Author: B. F. Skinner Foundation

The “word” as a unit of analysis is appropriate to the practices of the community rather than the behavior of the individual speaker. (p. 190)

Classifications of responses are useful only in separating various types of controlling relations, and some responses may show features of both mand and tact. (p. 189)

... a verbal response of given form sometimes seems to pass easily from one type of operant to another. The speaker commonly starts with a tact and then appears to…

... we cannot tell from form alone into which class a response falls. Fire may be (1) a mand to a firing squad, (2) a tact to a conflagration, (3)…

 ... there are no true synonyms, for when all variables have been specified there is no remaining choice of terms. (p. 183)

Among the effects of excessive or inconsistent punishment are many neurotic symptoms, including the “repression” of some areas of verbal behavior. It is often necessary for the psychotherapist to establish…

The effect of a weak audience variable is evident in talking on the telephone. Frequent stimulation from the listener is necessary to support verbal behavior in strength. Are you there?…

If we define a proposition as “something which may be said in any language,” then instead of trying to identify the “something,” we may ask why there are different languages.…

An audience ... is a discriminative stimulus in the presence of which verbal behavior is characteristically reinforced and in the presence of which, therefore, it is characteristically strong. Discriminative stimuli…

There is no evidence that punishment ultimately reduces a tendency to respond. Its principal effect is to convert the behavior, or the circumstances under which the behavior characteristically occurs, into…

The assumption that a punishing consequence simply reverses the effect of a reinforcing consequence has not survived experimental analysis. (p. 166)

The vain man is reinforced by hearing or seeing his name, and he speaks or writes it frequently himself. Boasting is a way to “hear good things said about oneself.”…

“Autistic” verbal behavior may be compared with that of the musician playing for himself. Other things being equal, he plays music which, as listener, he finds reinforcing. In other words,…

Reinforcing sounds in the child’s environment provide for the automatic reinforcement of vocal forms. Such sounds need not be verbal; the child is reinforced automatically when he duplicates the sounds…

An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin. (p. 163)

The therapist may begin with a number of statements which are so obviously true that the listener’s behavior is strongly reinforced. Later a strong reaction is obtained to statements which…

Our belief in what someone tells us is similarly a function of, or identical with, our tendency to act upon the verbal stimuli which he provides. (p. 160)

In a well-known experiment, Diven recorded changes in the resistance of the skin of the hand produced by the reflex secretion of sweat which is often a conspicuous feature of…

The distortion due to differential generalized reinforcement may be traced in the behavior of the troubadour or in the history of the art of fiction. The troubadour begins, let us…

GENERALIZED REINFORCEMENT is the key to successful practical and scientific discourse. It brings the speaker’s behavior most narrowly under the control of the current environment and permits the listener to…

I shall go skiing tomorrow is not, of course, literally a response to future behavior. No matter how we may interpret past events, as in the examples given above, it…

. . . when the child says There was an elephant at the zoo, he appears to be reacting to his past history rather than merely profiting from it. This…

What is the time limit on the stimuli controlling tacts? Show a child a watch and say What is that? and the response Watch is fairly easily explained. Show him…

Greater ease of execution is only one reason why behavior becomes covert. Another kind of consequence of verbal behavior . . . is commonly called punishment. An important distinction between…

Verbal behavior is especially likely to drop below the overt level, because it can continue to receive reinforcement by being useful to the speaker in many ways. (p. 141)

It is only through the gradual growth of a verbal community that the individual becomes ‘conscious’ (p. 140)

A man’s report of his own behavior is widely used in the social sciences, from cultural anthropology to psychophysics, and the reliability of the informant or subject is a crucial…

Self-descriptive verbal behavior is of interest for many reasons. Only through the acquisition of such behavior does the speaker become “aware” of what he is doing or saying, and why.…

The extensive verbal behavior usually called animism may have little to do with private stimuli. It may represent a stage in the growth of a verbal environment in which responses…

If we observe that an animal cowers or retreats when someone approaches, we call it afraid, not because we read into the animal our own private accompaniments of fear but…

The response His face is familiar cannot be formulated in the same way as His face is red. The condition responsible for familiar is not in the stimulus but in…

There are at least four ways in which a reinforcing community with no access to a private stimulus may generate verbal behavior with respect to it. (p. 131) [Editorial challenge:…

In setting up the kind of verbal operant called the tact, the verbal community characteristically reinforces a given response in the presence of a given stimulus. This can be done…

... the problem of privacy cannot be fully solved by instrumental invasion of the organism. No matter how clearly these internal events may be exposed in the laboratory, the fact…

A small but important part of the universe is enclosed within the skin of each individual and, so far as we know, is uniquely accessible to him. It does not…

The fact that a verbal response conditioned in the presence of a given stimulus is found to show some strength in the presence of another stimulus showing some of the…

A quotation is a special form of tact which uses the minimal repertoire of echoic behavior. Whether we are to call it echoic or a tact is unimportant. The classifications…

Having developed a functional suffix -ed with respect to that subtle property of stimuli which we speak of as action-in-the-past, the suffix may be added for the first time to…

Just as a speaker who possesses well-developed echoic behavior may imitate new complex sound-patterns heard for the first time, so the individual who possesses a well-developed minimal repertoire of tacts…

The most familiar examples of functional units are traditionally called words. In learning to speak the child acquires tacts of various sizes: words (doll), phrases (on the table), and sentences…

The properties of a stimulus which are relevant in evoking a response, either in the individual speaker or according to the practices of a given community, can be discovered only…

In studying the properties of the world of things or events which are responded to verbally we must lift ourselves by our own bootstraps; many properties of nature can be…

We are interested in finding terms, not to take traditional places, but to deal with a traditional subject matter. (p. 115)

How a stimulus or some property of a stimulus acquires control over a given form of response is now fairly well understood. The form of a response is shaped by…

... how a word “stands for” a thing or “means” what the speaker intends to say or “communicates” some condition of a thing to a listener has never been satisfactorily…

What do pyramidality, poetry, chair, red, or foxy really “mean”? If we try to answer this by discovering what they “mean to us,” we are behaving empirically, although under a…

Abstraction is a peculiarly verbal process because a nonverbal environment cannot provide the necessary restricted contingency (p. 109)

Our definition of verbal behavior, incidentally, includes the behavior of experimental animals where reinforcements are supplied by an experimenter or by an apparatus designed to establish contingencies which resemble those…

Some extended control is ... permissible and even useful, but a free extension of the tact cannot be tolerated, particularly in practical and scientific matters. The verbal community deals with…