Verbal Community Reingorcement, With An Illustration Using the Esoteric Buddhist Concepts of Fuse and Muzai No Nanase

by Bernard Guerin  & Sejima Junichiro

The Psychological Record

Vol.47 No.2

Spring 1997

Pp.233-241

COPYRIGHT 1997 Psychological Record


            Skinner defined verbal behavior as behavior which is mediated 
            through other people, and this includes the use of language forms, 
            gestures, and many other behaviors (1957, p. 14, p. 224). This 
            definition, however, was left unclear. For example, using a 
            coin-operated drink machine only works through the mediation of 
            other people who provide the drinks, clean the machines, and remove 
            our money, but we would not want to call using such a machine verbal 
            behavior. As well, allowing the shaping of a rat's behavior to be 
            called verbal behavior reduces the usefulness of the term (Skinner, 
            1957, p. 108, Note 11). Hayes and Wilson (1993) have also pointed 
            out that verbal behavior allows tact-like responses which have no 
            history of shaping and therefore cannot be discriminative stimuli. 
            Another way of defining verbal behavior is therefore required which 
            changes the scope of Skinner's definition while retaining its 
            substance. 
            Some behavior analysts have added scope to a definition of verbal 
            behavior by noting specific properties that separate it from 
            nonverbal behavior or nonsocial behavior. Chase (1986a) suggested 
            four properties that differentiate verbal and nonverbal behavior: 
            They affect speaker and listener similarly, they are portable, they 
            can act as a substitute for their referent, and they provide an 
            infinite number and variety of behaviors for shaping. Hayes and 
            Hayes (1992; and Parrott, 1986) have argued that the arbitrary and 
            referential nature of verbal behavior is sufficient, although the 
            basis to the equivalence class formation they utilize to make these 
            arguments is still undecided. Finally, Horne and Lowe (1996) argued 
            that verbal behavior was based on a naming response repertoire 
            learned early in life. 
            Elsewhere it has been argued that verbal communities might be 
            defined not only by the form of behavior they maintain (that 
            mediated by other people), but functionally by the properties of the 
            system of shaping used by a community to maintain such behaviors 
            (Guerin, 1992, 1994). Other definitions, which also put the 
            definition of verbal behavior back equally on the listener and the 
            speaker, usually emphasize the effects on the listener rather than 
            the form of the shaping (Parrott, 1984; Schoneberger, 1990). The 
            modest aims of the present paper are first to elaborate on the 
            notion of the type of consequences provided by a verbal community 
            and how that enters into verbal behavior, and second, to illustrate 
            this by some notions found in Esoteric Buddhism. 
            Defining Verbal Behavior 
            When we act on the physical environment there is usually a specific 
            and often repeatable contingent effect. If I hit my hands together, 
            each time I get a similar, specific outcome - that of clapping, with 
            its associated noise. But if I hit someone else's hand repeatedly, 
            however, I soon get very different effects happening. Social shaping 
            is not usually repeatable and different effects are likely to occur 
            each time we repeat a behavior. For this reason, social shaping by a 
            verbal community does not have the mechanical appearance that the 
            physical environment does, even though it is based on the same 
            principles. The variability of shaping, the way that a verbal 
            community shapes a speaker, might therefore define verbal behavior 
            (Chase, 1986b). 
            One suggestion has been that verbal communities are groups that 
            shape loosely or indiscriminately and engage in reciprocal shaping 
            over a long period (Guerin, 1994, 1995). It is suggested that such 
            an evolved system of shaping gives rise to the special properties of 
            verbal communities. The nontechnical term "loosely shaped" is meant 
            as a shorthand to indicate that the consequences that maintain 
            verbal behavior are generalized over time, setting or context, 
            persons, and behaviors. 
            For example, if a listener does not understand every part of what a 
            speaker is saying, or even if they dislike what is being said, they 
            do not immediately extinguish or punish the behavior, or walk away 
            and do something else instead. Rather, they encourage the speaker to 
            continue by smiling and nodding, and thus loosely shape verbal 
            behavior they do not even understand or like. Similarly, if friends 
            do things we do not like, we do not immediately punish them and 
            leave. Friendships are, in this sense, "forgiving" or 
            "cushioning"(1) and the contingencies that maintain such groups are 
            shaped over a longer period. Most of what we say and do to members 
            of our groups has extremely generalized outcomes (Guerin, 1995). 
            Because verbal communities loosely shape verbal behavior in this 
            way, a wide range of flexible and often arbitrary relations become 
            possible which could not be shaped by the physical environment 
            alone. 
            The same generalized effects can be seen for the large verbal 
            communities which maintain languages such as Japanese and English. 
            For any particular instance of producing an instance of that 
            language there might be little or no ostensible reinforcement. If 
