Operant Conditioning and Consumer Behavior

I’m generally unenthusiastic, and even a bit offended, at the comparison of human behavior to that of animals – it shows a level of contempt for the customer that is not only inappropriate, but also counterproductive in any competitive market.   However, it cannot be denied that there are some correlations.  The human mind is more sophisticated than the primitive brains of Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s pigeons, but all our sophistication is a like a cognitive system that runs on top of a kernel that remains extremely primitive in its abilities and functions.

The basic mechanism of operant conditioning is to provide rewards to encourage behavior and punishments to discourage behavior.   The rat quickly learns that pressing one button will dispense food and pressing another will administer an electric shock – so he presses the first and avoids the second.  It’s further been shown that, aside of the physical results of food and shock, that the brain releases various hormones that accentuate pleasure or pain, and that brain activity in the pleasure/pain centers becomes associated to the memory – such that even the sight of the color red stimulates a pain response.  

And while the human mind is more sophisticated than the animal, we are still largely driven by the desire to obtain pleasure and avoid pain, and often follow our initial emotional responses.   Laboratory experimentation has yet to discover a flawlessly reliable way to associate stimulus to response, but it does show that reward and punishment influence the likelihood of behavioral changes in subjects to a statistically significant degree.

In terms of consumer behavior, brands can readily leverage these mechanisms – in fact, they cannot avoid doing so.  The practical result of purchasing a brand and using a product leads to satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the result.  So without even trying, the brand is conditioning customers to seek or avoid it.

The core of a business activity (providing a product) is an attempt to offer a benefit to the customer that will serve as a reward.  Advertising attempts to leverage them by suggesting there will be pleasure associated with acquiring the brand and displeasure associated with refusing to acquire it.   Customer experience often grafts a level of pleasure/pain onto the experience of interacting with the firm.   Again, it’s far more complex than this, but the basic principle applies across many disciplines and practices.

The impreciseness of stimulus-response in human subjects is attributable to cognition, man’s ability to consider the signal and decide whether it is associated to the stimulus.   Ideally, the subject would accurately identify the cause of a given outcome and make the correct association – but in reality, human beings are far from accurate and often choose to believe that a different signal is the cause and to ignore the signal that actually has a causal connection to the outcome.

This is the way in which mysticism and superstition function: an individual associates the presence of a black cat with some misfortune, and therefore concludes that the cat was the cause of their “bad luck” while ignoring any other factor that might have a more plausible connection.   This can work for or against creating a positive impression of a brand – in that the individual may ascribe positive or negative qualities to it, or associate its positive or negative qualities to some other stimulus.   And apparently, it takes far less cognitive effort to establish a specious association than to dismiss one: hence individuals cling to their superstitions even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are incorrect and that a different cause than they have come to accept is linked to the outcome.