Are you asking me or just saying?
My husband is in the middle of making dinner and he approaches our liquor cabinet which is looking a little bare. "We don't have any wine."
[Pause...I'm waiting to see where this is going]
He continues to stand there, smiling, looking at me, looking at the place where a bottle of wine might stand. Eventually I say, "You'd like for me to get us some wine wouldn't you?" And he says, "That would be great. We need it for the beef cheeks I am cooking."
Not a problem. I walk to the nearest Wine Rack and purchase some bottles of red wine; one for dinner and one for me (thanks).
What we have above is what Skinner (1957) coined, an impure tact. I've written before about how a tact is one of our verbal operants whereby a person makes a comment or states what is happening in response to non-verbal stimulus. Here, the liquor cabinet and the absence of wine evoked the response, "We don't have any wine". However, an additional variable was also present in this scenario: my husband's motivation to have wine. So while the verbal behaviour of my husband may have looked like a tact, he was also making a request (Sundberg, 2004). Requests in behaviour analytic terms is referred to as a mand (from the word, 'command' or 'demand'; Skinner, 1957). Mands are primarily controlled by motivation for something.
Think of the impure tact as the passive aggressive ways in which we ask for things to happen or get done without really coming out and saying it. The "Honey, please...." exchanges, the subtle comments made about something we want dealt with.
My husband responds to a few of my impure tacts:
There's a spider in the.....
I'm thirsty (while we're laying in bed about ready to go to sleep)
This box is heavy.
I'm sure you have some in your verbal repertoire too! Got some examples to share?
References:
Skinner, B.F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Sundberg, M.L (2004). Verbal behavior glossary. Retrieved from: http://www.marksundberg.com/files/VerbalBehaviorGlossary.pdf
Related Posts:
Watch My Language
Labeling (and knowing) what we feel.
