The Art of Verbal Behavior
Ancient Art and Verbal Behavior
What does a hand stencil from at least 67,800 years ago, found in Indonesia, have to do with telephone sales, community outreach, public speaking, writing, presenting in front of a video camera, and teaching? They are all ways to communicate to an audience. They are all forms of verbal behavior.
Verbal Behavior is a very complex subject that touches on what it means to be human.
By looking at ancient artifacts we see it has been evolving for over 67,800 years and most likely longer. The earliest art we know of, or at least the beginning of art, is a zigzag engraving on a shell from around 500,000 years ago. It was not created by modern humans, but by Homo erectus. I speculate that it was not yet carrying cultural messages at this time. But I suspect it did serve as the foundation for how art developed into a language with meaning. I think of this much like how, according to archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, clay accounting tokens used inside of clay envelopes in ancient Mesopotamia eventually became cuneiform. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics are the earliest writing systems we know of. Neanderthals may also have created art. A hand stencil in Spain has been attributed to them, though the dating of it is debated. While only speculation, it’s likely that not just big brained modern humans, but other more ancient forms also developed art as a form of communication. Art that served as a form of verbal behavior.
A note on terms. I am using “verbal behavior” broadly. B.F. Skinner introduced the term in 1957 with a more precise meaning, behavior that is reinforced through the actions of another person. Art and speech both fit this description. While I may apply it more broadly or out of the original context of behaviorism, I am influenced by Skinner’s 1957 work.
We will be exploring verbal behavior from many angles. Some may be more technically correct, others more in line with a cultural explanation and still others more narrative or story based. While behaviorism and neuroscience may be more precise, they don’t always translate into easy to apply techniques.
First we look at high stress forms of verbal behavior.
I want to explore phone sales first. As this page develops I also plan on talking about public speaking.
Phone Sales and Telemarketing
I am going to use phone sales to begin with because many people find this a highly aversive job, and turnover gives us a way to measure how aversive it is. Public speaking does not have a comparable measure. It also makes for an interesting comparison between two types of verbal behavior that the majority of people find undesirable.
We need to start by determining what is and isn’t so. A lot of verbal behavior statistics are most likely inaccurate and can be accounted for by sharpening and leveling (terms from Gordon Allport and Leo Postman’s research on rumor), misquoting, or simply made popular because they sounded plausible, but never substantiated. I searched for statistics on the fear of phone sales and public speaking and found very little solid research. A lot of the research on phone sales was from companies that had a financial incentive to sharpen (exaggerate) statistics in their favor. They are also probably in the best position to gather data.
Here is what I found from Ringly. The sources for these stats are cited. However, they happen to be other companies selling a solution. I could not tell whether these companies are independent of one another.
Call center turnover averages 40-45% annually in 2026, and high-stress sectors reach 55-60%. That’s the suggested baseline businesses need to plan around. (Insignia Resources)
My observation.
Jobs that I have held would agree with the higher number. I have not done this enough to make that statistically relevant.
Call center turnover is more than double the average across all other occupations. This makes it a structurally different retention problem. (Insignia Resources)
My observation.
This is a tough job many people hate and it creates a great deal of negative emotional responses. I have always extrapolated the research of Pavlov, and later Wolpe, about what was called experimental neurosis as a condition of phone sales and some in person sales.
Average call center agent turnover was 35% in 2021 and 38% in 2022. The trend has been creeping up. (SQM Group)
My observation.
This is interesting and I have no comment.
First-year attrition rates of 69-73% mean most turnover happens within the first 12 months. You lose most people before they ever become fully productive. (Insignia Resources)
My observation.
From my experience I would agree with this. After 12 months workers experience undesirable management practices or find a job with better pay.
Average agent tenure is just 14 to 15 months across the industry. By the time someone’s genuinely good at the job, they’re already close to leaving. (Insignia Resources)
One benchmark puts average agent tenure at 14.3 months. Different sources, same story: barely over a year. (Bright Pattern)
My observation.
I think this is true. But it can be influenced by better trained managers and better pay. I think most people who leave and have the needed traits for doing the job leave because of bad management or low pay.
