December 22, 2015

December 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my sixth response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). Based on my own self-experimentation, I can tell you with certainty and pride that your problem behaviors will decrease and eventually stop, once you have an accurate understanding of how you talk. As my understanding about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) evolved, my life became easier, more successful and more enjoyable. This couldn’t occur as long my NVB was happening at a higher rate than my SVB. As your ability to discriminate SVB and NVB improves, you will find that rates of SVB are increasing and rates of SVB are decreasing. 

If my prediction doesn’t come out as I explain, you must be mistaking NVB for SVB or SVB for NVB. We mistake NVB for SVB and vice versa as we have all been conditioned by NVB. NVB keeps us busy with others and not with ourselves. You, my dear reader, are more inclined to experiment on others than on yourself. Self-experimentation and its benefits are underestimated, but the benefits of experimentation on others is overrated and continuously sold on us. 

Just as labelling of foods provides us with the discriminative stimulus that prompts healthier food choices, we need to have a term for the kind of interaction that occurs when a speaker affects a listener in a negative manner. When that happens the speaker creates NVB. Like unhealthy food, NVB must be identified and avoided. Similarly, SVB needs to be reinforced, validated, experienced and understood. Since we don’t label SVB as SVB or NVB as NVB, SVB isn’t experienced and understood as such. To the contrary, we keep reinforcing and validating NVB. 

As more and more people have become obese, our rates of NVB have been increasing. Meanwhile NVB keeps causing all our relationship problems. Certainly, “The field is ripe for inventive behavior-analytic research, research that comes with the tighter scrutiny of direct observation of targeted behavior rather than questionnaires.” However, this “tighter scrutiny of direct observation” should involve listening while we speak. Unless we can hear our own sound, we will not be able to identify SVB. We haven’t identified SVB because we have never really listened to ourselves while we speak. If we did, we would find out that our sound has a different effect on us than it usually has. In NVB, we are unaware of our own sound, but in SVB we enjoy our relaxed tone of voice.

December 21, 2015

December 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my fifth response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). I write in my journal with the goal of letting my students read it. I manage to write something new about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) every day. I keep reading papers, which were written by behaviorists, to which I respond. As I measure my teaching behavior, it keeps getting better. This semester was so successful as I used written prompts to get my students to participate and learn. Not only is my writing reinforced by this success, it has also become easier for me to write.

I just recovered from the flu and was unable to write for four days, but had written a couple of days ahead and it was easy to catch up the one day I fell behind schedule. While having the flue I had no urge to write, but now that I feel better again, I even write in the evening – something I normally don’t do. As over the course of the semester SVB kept increasing and NVB kept decreasing, more and more students began to notice. “Changes in the direction of data invite commentary from others.” 

I arranged the last two weeks in such a way that there were no more quizzes, only the final. This created lots of opportunity for students to talk. Although some students wanted the semester to be over, once they were given written instructions, they talked and enjoyed it. The written cards had topics and page numbers on them from the chapters of the book with questions they could talk about among themselves. After the cards were handed out the entire class was buzzing. It brought people together, it strengthened involvement and shaped discussion about the Principles of Psychology as well as the introduction of the SVB/NVB distinction in this class. 

In the past, many students would shy away from conversation as it was too overwhelming for them, but due to this in-between step with these written instructions, many were slowly beginning to find their way into the classroom conversation. People nowadays feel very vulnerable without their technological gadgets. I was happy to read in their written feedback that they liked my class so much as they were able to feel safe, relax and talk with each other. Students were talking with those who were sitting next to them and they also recognized the comfort which others felt while were doing the same. This contributed to marvelous centralized conversation which only went on as long as it was stimulating to everyone. More and more students experienced the power of SVB.

December 20, 2015

December 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my fourth response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). What is not discussed by Bostow (or other behaviorists) is that the improvements and changes of behavior by “successive approximations” depend on our vocal verbal behavior. Since the enhancement of the behaviors that are needed to develop positive relationships require specific ways of communicating, not much progress could be made as long as we hadn’t acknowledged the great difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

As long as we believed to be communicating, while, in reality, we were dominating, arguing, fighting, defending, intimidating and aversively influencing each other, something about our interaction remained terribly wrong. We don’t do any of these negative things if we really communicate. SVB could make many behaviors more effective, but unfortunately SVB is not the kind of communication we are conditioned by and mostly involved in. 

We are all familiar with and impacted by NVB, which, at best, is merely an attempt at interaction, and, at worst, the pretention of interaction. Although NVB is beginning to become recognized by some behaviorists, NVB is and has always been the way of talking which perpetuates our pre-scientific, negative view of human behavior. Most behaviorists (like non-behaviorists) seem to believe the-world-goes-to-hell-in-handbasket as “our cultural contingencies now favor behaviors that produce immediate small consequences at the expense of alternative behaviors that produce delayed but larger consequences” (Grant, 2007). 

Rather than addressing the vocal verbal behavior that reinforces excessive consumption behavior as well as many other destructive and pathological behaviors, Bostow advocates for the application of “contingency-management skills to one’s own behavior in a manner similar to controlling the behavior of another person.” SVB is the ultimate self-management skill. Its response rate remains high as we don’t depend on others for it. Moreover, SVB is immediately reinforcing. Bostow’s notion of self-management behavior as weak, “because the consequences of emitting it are often delayed and uncertain” derive from NVB. Controlling repertoires  based on the analysis ofthe science of behavior will have reinforcing consequences, but this would be even more enhanced if behaviorists would differentiate between SVB and NVB. Only SVB public speech can enhance SVB private speech!

December 19, 2015

December 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my third response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). Bostow, who, unlike Skinner, doesn’t seem to recognize the importance of Verbal Behavior (1957), wants his readers to believe that “our cultural contingencies” – and not the contingencies that produce high rates of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and low rates of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) - “now favor behavior that produce immediate small consequences at the expense of alternative behaviors that produce delayed but larger consequences (Grant, 2007).” Like so many other behaviorists, he is interested in anything except how we are actually talking with one another.  

Scholars like him, sadly there are many, are caught in the paper-trap, the myth that writing more papers will change the way in which we talk. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that he obviously refers to his own personal life when he states that “Unfortunately, the relatively less advanced state of the behavioral sciences provides little support for the development of interventions that help make life more rewarding in large but delayed ways.” As far as I am concerned behavioral science provides ample “support for the interventions that help make life more rewarding in large but delayed way.” If behaviorist would bother to verify, they would find out that SVB is such an intervention. 

The difference between me and Bostow is that I recognize the distinction between SVB and NVB, which is an extension of radical behaviorism. The dismal remark that “time is not on our side” when it comes to “isolating the controlling variables” of “why consuming behaviors persist even when individuals are presented with opposing facts and alternative options”, signifies Bostow’s NVB.

If “opposing facts and alternative options” are presented in SVB, they will be accepted as only SVB stimulates us to do that. Our current way of talking, which is mostly NVB, prevents us from accepting the facts.  The author suggests that probability of responding will be increased by “arranging magazines, books and so on in a sequence” by keeping “prompts in sight.” They reason “out of sight out of behavior.” 

To have SVB, we must keep track of the sound of our own voice while we speak. We engage in NVB each time we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak. However, we will not be listening to ourselves as long as we witness nonverbal threatening behavior. As long as nobody prompts us, with their tone of voice, we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak

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.