A Theory of Consumer Situation

Radical-behaviourist interpretation is a matter of locating behaviour; that is, of reconstructing the contingencies that produced it, without the aid of experimental method. This might easily be misunderstood as imposing external order on observed actions of sentient beings; indeed, operant accounts of contingency-shaped behaviour are often criticised for omitting the actor’s ‘subjective’ experience of situations. In fact, behaviourists have tackled this question of individual reaction by accounting for a person’s behaviour within the situation; the account includes consideration of the individual’s verbal behaviour, the rule-governance of his or her earlier activities, and the continuity of behaviour over time. This is achieved by reference to the individual’s environmental history (Skinner 1974: 77), for the meaning of an operant response is to be found in what has preceded it. According to Skinner — note that the concept of meaning expounded later differs from his — the meaning of an act is not found in the current setting: neither in the discriminative stimuli that compose the setting, nor in the responses that take place there, nor in their outcomes. Rather, it is located solely in the history of exposure to similar contingencies that have brought behaviour under the control of the current situation (p. 91).