Attitudes and beliefs as verbal behavior.
Attitudes are learned words—change the verbal-community payoff and the attitude moves.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author asked: What if attitudes and beliefs are just words shaped by social praise? He built a Skinner-style argument. No lab gear. No kids. Just tight logic.
He said attitudes are verbal operants. They live in the verbal community, not inside the skull. The paper maps how praise, correction, and echoic chains teach people to say 'I believe...'.
What they found
The paper claims attitude-behavior gaps are not hidden thoughts. They are mismatches between two verbal communities. One group taught the words. Another group controls the acts.
When words and deeds clash, look for competing contingencies. Change the social feedback, not the mind.
How this fits with other research
Stemmer (1992) set the table. It showed how listener rules and generic extensions keep talk working. Guerin (1994) adds: those same rules sculpt 'I think' statements.
Roche et al. (2002) later widened the path. They used Relational Frame Theory to explain how people learn to relate words like 'fair' to acts. The 1994 paper is the Skinnerian launch pad for that RFT rocket.
Kisamore et al. (2016) gives a live demo. They taught kids with autism to answer questions like 'Why be polite?' The correct answers were multiply controlled intraverbals—exactly the kind of verbal operant Guerin (1994) describes.
Why it matters
Stop probing for hidden beliefs during assent or parent interviews. Treat 'I hate math' as a response that contact adult sympathy. Shift the social payoff and the words will follow. Try it: when a client says 'I can't,' model 'I need help' and reinforce that sentence with immediate aid. Track if the new phrase spreads.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Reinforce a replacement verbal statement that better matches the target behavior and track its rate.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Attitudes and beliefs are analyzed as verbal behavior. It is argued that shaping by a verbal community is an essential part of the formation and maintenance of both attitudes and beliefs, and it is suggested that verbal communities mediate the important shift in control from events in the environment (attitudes and beliefs as tacts) to control by other words (attitudes and beliefs as intraverbals). It appears that both attitudes and beliefs are constantly being socially negotiated through autoclitic functions. That is, verbal communities reinforce (a) reporting general rather than specific attitudes and beliefs, (b) presentation of intraverbals as if they were tacts, and (c) presentation of beliefs as if they were attitudes. Consistency among and between attitudes, beliefs, and behavior is also contingent upon the reinforcing practices of verbal communities. Thus, attitudes and beliefs can be studied as social behavior rather than as private, cognitive processes.
The Behavior analyst, 1994 · doi:10.1007/BF03392661