Consumer Choice as Decision: Macro-Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

Cognitive interpretation is further explored in Chapter 9, this time from the standpoint of a macro-cognitive psychology (MaCP)which links the Intentional Interpretation to processes of collective intentionality in which consumers create the contingencies of reinforcement to which they will respond. Chapter 8 set forth the necessity to develop a cognitive psychology that could link the personal level of behavior and intentionality with the sub-personal level of neurophysiological functioning. This chapter is concerned to link the personal level with the super-personal domain of environment-behavior relationships. While Chapter 8 argued that the concerns of MiCP should not obscure the need for understanding at that level to reflect operancy, this chapter brings the behaviors and intentionality that constitute consumer choice at the personal level of exposition firmly into contact with the contingencies of reinforcement that influence them.

The following depiction of a macro-cognitive psychological framework has four elements. First, it traces the development of individual intentionality and collective intentionality as proposed by Tomasello (The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, A natural history of human morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Second, it examines Searle’s (The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press, 1995, Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010a, Consciousness and the problem of free will. In R. F. Baumeister, A. R. Mele, & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Free will and consciousness: How might they work? (pp. 121–134). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010b) argument that social reality might be created via collective intentionality. Third, it expands these insights to deduce implications for the analysis of consumer choice, proposing that the decision perspective of the BPM must incorporate concepts of the symbolic consumer situation and the symbolic pattern of reinforcement. This means that the understanding of rule-governed behavior can be revised in light of these symbolic portrayals of the BPM. Finally, it turns to the evaluation of theories of collective intentionality as MaCP. This means outlining the requirements of metacognitive control proposed by Shea et al. (2014)—that is, distributing metacognitive representations for verbal communication, evaluating metacognitive representations to motivate appropriate action, and extricating metacognitive representations from weak metacognitive information—as they apply to MaCP and, in particular, collective intentionality theories.