The structural part of Bronfenbrenner’s system is usually represented in a diagram of concentric circles that represent different domains nested within each. The child is at the centre. If the boundaries between the domains are porous, information can flow from one domain into another. There is a symbolic significance of the child as being seen as at the centre of sets of influence rather than being influenced by a linear arrangement of ‘boxes and arrows’. The image of the child in a box being potentially buffeted by vectors represented as arrows signifying sources of influence of different powers and force will not just signify but also connote symbolically a particular image of the child as defenceless and in need of protection. Which may be the case but it is unfair to assume that. One could argue that the child at the centre suggests an alternative image of the all-powerful child but I am more comfortable with the child surrounded by pools of potential resources that are more or less available, depending on the child.
Scripts
Before we put Bronfenbrenner ’s model to work I want to introduce another idea called ‘script ’. A script is another borrowed concept , this time from the theatre. The term is best known in a work by Erving Goffman , a sociologist who wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1956 where he described his dramaturgical theory of human behaviour based on behaviour as theatrical performance. Perhaps Shakespeare got there first: “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players/ They have their exits and their entrances/ And one man in his time plays many parts/ His acts being seven ages…” (As You Like It. 2.7.138–42). 1 Impression management , a term coined by Goffman is still a thriving area of psychology and analyses based on Goffman’s original theory are still being made (see for example, Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013). Perhaps the best known work on scripts (best known by psychologists of a certain age) is by Abelson (1981). Summarising Abelson, a script is a type of schema which is used to predict episodes in real life and prescribe adaptive routines. These scripts can be hierarchically organised so there may a general set of moves that are appropriate to a universal consumption situation i.e. one that is common to most if not all cultures such as eating a meal together. These are then ‘tuned’ into the particular cultural setting which may be different for Chinese and North American families with further subcategories dealing with issues like ‘conversation routines’, ‘eating instruments e.g. hand, chopsticks, knife and fork’ and so on. So scripts are powerful and flexible and in my opinion an essential part of any model. They include the full range of human behaviour including language, non-verbal communication, informal rules for emotional display in different situations, and social distance. 2
Returning now to the model that Bronfenbrenner used, the first circle surrounding the child is called the microsystem which is a defined setting where the child experiences and act out various roles. This is not one-way traffic. All children influence those around them whether the child has reached the stage of having an autonomous sense of agency or not. The family is a good example of such a setting and school will be another appropriate one for many children. But this system also involves linkages between the different ecological settings of the microsystem. This is called the mesosystem and I’ll give an example shortly. Finally we have two outer layers called the exosystem and macrosystem which deal with large scale cultural changes where the child herself does not play an active role but can be influenced by and influence them. I guess one such would be when the cultural values shift gradually from children ‘being seen and not heard’ to children being allowed to express themselves freely and how this indirectly affects microsystemic activity.
But let’s go to an example. This is personal and vivid and took place at school when I was about five or six years old. We sat in rows in the classroom as was the custom then and the teacher was called ‘Miss’. So when a question was asked of the class and I knew the answer I would put up my hand and call ‘Miss, Miss, Missss…’ I had the appropriate script for the school domain in my microsystem and was using it correctly. One day I forgot and called the teacher ‘Mummy’. The shame of it! The gales of laughter and condescending smile from ‘Miss’ are still with me. Why? Because the two domains of home and school had two scripts and leakage between the two was very restricted. The intimacy of the word ‘Mummy’ made it worse; if the slip was using the more robust ‘Mum’ then the embarrassment might have been less. The shifts in macro system movement over the decades in the UK away from school as alien territory, with parents anxiously waiting outside the school gates for their children to be ‘released’ when the bell went to a more parent-friendly domain means that Mums frequently make their presence felt within school precincts these days. Consequently the domains of home and school have become less separate.
