Defining the Verbal Specialist: An Adaptive-Evolutionary View of Deception and Counter-Control‪.‬

Behavior analysis and evolutionary theory share much common intellectual ground. Together they may extend our accounts of language. Baum (1995) represents an excellent beginning for merging behavior analysis with evolutionary theory in this area. However, Baum's analysis of verbal interaction considers the functional value of deception and noncompliance only briefly. This paper attempts a broad over view of how used as basis for extending the evolutionary analysis of verbal interaction to perhaps less savory aspect. We operants such as deception and noncompliance may function in the same ecosystem to counter each other. Examples of functional deception in nonhuman animals, functional rule-breaking, and noncompliance in humans are can see humans as verbal specialists occupying a social niche, manipulating the behavior of the listener to the speaker's benefit through verbal behavior. KEYWORDS: deception, verbal behavior, integrated operant and evolutionary accounts.