An Analysis of the Fundamentals of Marketing (part 20)

Behaviorism

by

Charles Lamson

In 1913 Watson began the movement known as classical behaviorism, and in 1938 Skinner proposed a different version known as radical behaviorism. Together with their Russian predecessors, Sechenov, Bekhterev and Pavlov, they introduced a commitment to the study of overt behavior as opposed to internal states, and coined a vocabulary of conditioned reflexes, including processes of reinforcement, extinction and generalization. Although initially Watson was well disposed towards Freud's theories, he later described it and other forms of analysis based on introspection as voodooism. In establishing the behaviorist platform, Watson sought to establish psychology as a natural science, asking:

Why don't we make what we can observe the real field of psychology? Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed and formulate laws about only things. Now what can we observe? Well we can observe behavior - what the organism does or says.

(Watson, 1931)

While Skinner's (1938) concept of operant conditioning (a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior) is different to  the classical account, he nevertheless shares with Watson a focus on the need to explain behavior solely with respect to its environmental consequences. Both explanations thus deny any importance to the consumer's internal state of mind.

Classical Conditioning

As an academic, Watson was primarily interested in the development of emotions, in posing basic questions such as "Where does fear come from?" Watson had observed the differences between very young infants, who positively engaged with external objects, and 3 year-olds, who seemed to be afraid of many things which were often harmless. How did such bizarre fears arise? Watson based his explanation of the development of emotions on Pavlov's theory of conditioned response. . Pavlov had found that if one repeatedly paired the sound of a bell with the taste of food, eventually the sound of the bell alone would elicit salivation from a dog. Watson reports that colored and geometrical forms were equally effective in eliciting the same response.


Unconditioned and Conditioned Stimuli

Food is an unconditioned stimulus; a hungry animal does not need to learn to salivate at the presentation of food but will do so automatically. A bell does not naturally stimulate salivation. However, this response can be learned due the contiguity, or close association between, the presentation of the food (unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and the bell (conditioned stimulus (CS)). Eventually, the secondary stimulus presented by the bell alone is sufficient to elicit the same reaction. 

Watson extended Pavlov's work by moving away from the study of simple conditioned reflexes to the study of complex emotional responses. He reasoned that such complex responses could be derived from three innate or primary emotional responses of fear, rage and love, all of which could be observed in infants. Fear could be stimulated by loss of support or a loud bang, rage was produced by restricting the infant's movements; finally love occurred as the consequence of fondling and stroking the infant's skin, especially in sensitive areas. Additionally, Watson theorized that the infant could learn emotional responses to new, previously neutral objects.

Watson offers the example of Albert B., a 'good' baby, aged 11 months and 4 days on the day of the experiment, to demonstrate how fear arises in infancy. Albert had played happily with a white rat for weeks. On one occasion it was presented to him and a steel bar was struck by a hammer just behind his head just as he reached forward to stroke the rat. Albert jumped and whimpered and Watson reported that due to his disturbed condition no further tests were carried out that day. Subsequently, Albert would whimper and withdraw when the rat was presented to him. Not only did Albert learn to fear the rat, this fear transferred to other objects that had the white furriness of the laboratory rat, to rabbits, a fur coat and even cotton wool.

Stimulus Generalization and Discrimination

The reaction of Albert to rabbits and cotton wool described above reveals that the conditioned stimulus (CS) does not have to be identical to the stimulus associated with the behavior during the learning process. Albert generalized the fear response from the white rat to objects that shared just one characteristic with the rat, a sense of 'furriness'. Formally the propensity to generalize one characteristic of the conditioned stimulus to other stimuli is known as stimulus generalization. Given a positive brand name, each of the products carrying that name should equally be evaluated positively. On the other hand competitors to a primary brand may copy stimuli that are associated with the primary brand, for example, the pack design or coloring, to capitalize on the same associations. This occurred in the UK, when supermarkets launched their own brands in competition with Coca-Cola. The packaging of Saiinsbury's cola was  reputedly almost identical to that used by the 'real thing'.While stimulus generalization may be of benefit in generalizing the reputation of a brand to a whole family of brands, brand managers spend a considerable amount of time in building stimulus discrimination. where they seek to associate their brand with some unique differentiating characteristic.

SOURCE: FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING, 2007, MARILYN A. STONE AND JOHN DRESMOND, PGS. 86-88*

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