Although there is no limit to the identification of microsystems a quick search for Bronfenbrenner diagrams suggests that the list is restricted to; ‘family’, ‘school’, ‘health provision services’, ‘church’, ‘neighbourhood’ which identifies it as a product of many lifestyles that share North American cultural institutions, values and beliefs in the latter part of the twentieth century. A more recent development to the Bronfenbrenner model is to add a third dimension that covers both historical time (Time) and changes in life-span development over time (Chronosystem ) so it is of particular relevance in the context of the aims of this book. These two streams constitute our recognition of what is happening as culture shifts and changes during the historical time period the person has the good or bad fortune to occupy as well as the life-span changes that occur to him or her from birth to death . Notice that the changes that happen within 3 her or him are a separate issue as we are dealing with the environment of the child in Bronfenbrenner’s analysis. As a baby boomer I recognise now that my early and middle adult life was enhanced by living in particular places at particular times and that my children’s lives as they grew into adulthood were different and harder in many respects. A Chinese older man and his children might think very differently given the recent history of that country where growth and prosperity and the emergence of a middle class is very much a twenty-first century phenomenon.
So far we have discussed several concepts that we need to know about before looking at lifespan human development as an approach to consumer psychology. There are some other aspects of psychology that you will need to know about and as much as possible I will try to include and integrate these into relevant chapters of this book. However in the next few sections I’ll introduce you to some of the most important basic areas of psychology and outline some of the relevant findings.
Motivation
Much human behaviour is intentional where there is a goal and one strives to attain it. The structure of the cycle of consumption (see Chapter 1) presumes that and more; that there are psychological sources that drive behaviour in order to achieve a series of goals . Goals can be specific and as I write this I have a goal which is to communicate what I think is valuable and relevant information to an audience. What impels or drives behaviour? There is a cluster of terms in English such as wants, needs and desire that are used in motivation research with various conventions as to how each operate. Needs for example are seen as either physiological or psychological. The body needs food, water, sleep and air to survive and these physiological needs according to Maslow (McLeod, 2017) take precedence over the psychological ones in the sense they have to be satisfied before the others. So for example in the classic model of McClelland (Management Study HQ, n.d.) there are three universal needs across the planet. Need for achievement implies that we all have this basic need to compete and achieve success. Need for affiliation suggests that we all want to be part of a group and relate to other people. Finally there is a need for power and control—a desire to control and take charge over others whether that is for the common good or for your own good. Now these three are shaped and modulated by the cultural and historical pressures at all levels ranging from the individual child growing up in the family through
the subcultural values of different groups up to the values of the cultural milieu of the nation or other polity so many differences can be found across individuals.
Needs are often conceptualised as limited and part of our psychological baggage we carry as humans either because as a species we share similar physiology or as a culture called humankind we adhere to basic cultural values. ‘Desire ’ is a term that is used by consumer psychologists to refer to attraction toward to an object that might transcend a simple decision based on costs and benefits of acquiring a good that you ‘want’. Belk for example explores ‘the fires of desire’ in a famous paper (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard , 2003) and the rise of an interest in hedonic consumption 4 among consumer researchers since Hirschman and Holbrook’s (1982) and Holbrook and Hirschman’s (1982) seminal papers suggest that these and other positive emotions 5 will still be explored in more detail in the future.
To bridge the gap between good intentions and the reality of behaviour that achieves and articulates them has been an issue that psychologists have tussled with for many years. Marketers want to see advertising and promotion translated into sales, and health professionals want to see their exhortations on sensible eating, drinking, sex and so on result in improvements in health and ‘wellness’ for the population. In order to achieve satisfaction of a need however there are two issues that need to be addressed. One would be the intermediate steps that need to be gone through to get there and the other is identifying the goals one would want to achieve. At this stage I am only introducing concepts so a complete analysis is unnecessary. I have identified two sets of skills that are important in any analysis of ‘getting there’.
The first set is known as self-regulation and is part of a general suite of strategies that we possess for metacognition or ‘thinking about thinking’ including self-reflection. What is also important is that these strategies emerge in childhood and are well-researched in both an educational and psychological context. Given the commitment in this book to a life-span development approach then we can track them from the very young child through to adulthood and maybe into older ages as well. The other ones are the goals themselves and according to Baumgartner and Pieters (2008), there was a lack of systematic research on goal -directed consumer behavior (op. cit., p. 367). Although the details of that review are beyond the scope of this book it is interesting to note that the role of affect 6 is seen as intrinsic and valuable in goal setting for adults and functions in different ways within the stages described by Baumgartner and Pieters (op. cit.).
