Conditioning the Behavior of the Listener

In the 1960s, prompted by cognitive psychologists’ claims that much behavior was governed by rules, that is, by what individuals believed, Skinner began offering his own view of rules and rule-governed behavior. Drawing upon the basic unit of operant analysis, Skinner interpreted rule-governed behavior parsimoniously as behavior under the control of discriminative stimuli, that is, rules. He then distinguished rule-governed behavior from behavior directly conditioned by contingencies, called contingency-shaped behavior. Behavior analysts in general followed Skinner’s lead and began to talk about rules and their effects on behavior, although they differed somewhat on the function attributed to the rules. However, Blakely and I (Schlinger & Blakely, 1987; Blakely & Schlinger, 1987) claimed that a more interesting effect occurred when a verbal statement altered the functions of antecedent events (motivating operations and discriminative stimuli) that controlled behavior, which we called a function-altering effect. It turns out that, as usual, Skinner had beaten us to the punch in Verbal Behavior, in a section in Chapter 14, titled, “Conditioning the Behavior of the Listener.” Therein he described how verbal stimuli can mimic respondent and operant conditioning, which he called instruction. Interestingly, when Skinner began addressing rules, for whatever reason, he did not return to his discussion of instructed behavior. In this talk, I 1) present a brief history of the interpretation of rules in behavior analysis; 2) describe function-altering operations and argue that they are the essence of respondent and operant conditioning; 3) describe how verbal stimuli commonly produce function-altering effects and, thus, are analogues to basic conditioning processes; and 4) discuss the implications of such an interpretation for the analysis of verbal processes.