case, we make the mistake of giving credit to what the person presumably has done, while in reality he was only able to do what he did because he was in an environment which stimulated him to do what he did. We should take note here of our mistake of attributing the invisible causation of behavior to a visible person. 

Skinner states “we try to gain additional credit by concealing the reasons why we behave in given ways or by claiming to have acted for less powerful reasons.” When we say a person is hiding his feelings, we think we refer to the obfuscation of the cause of his behavior. However, any talking in which we credit a person for what he has done will be Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as it prevents us from discriminating the environmental independent variables of which his behavior is a function. As long as we are looking instead of listening for these variables, we are not going to be able to find them. In NVB, because we don’t listen to how we sound while we speak, we get carried by what we say, and, consequently, we maintain the belief that an inner self is responsible for causing our behavior. 

When we say, ‘his voice gave him away’, we mean his sound was more veridical and was telling us more about the cause of his behavior than his words.  The word veridical comes from the Latin verb veridicus, which means us (ver) true + i + (dicus) speaking. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) we listen while we speak to the environmental variables which cause us to communicate the way we do.  In doing so, we speak the truth. We are not communicating the way we do because we are causing our own behavior; we are communicating the way we acknowledge that we are each other’s environment and are having a positive effect on each other!