Perception
Information from the senses, both within and outside the body, is being processed as you read this. You are aware of the letters but you are also aware of the slight changes in temperature in your space and the noise whether it is characteristic swish of car tyres in the rain outside the window or the irritating whispered chatter on the next table. Maybe your stomach rumbles and for some reason the smell of food is more acute. This is constant, continuous and we cannot talk about perception without appealing to two other great constructs—attention and memory . Some sort of filter system that we can control and that also works autonomously together with a complicated storage system is needed to cope with the major problem facing humans as they grow up—how to cope with all the information that comes to us through these senses as well as all the information that the mind generates. There’s just too much of it 7 (Levitin , 2014). This need to control the potentially overwhelming flow of stimulation flooding through our senses drives one of the basic principles behind theories of how we make sense of our world and cope with the information we receive about it and both perception and cognition are relevant. Where sensation, perception and cognition finish and start in the flow of information from the outside world is difficult to ascertain if we assume each of these three follow one another in a sequence. Not only is it difficult and maybe irrelevant to establish boundaries between these three processes but many sense organs don’t just channel and transduce physical information into neural information suitable for processing by our system of nerves, but do some other processing as well. Also if we are going to take seriously the idea of the human mind as a sophisticated computer 8 we need to consider alternatives to a sequential flow diagram in our models and start thinking about distributed and parallel processing. However if we start with the senses then traditionally we have vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. For our species vision is highly developed whereas for dogs, for example smell dominates. Given the dominance of the visual mode in much marketing and consumer literature, I shall focus on this sense modality not forgetting of course that each of these modalities can influence each other. Food that has been given an unnatural coloured (green) for example tastes different from say the food coloured red and the whole dining ambience and culinary experience can be one where many different environmental and food factors influence each other (see Spence , 2017).
Visual perception has a long and distinguished history in psychological research and theorising which can be traced back through philosophy to Plato via Bishop Berkeley (Peters , 1962) and several theories are available to make sense of it. The one I have chosen for several reasons 9 was proposed by J.J. Gibson . It’s ecological in the sense that the eyes of Homo sapiens have evolved to cope with the preferred ecological niche that this species occupies. We have specialist receptors, many millions of them scattered at the back of two eyes which enable us process information from our environment as we walk, lope or run through it but these days we are more accustomed to navigate by car or watch the world go by as constantly changing patterns in planes, trains, boats, buses and bikes. Ambulation is for exercise. What’s the input? Those of you who have studied ‘the eye’ at school or college will perhaps have seen diagrams showing rays of light going through a convex lens that can change shape to focus light on the retina. The reality according to Gibson is that our visual apparatus is exposed to a constantly changing array of information and, as this array is enhanced and changed as we move around our environment then why not explore ‘ecological optics’ (Gordon, 2004) when constructing our theories, rather than examining the pattern of stimulation that lands on the retina of the eye? There are regularities in the array of light as it reaches the eye and a texture pattern can be seen as three dimensional.
Of course we know that the rules of perspective can give us a third dimension in painting and drawing but Gibson’s theory has a more radical side to it. What appears to be an immensely complex task for the human i.e. to visually perceive an array when moving oneself so that the information from the changing light in the environment in the millions of receptors at the back of each eye is changing too, is made simpler by assuming we are able to detect what Gibson calls invariants . One of the examples of invariance he gave, although it deals with hearing is a powerful one. We can recognise a tune if it’s played in a different key or with a different instrument. Gibson believed that invariances are there and we are capable of learning them both as part of our evolutionary history and also as we acquire new skills. So there should be a developmental dimension implicit in Gibson’s theory here as infants have a limited repertoire of action and need to learn as they grow up.
There is one more concept that Gibson introduced and this is key to understanding how Gibson’s theory can be applied to consumer psychology. It’s the notion of affordance and it will be invaluable as an aid to your understanding of much consumer psychology, especially consumption involving sophisticated sensory input or complex buying environments like malls . An object in your environment can afford 10 certain actions on it or behaviours toward it. So for humans some objects are throwable and eatable like apples and some surfaces are flat and afford supporting other objects like vases for example. Doors afford pushing if they don’t have a handle and pulling if they do. Affordances are relevant in the design of objects and we’ll return to them when we look at the child growing up in a world of manufactured and marketed toys. Gibson’s theory is particularly relevant here.
Consumer Psychology Page 8