This book suggests how we might approach the explanation of the central pattern of behavior in affluent, marketing-oriented societies. The task is well worth the effort since it is a central component of both social scientific endeavor and the need to comprehend ourselves in the twenty-first century. While our parents and grandparents were primarily producers, we are more likely to define ourselves as consumers. Parts of our very identities are bound up with something as superficially trivial as our shopping behavior. There is, of course, much more than this to consumer choice: so much so that seriously seeking to understand ourselves as consumers ought surely to assume a dominant position in our epistemological landscape.
But this is an intellectual task and we cannot seek to approach it at the level of either popular cultural studies or managerial marketing in the expectation that we shall thereby gain real understanding. The social and behavioral sciences need to be brought to bear on the task of elucidating consumer choice. The disciplines of economic psychology, philosophy, behavioral economics, and neuropsychology are required as well, of course, as the insight that comes from knowledge of cultural awareness and the technological possibilities—and limitations—of contemporary marketing.1
In approaching the nature of humans as consumers, we are forced to acknowledge the depth of their personal involvement in the behaviors in which we are interested. Consumers invest their most intimate resources—their desires, beliefs, emotions, and perceptions—in the choices that create their economic and social welfare. The difficulty is that it is not obvious which beliefs and desires, let alone which emotions and perceptions, to attribute to them as we seek to explain and interpret their choices. It is easy to speculate and romanticize about, deconstruct, and overinterpret consumer behavior and there are many examples in both consumer research and cultural studies that exhibit this tendency only too well. Avoiding these admittedly imaginative avenues, that are ultimately not germane to the present task, we must tread a more mundane but finally more illuminating path. In particular, if we are to ascribe intentionality in a responsible manner to consumers, we must first establish the boundaries of the behaviorist explanation of what they do.
This initial pursuit of consumption as behavior is beneficial in its own right since there emerge aspects of consumer choice that are only amenable to such treatment, things we can learn about the behavior of consumers that depend on this parsimonious methodology. Many aspects of brand, product, and store choice, for example, are yielded through the pursuit of this procedure. The true nature of what it is that consumers maximize is also revealed in this conceptually frugal enterprise. Equally, there are aspects of consumer choice that cannot be understood in this way: we can only appreciate what they are when we have exhausted the insights we can obtain from the behaviorist approach. Then the nature and scope of an intentional account of behavior become apparent.
We cannot account, for instance, for some aspects of the continuity and discontinuity of consumer behavior without recourse to intentional idioms, desires, and beliefs, as explanatory devices. We cannot account for the personal level of the consumers’ experience, its meaning, unless we make reference to their desires and beliefs, emotions and perceptions, as well as to the rewards and costs that consumption brings. Finally, it would be impossible to delimit behavioral interpretations of choice were it not for our ability to attribute the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their history and current situation. These things we learn only from the pursuit of the behaviorist methodology, pushing to its limits the model of consumer choice derived within such confines. This in turn opens up the sure route to a responsible Intentional Interpretation of consumer choice, but it is only the beginning of our social scientific quest.
For it remains all too easy to invent fanciful desires and beliefs that consumers might be embodying in their behavior. The point is to explain, not to embellish. So how are we to discipline our intentional account? One way, following the lead of philosopher Daniel Dennett, is to start with an idealized view of the consumer as a utility maximizer and work out what manner of desires and beliefs he or she ought to have given their history and circumstances. We can be bolder in our prescription of intentionality than Dennett’s scheme permits, however, for the very reason that we begin our intellectual task with the behavioral account of consumer choice. So we can elaborate the notion of utility by remembering that consumers maximize a bundle of utilitarian and informational reinforcements rather than just a vague quantity called utility. We know from our empirical research how to conceptualize and operationally measure these sources of reward and how to relate them to the emotional reactions that are the ultimate evolutionarily sanctioned rewards that contribute to biological fitness and personal survival. These insights from the behavioral perspective place the ensuing intentional account of consumer choice on a much firmer footing than any strategy which proceeds directly to psychological explanation in its absence.
This idealized intentional view must be cashed out in what we know about the actual functioning of consumers, principally their cognitive and metacognitive processing. We need to consult the theories that have been advanced in these areas in order to see whether they are consistent with our Intentional Interpretations and whether the cognitive functioning they proposed has generated the intentionality required for our first approximation of their behavior and its mainsprings. It is essential to keep our feet on the ground here by ensuring that our Intentional Interpretations and Cognitive Interpretations are consistent with what we know of the extensional sciences that investigate economic and social behavior: neurophysiology and behavioral science. The resulting use we make of the cognitive psychology of consumer choice ought then to constrain our interpretations as well as ground our account of consumer behavior in what we know of rational human decision making—and its shortcomings.
These intellectual concerns provide the subject matter of this book. Given that the aim is to propose a metatheoretical framework for the cognitive explanation of consumer choice, rather than an exposition of consumer behavior per se, psychology and philosophy figure strongly. Consumer choice is a part of the pattern of human activity and its explanation therefore is that of human choice in general. The framework of conceptualization and analysis that elucidates how we are to understand consumer choice must apply more generally than just to the particular typology of behavior with which we are primarily concerned. It is inevitable in view of this that it draw upon and respond to the theories of human behavior, action, and agency that have been advanced by psychologists and philosophers. To this extent, the book is not about consumer choice per se; it is about how we can speak about consumer choice.
