A CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF HOW HUMAN BEHAVIOR COMES ABOUT

Cognitive psychology has, in the past 30 or 40 years, revolutionized how psychologists conceptualize the ways in which human beings acquire and process information and the relation between such information processing and subsequent behavior.

Marketers' view of how advertising and marketing communications work has not kept up with this revolution in understanding how humans process information, think, and behave.

By the early 1980s, behaviorism was no longer widely viewed in the scientific community as an acceptable explanation of how human behavior comes about. Attention shifted to the brain and the complex assortment of mental processes that constantly and contemporaneously go on in the brain as the real determinants of human behavior. Behaviorism lost favor as there was increasing recognition that it was neither a complete nor accurate description of how human behavior comes about. Behaviorism may well describe at least some learning and behavioral processes in lower animals whose brains have not evolved into complex organisms like the human brain but it does not describe how and why humans behave the way they do.

What has replaced behaviorism as a model of human behavior is a conceptualization of behavior as a result of complex, ongoing mental processes. The emphasis has shifted from the observation of discrete stimuli and discrete responses to a study of the brain processes that determine what stimuli consumers attend to and remember and how the brain then processes these perceptions and memories to develop specific behavioral patterns. The shift has been from simplicity (stimulus/response) to complexity (relating the totality of mental processes to subsequent behavior).

While it is safe to say that a general understanding of how the brain works has emerged, it is also safe to say that more is known about some mental processes than others and that a good deal of what is thought to be known is based on inference rather than upon undisputed fact.

It is generally acknowledged that the brain simultaneously processes a wide variety of incoming information. One way to think about this is to visualize a man driving a car down a superhighway in heavy traffic, conversing with his wife, drinking coffee, listening to the radio, monitoring the possibility of incoming phone calls on his cell phone, and worrying about the pain in his left shoulder rotator cuff.

Another way to suggest the complexity of the human brain's continuous processing of information is to think about the various components of human consciousness. First, of course, are all the language-based communications that impinge upon an individual. But human consciousness also monitors the simultaneous processing of visual information, tactile information, visceral information, motivational information, muscular information, emotional information, and so on.

Specific behavior comes about in the context of all this incoming information, perceived simultaneously not only consciously, but semiconsciously and unconsciously.

All of this information swirls together through tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or thousands of thousands (no one knows for sure) individual neural pathways that continuously produce, at least in healthy brains, an integrated awareness of and an integrated response to the totality of this input, as it unfolds.

There is no question about all the kinds of information that the brain processes, even though it may be impossible to identify precisely which kinds of information are arriving at any given time and which kinds of information produce specific ongoing awareness and response, moment by moment. There is less certainty about the exact organisms and mechanisms within the brain that selectively create the consciousness that we experience and our detailed awareness of and response to it.

Kandel, Kupfermann, and Iversen (2000,p. 1236) describe the complex ongoing activity of the brain:

... studies have made clear that our experience of knowledge as a seamless, orderly and cross-referenced data base is the product of integration of multiple representations in the brain at many distinct anatomical sites, each concerned with only one aspect of the concept that came to mind.

At any given moment, an individual perceives a limited amount of information that has been selected out, by the brain, from all the incoming information from the environment in which he happens to find himself at that particular moment. Exactly what the individual perceives also depends on his remembered past experiences as they are meticulously and instantaneously assessed as relevant or irrelevant in particular stimuli situations.