ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the conceptual and practical opportunities and problems which underlie the development of such a program and the potential of radical behaviorism to contribute to scientific progress in consumer research. It demonstrates that such a program requires more sophisticated research strategies than those employed in animal research and argues that for empirical and practical purposes the abandonment of cognitive concepts may be premature. The chapter concerns the antipodal approach to explanation provided by radical behaviorism in which behavior, including thinking and feeling, is the consequence of environmental selection. Marketing authors who have discussed behaviorism have expressed an overriding desire to derive managerial prescriptions from existing knowledge of operant conditioning phenomena. The chapter describes the nature of radical behaviorism and the operant conditioning phenomena upon which its rests in order to emphasize the utterly distinct mode of explanation they involve and, in particular, the contrast they present to the cognitive theories of consumer behavior embraced by marketing.
