ABSTRACT
The Intentional Behaviorist research strategy has three stages: theoretical minimalism, intentional interpretation, and cognitive interpretation. These involve, first, the construct and testing of a model of consumer choice based on a behaviorist depiction that explains (predicts) consumer behavior in terms of the environmental stimuli responsible for the rate at which it occurs: the aim of this stage is to learn what this methodology can uniquely reveal as the mainsprings of consumer choice and also to identify the point (if any) at which this means of explanation breaks down and must be replaced by an intentional account. The stage of intentional interpretation demonstrates whether consumer activity that is not amenable to an extensional, behaviorist explication can be satisfactorily accounted for in intentional terms. If this proves to be the case, the final stage, cognitive interpretation, critically examines the feasibility of the intentional interpretation as a means of understanding consumer choice. In the course of moving from the first stage of theoretical minimalism to the subsequent stages of psychological explanation, our subject matter ceases to be consumer behavior, a form of activity that is regulated by environmental stimuli, to consumer action which is conceived as resulting from the consumer’s mental processes, including the perceptual and conceptual representation of the contingencies of reinforcement and punishment identified in the initial stage. A theme of the analysis undertaken in the present work is that all or virtually all modes of consumer choice involve a degree of akrasia or weakness of will marked by a tendency to reverse preferences over time in accordance with differing rates of discounting future rewards. This is an essential component of the definition of consumer choice.
