ABSTRACT
The Intentional Behaviorist research program has progressed from the foundation of an empirical base for the explanation of consumer choice to the development of cognitive models of consumer choice that rest on solid conclusions about what it is that makes consumer action action rather than behavior. Recognition that the focus of the research program is henceforth principally on consumer action rather than consumer behavior, appreciation of the role of contingency-representations in the explanation of consumption, and understanding of consumer choice in terms of the temporal considerations that underlie decision processes all indicate the progressive nature of the Intentional Behaviorist research program. The Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM) of purchase and consumption, which provides a motif for the Intentional Behaviorist research strategy, proposes that consumer choice is a function of the patterns of reinforcement and punishment which have followed consumer activity. A functional analysis of consumer choice reveals an eightfold classification of the patterns of reinforcement and consumer behavior setting scope that shape and maintain consumer behavior (the contingency categories) and that the consumer-situations that are the immediate precursors of consumer behavior can be defined in these terms. The model accommodates behaviorist, intentional, and cognitive perspectives to portray consumer choice, first, as the outcome of the rewards and sanctions that are the consequences of behavior and, subsequently, as a mode of human action that must be understood in terms of the desires, beliefs, emotions, and perceptions of the consumer and her intellectual functioning. Hence, the BPM provides a vehicle for the exploration of the relationships between the context in which consumer choice occurs (the contingencies of reinforcement and punishment) and the cognitive processes that underlie this choice (decision 2making) via the construction of an intentional consumer-situation that explains their interaction.
