Situating the Situation: A Reply to Barker and Wicker. RUSSELL BELK. The comments by Barker and Wicker on "Situational. Variables and Consumer Behavior" ...
COMMUNICATION NOTES Situating the Situation: A Reply to Barker and Wicker
RUSSELL BELK
The comments by Barker and Wicker on "Situational Variables and Consumer Behavior" present alternative perspectives on three important issues:
examined should reflect the consumer's more immediate sphere of sensation at the moment of choice. 2 Situation has been defined as specific to a time and place of observation, based on the assumption that the observer's and the participant's spheres of sensation are generally comparable. Wicker would have us go even further and apparently specify the fixed number of seconds and cubic meters occupied by a situation. Such a definition would be positive and precise, but undesirably narrow. Doob's (1971) comprehensive review of temporal patterns found that even the brief time interval needed to apprehend the immediate surroundings, depends upon the number of events taking place. Similarly, a person's sensory horizons are likely to expand and contract with the amount and variation of surrounding stimuli. Since only those stimuli within a person's present sensory horizons (internal and external) can act as conditional effects on that person's current behavior, fixing absolute time and volume limits is inappropriate. For instance, the choice situation in selecting a television program to watch at home is more limited in relevant time and space than the choice situation in selecting an automobile at the expansive and busy one-hundred and fifty acre Reedman automobile sales facilities (see Trillin, 1969). The limits on the time and area of a situation are instead imposed by the scope of the external stimuli (physical, social, and temporal) and by the nature of the task and antecedent conditions.
1. What is the proper unit of study for conditions? 2. What characteristics do situations process? 3. In what directions should situational research proceed? While alternative perspectives on such issues are highly desirable at this developmental stage of situational research, those views offered in the commentaries appear either misdirected or misleading when considered in the context of consumer choice behavior. UNIT OF STUDY Barker argues that situations· are too specific to a time and place, implying that the broader behavioral setting is a better unit with which to study the conditions affecting consumer behavior; while Wicker on the other hand, argues that the definition provided for situations is too general and needs to be more specific and precise. Such disagreement in the basic task of defining a situation illustrates an essential difference between the studies of conditional and unconditional factors affecting behavior. Whereas individual characteristics and isolated stimulus properties lie within relatively unassailable boundaries (they reside in the individual or the stimulus), the conditional variables which facilitate, constrain, stimulate, and guide behavior are delimited only by our selection of an artificial "conditions unit." However, the fact that this unit is necessarily artificial does not imply that the selection is arbitrary. Logically the best conditions unit is the one which corresponds most clearly to the response unit under study. Where the response unit of interest is, as Barker assumes, ". . . molar actions which extend over time and occur within spacially extended regions . . . ," then the behavioral setting or some broader environmental unit is quite possibly the best conditions unit. This might be the case where we wish to examine the general contextual appropriateness of certain extended Modal behaviors including shopping routes, decision sequences, and information acquisition patterns. To examine the far more fundamental consumer response unit of "choice,"l however, the time and area of the conditions
SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS Barker suggests that we add to the groups of situational characteristics just named, the coercive purpose of certain behavioral settings. His argument is again tied to his orientation toward the behavioral setting and its resulting focus on social normative behaviors. To be sure there are symbolic and implicit social pressures which coerce the audience at an auction to avoid incidental gestures and which encourage bidding contests, for instance. When we turn from such aggregate behavioral effects to individual considerations (such as why the auction's winning bidder for a clock would have never considered buying the clock if he had seen it that week for the same amount in a department store), the need to ascertain the structural purposes of the behavioral setting becomes less relevant than the need to
1 Hansen (1972) provides a more comprehensive rationale for the primacy of choice as a consumer behavior response unit.
2 Further elaboration of the sphere of sensation concept, as measured in objective terms, may be found in Belk (1975).
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ascertain the intentional purposes (i.e., task) and states characterizing the situation for the participant. Furthermore, even though entering a familiar behavioral setting may imply an agreement to abide by the social norms present, encountering a consumer choice situation does not necessarily imply acquiescence to the purposes of the seller or other who is seeking to structure and control that situation. In fact, this potential conflict in the situation coupled with the potential for the consequences of one situation to become the antecedent conditions of the next, offer the dynamism which Barker contends is needed to explain fully conditional effects on consumer behavior. Ultimately this latter contention is probably correct, but it still should not enter the conception of situational characteristics. Wicker's plea for more theory in developing situational characteristics is basically well taken, even though his interpretation of Figure One as a theoretical model of situational influence is quite incorrect. The model, as well as the paper as a whole, is expository only. Theoretical perspectives are needed here as they are needed elsewhere, but they are simply beyond the scope of the original paper or this reply. It is essential that we agree whether the game to be played is chess or checkers before we begin to speculate about how the game is played or won. Wicker's seemingly related suggestion to avoid using empirical criteria in defining situational characteristics is less well taken. The requirement that situational characteristics have a demonstrable and systematic effect on behavior is merely a stopping criteria in order to avoid considering situations to be entirely idiosyncratic and therefore of truly infinite variety. To attempt to record situational characteristics independently of their capacity to evoke a response would doom us to such a myriad of detail that no generalization could emerge. To stipulate instead that situational characteristics must show a systematic effect on behavior is neither "blindly circular" nor does it impose the requirement that a given situational characteristic must effect all individuals in the same way; systematic does not mean uniform. As illustrated in earlier papers using three mode factor analysis (e.g., Belk, 1974) the intent is to look for systematic regularities in behavior which reflect types of responses made by types of consumers in types of situations. RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The question of the course of consumer situational research is raised only in Wicker's comments, but his suggestions are basically to follow the path of Barker's
investigations of the behavioral setting. If Wicker's only point here were that "multiple, diverse, yet complimentary methods need to be applied to the study of consumer situations," I would readily concur. However, Wicker overemphasizes the concern of Barker and others that social psychological research move out of laboratory settings with active experimenter intervention and into more naturalistic settings with passive observation. The fact that this reaction warrants some consideration given the past course of psychological research, should not shift our focus from general approaches within situational research to situational approaches within general research. Before leaving the former focus, Wicker's paper suggested that the sequence of consumer situational research should be to move from definition, to theoretically derived descriptive dimensions, to taxonomy. This is wholly in line with a totally naturalistic orientation, but taxonomy seems a rather hollow ultimate objective. I am more inclined to agree with Milgram (1965) who argued that, Ultimately, social psychology would like to have a compelling theory oj situations which will, first, present a language in terms of which situations can be defined; proceed to a typology of situations; and then point to the manner, in which define able properties of situations are transformed into psychological forces in the individual.
This same ordering of objectives is desirable in consumer psychology. While recognizing the dangers of a semantic squabble, reaching the first objective seems prerequisite to the others and is primarily, I believe, what this exchange concerns.
REFERENCES Belk, R. W. "An Exploratory Assessment of Situational Effects in Buyer Behavior," Journal oj Marketing Research, 11 (May 1974), 156-163. - - - - . "The Objective Situation as a Determinant of Consumer Behavior," Mary Jane Schlinger (ed.) Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 2. Chicago: Association for Consumer Research, 1975, 427-437. Doob, L. W. Patterning oj Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971. Hansen, F. Consumer Choice Behavior: A Cognitive Theory. New York, The Free Press, 1972. Milgram, S. "Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobediance to Authority," Human Relations, 18 (1965), 57-76. TrilIin, C. "U.S. Journal: Lower Bucks County, Pa.: Buying and Selling Along Route 1," New Yorker (November 15, 1969), 169-175.
