The relationship between a person's behavior and the interaction with his immediate environment is discussed as a shaping process. The behavior that is shaped is always that which is directly and crucially involved in the choice he makes, the response he makes, and the way that response affects him in the given situation. The abstraction process…

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior,…