Intentional Behaviorism

Philosophical Foundations of Economic Psychology

Gordon Foxall

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780128145845
• eBook ISBN: 9780128145852
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Intentional behaviorism is a philosophy of psychology that seeks to ascertain the place and nature of cognitive explanation of behavior by empirically determining the scope of an extensional account of behavior based on the limitations of a behavioral approach to explanation. This book draws on an empirical program of research in economic psychology to establish a route to a reliable and justifiable intentional explanation of behavior. Since the cognitive revolution in psychology, intentional explanations of behavior have become the norm, and as the methodology that provides the normal science component of psychology, cognitivism is sometimes accepted relatively uncritically. However, there is a lack of understanding of the role of psychological research in determining the place and shape of intentionality. This book explicates the philosophy of psychology that the author has devised and applied in his work on economic psychology and behavioral economics. Given the provenance of intentional behaviorism, economic and consumer psychology forms the primary application basis for the book. This book provides a theoretical background to understanding how and why consumers make the choices they do. The book integrates behavioral economics, consumer psychology, and decision-making research to explore intentional behaviorism, which is proposed as a philosophical framework for consumer psychology, viewing economic behavior in the contexts of modern human consumers in affluent marketing-oriented societies. - Integrates research in behavioral economics, decision-making, cognitive psychology, and consumer psychology. - Offers readers an interdisciplinary look at intentionality and intentional explanations. - Proposes a theory of intentional behaviorism to explain economic behavior, consumer choice, and other decision-making. - Examines the methodologies of philosophers of mind such as Dennett and Searle.

Part I

Introduction

Outline

• Chapter 1 Orientation

Chapter 1

Orientation

Abstract

Economic activity is usually understood to involve the allocation of limited resources among competing ends. In fact, most behavior can be viewed in this way, prompting the idea that there is no behavior that is specifically economic in character as opposed to social, political, romantic, or any other kind of behavior but that the economic perspective can be applied to activity in general in order to understand it and explain it. In the context of consumption, which is our theme, the behavior with which we are concerned is certainly social as well as economic, and this invites the possibility of comparing these perspectives and of exploring their interrelationships. It is inevitable, therefore, that our quest to understand will be interdisciplinary, drawing upon social psychology as well as economics, for instance. Economic behavior is that aspect of behavior which recognizes its instrumentality, its persistence only in the face of reward for which agents exchange work or other valued resources such as money or goods.

Keywords

Economic behavior; levels of exposition; economic activity; Intentional Behaviorism; intentional interpretation; contextual stance

Chapter Outline

Outline

• 1.1 Economic behavior 3
• 1.2 Levels of exposition 5
• 1.3 Outline 7

1.1 Economic behavior

Economic behavior is that aspect of behavior which recognizes its instrumentality, its persistence only in the face of reward for which agents exchange work or other valued resources such as money or goods. Economic activity is usually understood to involve the allocation of limited resources among competing ends.¹ In fact, most behavior can be viewed in this way, prompting the idea that there is no behavior that is specifically economic in character as opposed to social, political, romantic, or any other kind of behavior but that the economic perspective can be applied to activity in general in order to understand it and explain it. In the context of consumption, which is our theme, the behavior with which we are concerned is certainly social as well as economic, and this invites the possibility of comparing these perspectives and of exploring their interrelationships. It is inevitable, therefore, that our quest to understand will be interdisciplinary, drawing upon social psychology as well as economics, for instance.

The idea of distributing scarce resources among mutually exclusive objectives is also found in behavioral psychology, especially in the school of behavioral economics to which it has given rise, which I have elsewhere called “operant behavioral economics” (Foxall, 2016d; see also Hursh, 1980, 1984; Hursh & Roma, 2016). Operant psychology is concerned with the allocation of a limited number of responses among competing opportunities for reward; once again, it focuses on a particular aspect of behavior, the amenability of its rate of performance to particular consequences that are known as reinforcers when the rate increases and punishers when it decreases. Operant behavioral economics connects this school of psychology to microeconomics in order to generate a powerful means of predicting and explaining animal and human behavior in a wide range of circumstances. Behavior corresponds to working or spending, the rewards (and punishers) it produces to the goods (and bads) of economic theory, and the rate at which working or spending earns these outcomes to the wages and prices that influence economic behavior in the workplace and the store. Economic psychology is, therefore, necessarily an interdisciplinary affair: to economics and psychology, we must add philosophy, consumer and marketing research, and neuroscience in order to forge a methodology of economic action.

