June 27, 2016

June 27, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my twelfth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). These authors, who don’t know anything about the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) / Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, try to understand why students have problems accepting behaviorism and why folk psychology still remains such an epistemological barrier.

Once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction, we realize that NVB maintains all our superstitions and that SVB is a scientific way of talking. Also, the “Fundamental Attribution Error” which deals with a person’s tendency “to place greater emphasis on internal explanations for behavior rather than on external ones” (Jellison & Green, 1981), must be explained differently.

Why is it that “Internal explanations of behavior are common and serve to minimize the role of environmental variables?” It is because of how we talk. In NVB, we minimize the important role of our public speech in our private speech. Presumably, how we talk with ourselves is caused by us, but this absolutely wrong. We talk with ourselves privately, that is, we think, in the same way as others have talked with us publicly.

As a consequence of our involvement in and our exposure to NVB public speech, we acquire negative self-talk. Our thinking about ourselves and each other is negative because in NVB the speaker separates him or herself from the listener. Separation of the speaker and the listener involves conflict between people, but also within each person.

It is because of NVB that, when we observe someone’s else’s actions, we have the tendency to overestimate the influence of that person’s internal characteristics on behavior (disposition) and to underestimate the influence of the situation. Also, it is because of NVB that when we explain our own behavior we use situational attributions. In SVB we recognize that other people just like us are affected by the situation.