            someone asks us to tell them the time, in our language, we usually 
            respond with the correct time, but there is minimal reinforcement 
            contingent upon doing this and only mild punishment if we refuse. 
            What reinforces speaking in a language and responding to a language 
            is not that it is immediately reinforced in any specific way, but 
            that the participation and membership in the verbal community is of 
            enormous benefit over time, most importantly when the listener 
            speaks. Any particular responding might not be reinforced, but the 
            overall use of the language is continued because it makes available 
            to us so many other opportunities for shaping. If we stop speaking 
            altogether, or we speak only a foreign language, then we lose many 
            effects not otherwise possible. 
            Other forms of social behavior also show the loose or generalized 
            shaping by other people, including "cognitive" phenomena. For 
            example, answering "five" to a spoken "What is 2 plus 3?" or "2+3 = 
            ?" might seem specific shaping, but what exactly are the 
            consequences for saying five? What happens if we do not say five? 
            Probably every time we have produced five to "2+3" something 
            different has occurred: It might have allowed us to remember 
            something longer; it might have allowed us to do a further 
            mathematical operation based on "5" instead of "2+3"; or many 
            different people might have said many different things following our 
            production of "five." We add two and three regularly in different 
            ways in our lives but these probably have very different contingent 
            effects. This is why cognitive psychologists can talk about people 
            processing information without discussing the consequences 
            maintaining the "processing": The behaviors nominalized as 
            "processing" are reinforced through generalized social shaping. We 
            learn in childhood to "read information" when someone asks us to. 
            Social anthropologists and social psychologists have recognized such 
            loose systems of shaping in social groups and called them 
            generalized reciprocity and interactive dependence, and they argue 
            both that such reciprocal arrangements rely on the long term 
            stability of verbal communities, and that the reciprocal 
            arrangements underlie symbolic and ritual behavior patterns (Hart, 
            1986; Hogg, 1992; Peterson, 1993; Sahlins, 1965; Yamagishi & Cook, 
            1993). 
            People in such exchange communities do not usually restrict 
            themselves to exact or specific exchanges but give effects to 
            speakers freely and flexibly. This stops, however, if the exchanges 
            become one-sided in the long run or if social conditions become 
            unstable (Hart, 1986). For example, in times of war or resource 
            scarcity, generalized exchange is greatly reduced (Hart, 1986; 
            Turnbull, 1973). In times of conflict between friends, the 
            (ex)friends will not spend time listening to one another and require 
            more immediate reinforcement of their listening to do so. This is 
            often a role for a third-party mediator. 
            It has been argued that there are many effects available from 
            membership of a verbal community, both verbal and nonverbal, and 
            that, over a longer time period, belonging to a verbal community is 
            highly reinforced (Guerin, 1994; Hogg, 1992). Although there is no 
            immediate, material reinforcement for providing reciprocal 
            reinforcement to a speaker who is saying something you do not like, 
            belonging to such a verbal community pays off in the long run and 
            participation has been shaped through a lifetime. The difficulty in 
            making this analysis is that the reinforcing effects are not those 
            seen in the immediate situation. For example, taking the bread in a 
            Catholic Mass is not reinforced by the food, but because not taking 
            the bread would lead to expulsion from the group and the loss of all 
            the benefits that group provides (Guerin, 1995) (benefits which have 
            nothing otherwise to do with the eating of bread). 
            To put this into better behavioral terms, belonging to groups (or 
            producing the relevant behaviors for this in appropriate 
            circumstances) and conforming to groups is a setting event for many, 
            social and nonsocial, powerful reinforcers not otherwise available. 
            It is not that such individual, conforming behaviors magically 
            appear, or are somehow a part of a fictitious "group reinforcement," 
            but that those behaviors are shaped because they make available 
            access to other powerful yet unrelated (arbitrary) contingencies. 
            To give another example, chatting briefly with one's neighbors is 
            probably not reinforced by anything immediate or obvious. It is 
            suggested that chatting or even greeting your neighbor from a 
            distance is maintained by previous outcomes of forming memberships 
            which have other unrelated outcomes (Litwak & Szelenyi, 1969; 
            Wellman & Wortley, 1989; Williams, 1995). Belonging to neighborhood 
            groups by chatting provides potential outcomes such as borrowing 
            lawn mowers for short periods and getting help with short-term 
            problems; belonging to families provides other outcomes (borrowing 
            larger sums of money, receiving help with long-term problems such as 
            illness); and belonging to a group of language users provides many 
            highly generalized but powerful outcomes. 
            To summarize this necessarily loose description of the verbal 
            community system of reinforcement, it has been argued that what 