Earlier chapters set the scene by introducing behaviorist and cognitive approaches to consumer choice and showing how their interaction leads to richer explanations, and describe an extensional model of consumer choice which portrays consumer behavior as the outcome of the consumer’s history of reinforcement and the opportunities for purchase and consumption offered by the current consumer behavior setting. Hence, Chapter 2 introduces the philosophy of Intentional Behaviorism and describes radical behaviorism as a psychological methodology. Chapter 3 projects this understanding into the explanation of consumer choice from a behaviorist standpoint, notably in terms of the Behavioral Perspective Model and the evidence for its capacity to elucidate consumption as behavior. This approach has yielded a basic understanding of the nature of consumption that allows the prediction of such aspects of consumer behavior as brand, product, and store choice; the sensitivity of consumption to changes in price; and the types of reinforcement that consumers seek in the course of utility maximization. It also permits the interpretation of swathes of more complex consumer choice such as saving and investment, the adoption and diffusion of innovations, and environmental despoliation and protection. Even though such interpretations are not in themselves amenable to a behaviorist analysis, they are evaluable by means of data generated by other researchers in marketing, economic psychology, and behavioral economics on the basis of which they can be understood in terms of the extensional model which suggests hypotheses for further empirical research.
Several succeeding chapters derive and elaborate the methodology of Intentional Behaviorism by identifying aspects of consumer choice that are not amenable to empirical analysis in behaviorist terms because the stimuli necessary for such an investigation are not available. Accounting for the continuity/discontinuity of behavior, for instance, as well as the personal level of consumer experience, and formulating suitably constrained behaviorist interpretations, all fall short of the usual canons of behaviorist practice because it is not feasible to identify clearly the antecedent and consequential stimuli that would normally form the stimulus field through which the behavior is explained. In identifying these limitations, these chapters establish the bounds of behaviorism which demarcate the points at which it becomes necessary to turn to an intentional account of the behavior for which no stimulus field is obvious. Each of the bounds of behaviorism finds a counterpart in the imperatives of intentionality which indicate the direction a psychological explanation should take: the principles of ensuring an intentional account of the behavior, of taking first-person experience into consideration, and of maintaining stimulus proximity in proffering behaviorist interpretations. The investment in the philosophy of economic psychology that is made in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, is necessary to the overall project of the book which aims to place the psychological explanation of consumer choice on a secure epistemological footing.
Pursuit of the imperatives of intentionality enjoins a rigorous methodology. We have seen that this psychological explanation of consumer choice has two stages, suggested by but differing from Dennett’s (1987) approach to intentional psychology. The first stage involves the creation of an Intentional Interpretation of behavior which treats the consumer as an idealized (utility maximizing) system whose intentionality (desires and beliefs) can be deduced from knowledge of its learning history and current circumstances. This Intentional Interpretation must be critically examined in terms of the extent to which the consumers’ cognitive processes would be capable of generating the desires, beliefs, emotions, and perceptions by reference to which the Intentional Interpretation proceeds. This process, the construction and deployment of a Cognitive Interpretation, is the second stage of psychological explanation.
This methodology is elaborated in the context of intentionality and cognition. In the first stage of psychological explanation, based, as I have said, on an intentional perspective of consumer choice, the consumer situation and the patterns of reinforcement which explain behavior are delineated in intentional terms and the relationships among them are drawn out. This permits the idealized projection of the intentionality of a consumer with a particular consumption history in a specified setting which promises reinforcing and punishing outcomes for further consumption behaviors. This framework of conceptualization and analysis can then be employed to elucidate the behavior of consumers more generally, ranging from the routine—everyday consumer behavior such as brand choice for familiar food products—to the extreme—such as addiction to slot machine gambling. The resulting Intentional Interpretation must also be consistent with what is known of consumer choice via the extensional sciences of neurophysiology and behaviorology.
The second stage of psychological explanation, again as has been noted, seeks to establish the degree to which the Intentional Interpretation is consistent with cognitive psychology. How far does our knowledge of the structure and functioning of cognitive processes justify the view that consumer choice that is not amenable to a behaviorist explanation can be interpreted intentionally? Two sources of cognitive psychology are employed for this purpose, reflecting the need to link the personal level of exposition first with the sub-personal (via neurophysiology) and second with the super-personal (via operancy).2 These explanations, respectively termed micro-cognitive psychology (MiCP) and macro-cognitive psychology (MaCP), are represented, in turn, by dual and triprocess models of metacognitive functioning (e.g., Stanovich 2009a), and theories of collective intentionality and the construction of social reality (e.g., Searle 1995, 2010a, b). The account of MiCP illustrates not only the capacity of unchecked neurophysiological responses to environmental stimuli to dominate consumer choice but also the abilities instantiated by cortical and subcortical brain regions to perform the executive functions that potentially forestall these impulses and make considered responding a possibility. The account of MaCP discusses the ability of humans, acting collectively, to fashion for themselves the contingencies of reinforcement and punishment that will influence their actions, something that is a far cry from the be...