August 12, 2016

August 12, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fourteenth response to the paper “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). One of the cornerstones of radical behaviorism is “the focal awareness of the importance of environmental variables.” 

I would like to advocate for a vocal awareness of the importance of environmental variables, which change how we sound while we speak. Such awareness makes us realize we can’t sound how we would like to sound under certain circumstances. 

Although we may still be capable of saying something friendly while we find ourselves in circumstances in which we are treated with hostility and disrespect, our sound will ALWAYS tell a different story. 

We may say polite, sociable, responsible and pleasant things while we  sound on guard, fearful, anxious and held back. As we are not used to listening to our own sound while we speak, we often fail to notice that the tone of our voice contradicts what we are saying. 

When what we say opposes how we say it, we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Only in the absence of aversive stimulation can we engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which the sound of our voice matches what we say and nonverbal and verbal behavior is congruent.

Someone familiar with SVB and NVB ALWAYS knows the difference between whether someone is lying or not. This is both a blessing as well as a curse. In NVB the speakers and the listeners are constantly lying. 

Those familiar with SVB perceive that in NVB the speaker is not really speaking and the listener is not really listening. We are so used to NVB that we don’t notice that we constantly fabricate our tone of voice. 

In NVB, speakers pretend to sound in control, powerful, knowledgeable and conscious, while they don’t realize they are responding to aversive environmental variables. As anyone who has publicly spoken will know, these stimuli are often not the audience itself, the listeners outside the skin of the speaker, but these stimuli are most of the time inside the skin of the speaker. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we have been mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB. 

As long as the body of the speaker produces the stimuli that set the stage for NVB, no friendly, welcoming, receptive audience will affect the speaker’s tone of voice. If, however, the speaker finds him or herself repeatedly in front of such an affable audience, such a speaker gets better at producing the sound such an audience would like to hear. 

Even the friendliest audience could NOT cause the speaker to produce SVB. The speaker can only produce SVB to the extent that he or she is his or her own audience, that is, to the extent that he or she listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Thus, in in SVB listening to one self is considered to be more important than listening to others. 

SVB teaches us that listening to ourselves makes listening to others possible. As long as listening to others or making others listen to us remains our focus, we inadvertently engage in NVB. 

Only an audience that stimulates a speaker to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks conditions the conscious speaker. Such an audience has only sporadically existed as it could only evolve as a verbal community that is familiar with SVB. It is my goal to create such a community. 

Each audience member must have SVB to be able to condition a newborn speaker into becoming a conscious speaker. During SVB we constantly renew and replenish ourselves. 

The oneness of the speaker and the listener, which is made possible by the harmonization of our speaking and listening behavior, is a new form of meditation. SVB is the spoken communication which makes us and which keeps us conscious.