The Situated Consumer

Recognition that attitude research had failed to produce convincing predictions of behavior came relatively early in the history of social psychology. We have seen that Wicker and Fishbein, in particular, though among others, realized that attitudes would be implicated in the prediction and explanation of behavior only if drastic but appropriate measures were taken to incorporate situational variables. This chapter argues first that the relative success of attitude research since the early 1970s has been achieved by precisely the kind of situational reasoning required to take environmental variables into consideration. Second, it argues that these situational variables are precisely those arrived at independently in the development of the Behavioral Perspective Model of consumer choice (BPM), namely the consumer’s learning history and the setting in which consumption occurs. Third, the chapter presents evidence that the formalization of these situational influences on consumer choice has enabled the prediction of consumer behavior to take place in ways that identify the specific setting variables that influence choice in a marketing context.