Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Chapter 1 Explaining Consumer Choice -- Chapter 2 Consumer Choice as Behavior -- Chapter 3 Beyond Behaviorism -- Chapter 4 The Ascription of Intentionality -- Chapter 5 Intentional Psychologies -- Chapter 6 Consumer Choice as Action -- Chapter 7 Consumer Choice as Decision: Micro-Cognitive Psychology -- Chapter 8 Consumer Choice as Decision: Macro-Cognitive Psychology -- Chapter 9 Consumer Choice as Decision: Meso-Cognitive Psychology -- Chapter 10 Consumer Choice as Agency -- Bibliography -- Index.

A central aim of consumer behaviour analysis has been to delineate the place of cognitive explanation in consumer research and marketing. The strategy has involved first the exhaustion of noncognitive, behaviourist explanation in order to elucidate the necessary role of cognitive explanation. Behaviour analysis has proved relevant to a wide range of consumer behaviours, but its limitations include an inability to account for behavioural continuity and to deal with the personal level of explanation and an inability to delimit the behavioural interpretation of choices that are not amenable to an experimental or quasi-experimental analysis. For these purposes, an intentional explanation is necessary and this article is one of a series devoted to the development of a strategy for the responsible ascription of intentionality to the explanation of consumer choice. This article is specifically concerned with the relevance of Searle's concept of collective intentionality in the refinement and definition of symbolic reinforcement. The consequences of incorporating collective intentionality into the explanation of consumer behaviour for the philosophy of science underlying consumer behaviour analysis are discussed.

Temporal discounting, which is apparent in all modes of consumer behaviour from the routine to the addictive, is an evolutionary endowment that has been biologically and culturally modified through time. Its evolutionary advantage is most obvious in the pre-agricultural phases of the Pleistocene era, when immediate consumption was essential to both survival and biological fitness and delay would inhibit both. The capacity to overcome impulsivity, on which both agrarian and animal husbandry depended, required the development of executive functions that enable long-term memory, self-rule formation and the self-control of emotional response to engender behavioural inhibition. In human evolutionary terms, the key outcome of this development has been the capacity of behaviour to be reinforced by symbolic as well as functional consequences and the consequent ability to enter into collective intentionality. The paper argues that only a model of consumer choice that incorporates the various influences on impulsive and inhibited choice and their manifestations can explain both everyday and extreme consumer behaviour. This process requires the integration of evolutionary psychology with the insights provided by neuroeconomics and reinforcement learning. A model of consumer choice based on reinforcement learning, the Behavioural Perspective Model (BPM), enables such integration by synthesizing the range of consumer behaviours observed in the modern world and the differing patterns of influence exerted by their common neurobiological and environmental causes.

AbstractNeuroeconomics has found no definitive role in the explanation of consumer choice and its undeveloped philosophical basis limits its attempt to explain economic behaviour. The nature of neuroeconomics is explored, especially with respect to what it reveals about the valuation of alternatives, choice and emotion. The tendency of human consumers to discount future rewards illustrates how behavioural and neuroscientific accounts of choice contribute to psychological explanations of choice and the issues this raises for both routine everyday choices and more extreme compulsions. Central to this is the phenomenon of matching in which consumers tend to select the immediately larger or largest reward and the neurophysiological and behavioural bases of this choice. Recognition that rewards are evoked by reinforcement contingencies and that the rewards themselves engender emotional responses via classical conditioning enhances understanding the contribution of neurological activity to the explanation of consumer behaviour. It is argued that neuroeconomics can play a vital explanatory role by providing an evolutionarily consistent warrant for the ascription of intentionality. The Behavioural Perspective Model is used as a template for investigations of consumer choice that lead to iterative theoretical development, forming the basis of a neurophilosophy in which neuroeconomics can find a decisive role.Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This essay reviews the course of consumer behaviour analysis, a research programme that employs the findings and principles of behavioural research toelucidate consumer behaviour and marketing management. Although attempts have been made from time to time to integrate a behaviour analytic perspective intomarketing research, the tendency has been to concentrate on the potential contribution of operant psychology to managerial practice rather than to examine the potential of behaviourism to provide a theoretical basis for marketing and consumer research. Moreover, concentration on research with animal subjects has severelylimited the relevance of behaviour analysis to marketing. The essay therefore pursues three themes: (1) to explicate recent developments in behaviour analysis, such as the analysis of verbal behaviour; (2) to take account of work by behaviour analysts on economic choice and to apply its lessons to understanding consumer behaviour and marketing action in naturally occurring environments; (3) to establish the requirements of an interpretive approach to consumer behaviour and marketing which is not limited to an experimental analysis of choice.

Adaptors and innovators exhibit distinct approaches to problem solving and derision making: a finding which has far‐reaching implications for managerial psychologists who intervene in business and other organisations.