            connects the different forms of verbal communities, audiences, or 
            listeners is the loose nature of the consequences, where "loose" 
            refers to the highly generalized consequences for behaving. Behaving 
            with verbal behavior is reinforced over long periods, over many 
            people, over many different settings, and with many different 
            effects as the outcomes for the same behavior. Verbal behavior 
            therefore most often appears to have no maintaining consequences but 
            only because they are generalized and not obvious. In this way, 
            cognitive psychology and social psychology have been able to carry 
            on without dealing with consequences, because the cognitive and 
            social phenomena they deal with mostly have generalized 
            consequences. 
            The particular system of shaping suggested as defining verbal 
            communities might also explain the arbitrary nature of verbal 
            behaviors. As an example, the use of the English word "cat" for the 
            object cat requires the formation of extremely arbitrary relations 
            because "cat" does not look like or share any stimulus features of 
            the object cat (Chase, 1986b; Sidman, 1994). To be able to reinforce 
            responding to a stimulus that in no way "resembles" its referent 
            might only be possible with the properties that arise from the way 
            that verbal communities reinforce. 
            If true, this has possible implications for the growing research on 
            stimulus equivalence classes and the relation of equivalence classes 
            to verbal behavior (Hayes & Hayes, 1992; Sidman, 1994). Children 
            learn such arbitrary relations early in life although it is still 
            not clear how they do this, because equivalence formation is not 
            like normal stimulus generalization (Horne & Lowe, 1996; Sidman, 
            1994). What has not been explored sufficiently yet is the natural 
            shaping required for the formation of these arbitrary relations; how 
            such arbitrary relations can be shaped without the special 
            reinforcement procedures used in the experimental research. One 
            suggestion has been that a naming response is learned early in life 
            (Horne & Lowe, 1996) although the finer details are still required. 
            Another closely related suggestion is that equivalence formation 
            arises from the natural shaping of generalized social interaction 
            (Guerin, 1994, p. 66). Given that early social shaping will train 
            reciprocity or generalized exchange in social relations, this 
            probably trains nonlinguistic (but verbal) identity, symmetry, and 
            transitivity relations even before language use (cf. Doise & Mugny, 
            1984; Doise, Mugny, & Perret-Clermont, 1975; Goody, 1995; Kent, 
            1993; Sahlins, 1965). It is suggested that shaping the use of highly 
            generalized forms of reinforcement during nonlinguistic social 
            interaction might shape both the naming function (Horne & Lowe, 
            1996) and the special form of generalization which are found in 
            equivalence class formation (Hayes & Hayes, 1992), or it could at 
            least make them both possible (cf. Peterson, Merwin, Moyer, & 
            Whitehurst, 1971; Peterson & Whitehurst, 1971; Steinman, 1970). 
            Buddhism and Generalized Reciprocity 
            Social anthropologists have given many interesting and informative 
            examples of the dynamic ways in which generalized reciprocal 
            relationships work. The Appendix to Sahlins (1965), for example, 
            contains many interesting case studies. Outside of anthropology 
            there are fewer examples showing the ways that verbal communities 
            deal with generalized and loosely discriminated reinforcement of 
            members, although some forms of psychotherapy will be mentioned 
            briefly later. To give an extended example from another area of 
            human social behavior, we will discuss some notions from Buddhism. 
            In Esoteric Buddhism (Sekiguchi, 1988) we can find some notions of 
            generalized exchange relationships that nicely illustrate the loose 
            verbal community reinforcement. Although this does not empirically 
            prove an analysis of the properties of generalized, reciprocal 
            shaping in any way, it provides a nice example and can help us learn 
            to recognize and analyse the ways that verbal communities maintain 
            their relationships when there is only very intermittent 
            reinforcement available for both listeners' and speakers' behavior. 
            Fuse: The Giving of Alms or Charity 
            One of the older concepts of Esoteric Buddhism is that of Fuse. 
            Although Fuse now means giving money to a monk, its original meaning 
            was an offering or giving of alms, and at the same time a 
            renouncement of possessions (Sekiguchi, 1988). This was considered a 
            positive behavior to help get through life. One does not offer up 
            possessions "in order to" receive happiness, but Fuse leads to 
            happiness. In the extreme case, Fuse means altruism. 
            Fuse in this older sense is very similar to "charity" in 
            Christianity, one of the major virtues to show in life. Christians 
            are admonished to be charitable towards others. In particular, 
            charity is most important not when you have many possessions and 
            give some away, but when you are poor and yet still make offerings 
            to other people. 
            With respect to verbal communities, both Fuse and Christian charity 
            can be seen as societal rules which help in the formation and 
            maintenance of verbal communities. As discussed earlier, the 
