Consumer behaviorism

Chris Janiszewski and Juliano Laran

Chapter 28 in Handbook of Social Psychology and Consumer Behavior, 2026, pp 404-426 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter presents a behaviorist model of motor behavior. In contrast to cognitive models of motor behavior, which postulate that internal mental processes are responsible for behavior, behaviorist models postulate the environment is responsible for behavior. We assume that behaviors are initiated by opportunities in the environment (i.e., the available stimuli) and that specific behaviors are expressed owing to a Bayesian system that records the success/failure of prior behaviors in similar environments. We derive hypotheses about how the permanence (how long stimuli are in the environment), intensity (the salience of the stimuli), and convergence (the extent to which the stimuli support the expression of joint behaviors) of stimuli in the environment influence the onset, magnitude, frequency, and persistence of behaviors. Thus, our model presents a behaviorist alternative to the cognitive approaches that dominate current explanations of consumer behavior.

Keywords: Behaviorism; Learning; Constructive behavior; Environment; Consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035327591
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