The advertising industry imported behaviorism to treat consumers as mechanically conditionable

Evidence

“Whenever one of us goes to the theatre or picks a necktie, we are responding to definite laws,” wrote Stanley B. Resor, president of New York’s J. Walter Thompson and perhaps the most influential proponent of behavioral science. “For every type of decision—for every sale in retail stores—basic laws govern the actions of people in great masses.” Resor was serious enough about the discipline to hire John B. Watson, the famous author of the 1913 Behaviorist Manifesto. Watson was more ethologist than psychologist, more concerned with hardwired human traits and conditioned responses than the Freudians, who were more interested in the individual psyche and its personal experience. For Watson, unlike Freud, mental states and moods were irrelevant. “The time seems to have come,” he said, “when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness.” Instead, he pursued a unitary theory of animal response, for the behaviorist “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 198

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how behaviorism diverged from Freudian psychology via Watson’s rejection of consciousness — the conceptual framework that advertising adopted.
• XREF: connects to: Cigarette advertising created both a dangerous-product market and a durable oligopoly — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 274