One company I talked with about recruiting and training callers had very high turnover. The hiring manager told me they kept people in the job by encouraging employees to take on new debt, so they would have to keep working and could not afford to quit. I was told I should plan on how to do the same. I thought it was an unscrupulous and unethical practice. I did not work for that company.
Burnout and stress behind the turnover. The job is genuinely draining, and the data on stress indicates this.
87% of call center agents report high or very high workplace stress. Almost nobody in the role describes it as low-pressure. (HiveDesk)
My observation.
I have noticed even experienced and successful call agents are often under stress. They display more or less displacement behavior. Displacement behavior is a term from ethology, associated with Niko Tinbergen. It means an action that looks irrelevant to what the animal is doing, such as scratching, grooming, or fidgeting, that shows up when there is a conflict between drives or when a goal is blocked. In a caller I have observed many of the same behaviors I see in dogs: displacement vocalizations, drinking, limb movements, such as excessive foot movements or unnecessary hand movements, getting up and down, and what could be classified as displacement grooming. But people who are going to quit usually display a great deal more displacement behavior, sometimes from day 1. I have mostly worked in either a job requiring complex technical knowledge or to know where to find it, or where the person being called is experiencing high levels of emotional distress and uncertainty, while getting bombarded with sales calls. I think this increases the stress and pressure on the call agents and I then have the opportunity to observe some interesting behavior.
That stress bleeds into personal life for 77% of agents. It doesn’t clock out at the end of a shift. (HiveDesk)
My observation.
I have not noticed excessive stress after work in the people who handle the job and mental stress well. Those who have a hard time managing the negatively emotionally charged conversation most likely do. But people do take the work home with them. On their off time they do tend to work at learning how to improve their performance and how to become more skilled.
74% of call center workers currently report high burnout. Three in four is the norm. (HiveDesk)
53% of high-stress agents say they’re likely to leave within six months. Burnout and turnover are the same curve, just measured at different points. (HiveDesk)
Employees who are very often or always burned out are 63% more likely to take a sick day, per Gallup. That figure comes from Gallup’s research on full-time U.S. employees in general, not call centers specifically, but it shows how burnout drives daily absence.
My observation.
For someone to work in this field they need to develop a personal strategy of how they will deal with the stress. I think we can learn a lot about developing this strategy from authors who take very different approaches to the subject. First would be a swordsman and duelist, Miyamoto Musashi, the second would be a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. Another strategist to consider is John Boyd. This is for the one doing the calling. We need to add to this list if we are talking about the managers overseeing the callers.
First, I want to go over Claude Shannon’s technical aspects of communication because this is relevant for phone sales in particular, but it applies to all forms of verbal behavior.
The basics for communication theory.
- Information Source: The entity or device that selects and produces the desired message to be sent.
- Transmitter (Encoder): The mechanism or equipment that transforms the raw message into physical signals (such as electrical currents, radio waves, or digital bits). In our case the phone rep.
- Channel: The medium or physical path (such as a copper wire, fiber-optic cable, or free space) used to carry the signal from the transmitter to the receiver.
- Noise: Unwanted physical or electronic interference (such as static, distortion, or signal degradation) that alters or disrupts the signal during transmission. For this example we will also include office noise. If your people work in a noisy call center it introduces noise into the call as well as increasing the rep’s cognitive load, which acts as mental noise. The same is true for the one receiving the call.
- Receiver (Decoder): The device or mechanism that intercepts the signal from the channel and translates it back into a usable message form.
- Destination: The final target equipment or person that receives the reconstructed message.
What everyone who works the phones needs to ask is, are we adding unnecessary noise into the conversation? We need to consider both technical noise and semantic noise.
The distinction between technical and semantic noise comes from Warren Weaver’s section of The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). Weaver described three levels of communication problems: technical, which is how accurately symbols are transmitted, semantic, which is how precisely they convey the intended meaning, and effectiveness, which is whether the received meaning leads to the desired behavior.
Next we will look at how different approaches to what I call verbal behavior influence performance and audience acceptance. Some that I am interested in are Skinner, Richard Bauman (Verbal Art as Performance, 1977), Musashi, Damasio, and Boyd. All of these can influence and inform the strategy of the person making the calls.
