The control of the content of conversation: reinforcement of statements of opinion.

SOME kinds of human behavior have seemed to be resistant to experimental investigation because of both their complexity and their apparent variability. One such class includes the commonplace activities of people —for example, whatever the reader was doing just before he picked up this journal. Perhaps talking to someone. This paper describes the successful experimental application of some principles of operant conditioning in this area; specifically to conversation between two people. The experimental procedure is based on two assumptions (2, 3). (a) Apparently heterogeneous human verbal behavior falls into comparatively simple operant response classes; hence, any one is susceptible to conditioning. The class of verbal behavior chosen is the stating of opinions, (b) Classes of environmental events can be isolated that have the property of altering any behavior on which their occurrence has depended, i.e., some events are reinforcing stimuli. Specifically, under our conditions, statements of agreement or paraphrase are hypothesized to be reinforcing stimuli for the verbal behavior of a speaker. According to these assumptions, if someone agrees with every opinion of a speaker, the speaker should show a sharp increase in his rate of stating opinions. The stating of opinions has been conditioned. Since it is both interesting and important to obtain changes in behavior that correspond to those termed conditioning when the subject is not aware that he is "being conditioned" (or, indeed, that his behavior is being manipulated in any way) the present experiments were conducted under conditions in which the occurrence of such "insight" was extremely unlikely.