July 2, 2016

July 2, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my seventeenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The authors argue that many people have used and have witnessed other people use” folk psychology “to account for human behavior for the first 20 years or so of their lives.” However, what people have been involved in and exposed to, was a way of talking which, according to them, accounts for their behavior.

During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speakers justify and rationalize why they talk the way they do. Parents practicing coercive behavioral control may say to their children “I do this for your own good.” Along with the inevitable counter-control which results from such parenting  NVB continues to increase in response rate. When “during these formative years they also have witnessed very little challenge to these accounts” this simply means that their NVB was never challenged.

Those who know about the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and NVB understand that challenging NVB never worked and only gave rise to more NVB. The contrast between SVB and NVB was never presented. Only from this contrast more SVB can be stimulated. By comparing one to the other we can and will all agree that SVB is better than NVB and that we should try to increase SVB and decrease NVB.

Once the distinction is clear, discrimination learning will effortlessly increase our rate of SVB. This is another criterion which has not been recognized: NVB is effortful and SVB is effortless. What should be made emphatically clear is that “most individuals who pursue formal education in the behavioral sciences begin” unknowingly with NVB. 

“Real education” from “folk psychology” to behavioral science never happened, as our challenge has always been to go from NVB to SVB. This also didn’t happen, but it would happen once behaviorists realized the importance of this distinction. “The more systematic and formal positions that the student encounters in the academy” require SVB.