We are here concerned with a particular aspect of consumer behavior that understands it as choice, where choice reflects the allocation of resources among rewards and potential rewards that appear at different times (Foxall, 2017b). In particular, choice is defined in terms of the fact that some rewards, even though they are smaller than others (for which we must wait longer), are so attractive that we select them instead of engaging in the more economically rational behavior marked by patience and, ultimately, higher levels of consumption. Just the imminent appearance of an inferior reward can vastly enhance its desirability, even though we know full well that something better lies in the future. We do not always dismiss the future in this way, of course; sometimes we manage to wait patiently and reap the greater return. It is in the potential conflict that characterizes temporally defined situations of this kind that we understand consumer behavior as consumer choice and managerial behavior as managerial choice (Foxall, 2016a, Chapter 2). The guiding principle is that the formulation of theory is a matter of how we speak about our subject matter and that the analysis of how the actors whose activity provides our subject matter use language is the key component of our analysis.

Economic activity can be conceived in two ways: as behavior, in which case it is explained as the effect of environmental stimuli, especially those that follow it; and as action, in which case it is interpreted as consistent with, though not necessarily caused by, desires and beliefs. All three terms in the depiction of activity as action—desires, beliefs, and action—are intentional expressions, whereas behavior and the stimulus field that predict it are extensional constructs. Recognizing this as a guiding principle of one’s investigation of economic behavior is to assume a methodological perspective. Methodological explorations are concerned with how we can speak of phenomena as well as what we have to say about them. In investigating the role of intentional explanation in the treatment of economic phenomena, we must confront the mind–body problem, the fact that while we assume a materialist ontology, we can come to terms with it only by employing the language of mentality, desires, beliefs, emotions, and perceptions. This formulation is not antibehaviorist, since it acknowledges that we have only behavior as our subject matter (Dennett, 2005). It simply recognizes that the extensional vocabulary and reasoning of radical behaviorism is insufficient to capture the causation and interpretation of behavior in its entirety. The relationships between the extensional languages of neuroscience and behavioral science and the intentional language of interpretation are the means by which we can attempt to deal with this problem of reconciling personal subjective experience and a world of extrapersonal causes. However, we lack the bridging concepts that belong to both modes of expression and would enable us to conjoin the disparate explanations they provide into a single theoretical framework (McGinn, 2004). Simply switching from one language to another, even if the same words are employed in each case, may amount to no more than intellectual legerdemain. Our task requires a more principled methodology.

This book is concerned with the conceptual development of Intentional Behaviorism as an approach to explanation in economic psychology. As a methodology of social science, Intentional Behaviorism relies on an extensional account of economic behavior to indicate, by its exhaustion as a means of explanation, the point at which an intentional account becomes necessary and the form it should take. It also entails the evaluation of this intentional interpretation by reference to its compatibility with more general psychological theories of cognitive structure and functioning. Since the research process and results have been described in detail elsewhere (Foxall, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017a, 2017b), I do not rehearse them here, though sufficient description is provided to elucidate the argument. The present purpose is, rather, to examine the viability of this mode of explanation, which brings together behaviorist and cognitive reasoning. The book is concerned with the capacities, first, of radical behaviorism to act as a foundation for the theoretical minimalism that is the initial stage of the research process, and, second, of intentional interpretation to provide an account of economic behavior when the extensional mode of explanation provided by theoretical minimalism has been empirically expended. But there is a deeper ambition.

1.2 Levels of exposition

Given the increasing prevalence of neuroscience and neurophilosophy, behavior is nowadays widely explained at the subpersonal level of exposition that entails neuronal activity, as well as the personal level which is that of individual action and the desires and beliefs that underlie it (Dennett, 1969). We can also identify a superpersonal level of exposition in which behavior is explained according to its sensitivity to its rewarding and punishing consequences (Foxall, 2004, 2016b). Each of these levels has a mode of explanation associated with it: extensional in the case of the sub- and superpersonal levels and intentional in the case of the personal. Hence, the intentional behaviorist paradigm assumes three levels of exposition: the superpersonal that comprises the theories and research of behavioral scientists, which shows empirically how patterns of behavior are functionally related to patterns of environmental contingencies; the subpersonal that relates neuroscience to patterns of behavior; and the personal that deals with behavior or action and the patterns of intentionality associated with their explanation. I have long argued (most recently in Foxall, 2016b, 2017b) that while these levels of exposition and the corresponding modes of explanation are inextricably bound up with one another, the maintenance of their integrity, that is, their conceptual separation is of paramount significance to explaining behavior and action. This remains a cardinal principle, though the questions of how the levels of exposition are related and how they interact in an explanation of action remain. They are of prime concern in the exposition which follows.

