ABSTRACT
The future of marketing as a serious intellectual approach to understanding consumer and marketer behavior requires a solid, evidence-based, and critical underpinning based on neuroscience. Neurophilosophy, which is concerned with the metatheoretical basis of the explanation of behavior, is employed in this chapter to promote critical awareness of the role of neuroscience in marketing and consumer research. In particular, it is argued that economic psychology and its application area, marketing, must come to terms with the rigorous use of cognitive language and explanation. This is approached by the explication of a theory of normal and addictive consumer behavior (the competing neuro-behavioral decision systems hypothesis) in which the neural foundations of behavior, together with the theories and findings of behavioral science, are presented as means of circumscribing the cognitive interpretation of choice. The chapter concludes by noting the promise of an integrated framework for consumer and economic psychology in which behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and picoeconomics provide the explanatory bases of consumer behavior.
