Computer simulations of verbal behavior for research and persuasion

Crucial issues in the applied analysis of verbal behavior: reflections on crucial conversations: tools for talking when the stakes are high

A popular-press self-help manual is reviewed with an eye toward two issues. First, the popularity of such books documents the existence of considerable demand for technologies that address the everyday problems (in the present case, troublesome conversations) of nondisordered individuals. Second, many ideas invoked in popular-press books may be interpretable within an analysis of verbal behavior, although much more than casual translation is required to develop technologies that outperform self-help manuals. I discuss several challenges relevant to research, theory refinement, technology development, and dissemination, and conclude that behavioral alternatives to existing popular-press resources may not emerge anytime soon.

Self-Editing: On the Relation Between behavioral and Psycholinguistic Approaches

In Skinner's (1957) conceptual analysis, the process of self-editing is integral to the dynamic complexities of multiply determined verbal behavior, but the analysis has generated little in the way of an experimental analysis. The majority of scientific work on self-editing has taken place within linguistics and cognitive psycholinguistics. Here we compare and contrast behavioral and cognitive psycholinguistic approaches to self-editing, highlighting points of contact that can be identified despite fundamental differences in theoretical styles. We conclude that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive on all dimensions, and suggest that a consideration of cognitive psycholinguistic research may help to spur an experimental analysis of self-editing from a behavioral perspective.

A contingency interpretation of Place's contingency anomaly in ordinary conversation

A verbal phenomenon often reported in the research literature of conversation analysis is reviewed. The phenomenon involves the observation that spoken sentences often receive consequences from listeners, and that the effect of these consequences appears to be variability in sentence emission, whereas the absence of such consequences appears to produce response persistence. If the speaker's sentences function as units of verbal behavior and the listener's responses function as reinforcers, the effect seems to run contrary to reinforcement contingency effects observed in the laboratory, where reinforcement produces response differentiation and extinction produces an increase in response variability and a decrease in the response class previously selected by reinforcement. An interpretation of the conversation phenomenon is presented, employing standard reinforcement contingencies for which the behavioral dynamics involved may be seen when speaker's sequence of sentences is construed as a behavior chain.