A possible model for work of this sort is what Hacker (2007) calls philosophical anthropology, “the investigation of the concepts and the forms of explanation characteristic of the study of man” (p. 4). Hacker describes philosophical anthropology as a grammatical inquiry into the “sense- or meaning-determining rules for the use of words,” and traces this usage, which is not confined to the syntactical, to Wittgenstein. As such, philosophical anthropology includes but is not limited to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. He also makes clear that the job of philosophy is “not to generate novel concepts and conceptual connections for use in the empirical sciences, or for use in everyday discourse” (p. 12). While sympathetic to this orientation, I must point out where I nevertheless depart from Hacker’s exemplar: I am specifically concerned with the philosophy of economic psychology and, specifically, with the meanings of concepts as they enter the psychological explanation of economic behavior, and I am primarily concerned with the conceptual basis of Intentional Behaviorism. This requires, of necessity, a willingness to advance novel concepts for the explanation of economic and social behavior.

Hence, an important distinction must be made. The current emphasis is not on the philosophical analysis of mind per se but on the philosophy of a particular approach to explanation in economic psychology. Because I am concerned especially with the conceptual basis of a methodology for economic psychology, the idea of the syntactic structure of the argumentational procedure, the mode of explanation adopted, necessarily looms large. This precludes exclusive concentration on the conceptual implications of specific terms, an undividedly grammatical account. This is in part because, by focusing on a specific theory of human behavior and its empirical confirmation or disconfirmation, one must grapple with concepts that are not simply grammatically feasible from an armchair point of view but have to be implemented in some way in a process of behavioral explanation and appraised accordingly. As an exercise in the philosophy of psychology, rather than either of these disciplines alone, this requires the inclusion of novel concepts and methodological recipes for empirical research alongside their critical evaluation. The aim of the investigation of the nature of the explanation proposed is not simply to evaluate it in isolation but to extend and hopefully improve on it. Hence, the work is not simply retrospective in its critical evaluation of work already completed. It seeks the conceptual and explanatory gaps which remain in the intentional behaviorist enterprise and proposes what is necessary to bridge them. What this necessitates is not a conceptual investigation of the whole of economics and psychology; rather, it is confined to the ways in which they combine to explain the economic behaviors that Intentional Behaviorism embraces. Two confessions follow from the last sentence. First, I have alluded to the sphere of economic psychology with which I am primarily concerned: the consumer behavior analysis on which most of the investigation, theoretical and empirical, with which Intentional Behaviorism is concerned. I do not attempt to cover the whole of economic psychology. Second, although the analysis presented here in terms of consumer choice appears equally to fit managerial behavior and the actions of the firm (Foxall, 2014a, 2014b, 2020), I cannot, for reasons of space, treat them in any depth in the present volume. Both are covered in depth elsewhere (Foxall, 2017a, in preparation). Finally, I must note that, as an exercise in the philosophy of psychology, my approach is critical of Hacker’s position that “The deepest students of the role of the emotions in human life are the novelists, dramatists, and poets of our culture” (Hacker, 2018, p. xiii). This stance may suffice for the pure pursuit of philosophical anthropology, but to adopt it in the context in which I am working would be to overlook the role of the empirical and theoretical social sciences in favor of romantic speculation.

1.3 Outline

What Intentional Behaviorism seeks is a particular style of rapprochement between antithetical routes to behavioral explanation, namely, radical behaviorism and cognitivism: not a merger, but working together to provide as comprehensive an explanation as is possible, since each is necessary to the accurate articulation of the other’s claim to explain. This requires understanding of the antipodal viewpoints these schools of psychology present, the barriers to conciliation, and the advantages of cooperation. These are the themes of Chapter 2, A kind of consilience, that offers a general introduction to the argument and interdisciplinary spirit of inquiry. The chapter sets out the conflict between behaviorist and cognitive perspectives on explanation, calling for mu...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Foundations
• Part III: Imperatives of Intentionality
• Part IV: Intentional Behaviorism
• Part V: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index