            reinforcement which maintains verbal communities only reinforces 
            loosely and over a long time period, so supplementary control from 
            verbal rules is probably required. The rule-governed control gained 
            from training Fuse or charity can help achieve this. Following such 
            rules might not lead to happiness in the short term, but will over a 
            longer time period because it makes available, or is a setting event 
            for, access to other group contingencies. Thus listeners and 
            recipients of someone else's boring verbal behavior will continue to 
            respond. 
            In the extreme case of altruism, it has been suggested elsewhere 
            that altruism will not occur without this form of verbal community 
            because the immediate outcomes cannot be reinforcing (Guerin, 1994, 
            1995). Maintaining a verbal community is therefore essential to 
            maintain altruism within a community. In these cases, behaviors of 
            Fuse and charity become essential in order to maintain the loose 
            reciprocal reinforcement, so it is clear why altruism is emphasized 
            when discussing both Fuse and charity. 
            Muzai No Nanase: The Seven Charities 
            Maintenance of verbal communities does not only consist of altruism 
            and giving away of possessions. We do not give someone our food 
            every time they speak English or Japanese to us. So "giving of alms" 
            in a strict interpretation will occur infrequently and under special 
            conditions. 
            To suggest other ways of maintaining the verbal community form of 
            reinforcement to a speaker, especially without giving possessions, 
            Esoteric Buddhism combines Fuse with the concept of Muzai No Nanase. 
            In the original philosophy of Buddhism, Muzai meant a state of 
            innocence or lack of possessions, and Nanase meant seven charities 
            (Sekiguchi, 1988). The original concept meant that even when someone 
            is without possessions at all, there are still seven ways in which 
            they can be charitable (or loosely reinforce a speaker in our 
            interpretation). 
            The seven ways of being charitable are to show a gentle face, to 
            show gentle eyes, to speak politely, to behave politely, to 
            sympathize with others, to offer your seat to someone, and to 
            receive guests warmly. These behaviors can be widely observed in 
            conversations between friends. As mentioned earlier, when a friend 
            is saying something with which you disagree, you do not punish them 
            immediately but sympathize or speak politely back to them. So the 
            Nanase are not only applicable when lacking possessions and unable 
            to give, but also when it is inappropriate to give something at the 
            time. In everyday life, it is inappropriate to give food or money 
            reinforcers to maintain verbal behavior, but the older Buddhist 
            philosophy tells us that there are still at least seven ways to 
            provide generalized reinforcement in such cases. And as mentioned in 
            the earlier suggestion of a definition of verbal behavior, such 
            reinforcement is only loosely contingent upon particular behaviors. 
            The same seven behaviors can also be seen in various forms of 
            psychotherapy. One goal of psychotherapy is to form a trust or 
            reciprocal exchange relationship with a client who is initially a 
            stranger. In such situations it is inappropriate to give them food 
            or possessions, or any direct material objects, and so all seven 
            behaviors specified as Nanase can be found in such situations. 
            Indeed, some psychotherapies, such as Rogerian therapy, explicitly 
            train gentle eyes and face, sympathizing, and loose reinforcement of 
            behavior (called "unconditional positive regard"). 
            Conclusion 
            We have shown that some of the ideas involved in a modern definition 
            of verbal behavior and verbal community can be found in the original 
            Esoteric Buddhist concepts and teachings, as ways to shape and 
            maintain a verbal community system of reinforcement with its 
            emergent properties. The phenomena are not unique to Buddhism but 
            occur under different guises and different names in all verbal 
            communities. To face life alone is difficult or impossible, and we 
            are shaped to have other people help us have useful effects on the 
            physical environment. To achieve this, we need communities that only 
            loosely reinforce behavior because specific and repeatable 
            reinforcement is less likely to lead to arbitrary relations. To 
            achieve such a community system of loose reinforcement to "cushion" 
            behavior which would otherwise extinguish, various cultural 
            practices (Glenn, 1989) are required. 
            In the concepts of Muzai and Nanase we can find good examples of one 
            approach to these questions. These concepts provide verbal 
            instructions for members to follow which train reinforcement of 
            other members' behavior even when providing that reinforcement is 
            not immediately reinforcing (Fuse). It further specifies that 
            following the instructions will be reinforcing in the long run, and 
            that the instructions can be followed even if there are no material 
            possessions which can be used (Muzai No Nanase). 
            The first author thanks the Japan Foundation and Keio University for 
            supporting this work. Both authors thank anonymous reviewers for 
            making helpful comments. 
            1 We thank William Baum for suggesting this second word to describe 
            the properties of verbal community reinforcement systems. 
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