My own contribution to this debate is to look at ‘children’ and ‘kids ’. These refer to quite different creations and they emerged from one of my interests which (at that time) could be called children and television as in the 1980s and 1990s this was still the dominant medium. During the 1950s and 1960s children appeared on TV in the UK. They were well-behaved and interested in learning, earnest and dutiful and (within the dominant class system that prevailed in the UK at that time) unassailably middle class. Kids however are different. They are anonymous and on the street where they belong. They are playing, laughing and (probably) noisy. They are unpredictable and what they are doing is dangerous and they regularly take risks. They are active and won’t keep still. I suppose the eponymous ‘kid’ was Jackie Coogan in Chaplin ’s film of the same.
The BBC whose motto is ‘Inform, Educate, Entertain’ has a long history of television for children which did just that and had effectively woven itself into the fabric of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1958 the BBC launched a programme called Blue Peter that became the mainstay of broadcasting to children on the BBC and is still shown on the CBBC channel in the UK. It was full of iconic features such as making things out of junk, a resident pet, the Blue Peter badge (a nod here to Scouts and Guides a dominant group activity for children in post-war Britain), the Blue Peter garden and cooking for children. In short it was earnest, enthusiastic, and on-message with educating, entertaining and informing. It could be toe-curlingly self-referential with coy references to ‘that episode’ where things didn’t go quite right or someone said a rude word and humour was present but in the form of jokes that were ‘suitable for children’. However many of us (myself included) recall it with affection and nostalgia and I have exaggerated deliberately to emphasise the contract with… Tiswas ! This was also a programme for children but no—for kids—produced by one of the ITV companies 19 and ran from 1974 to 1982. Tiswas was wild, anarchic and for kids and that included grownups too. Although much of what was shown is lost as video recording was seen as expensive and the attitude was who would want to watch this stuff in the future, a judicious sampling of some of the available material on YouTube should confirm the following generalisations. Firstly the boundary between child and adult was fluid and whereas the humour was restricted on Blue Peter, it was unlimited on Tiswas with double entendres and adult-to-adult asides. 20 Sometimes the ‘children’ are ignored and the programme seems more like adults ad-libbing—the expression adolescent which bridges the gap between adult and child might be a better description. And the way children are treated and talked to was a million miles removed from Blue Peter but it is a genre that has emerged and evolved over the decades since then. ‘Kids’ are assumed to enjoy farce and slapstick with the ubiquitous custard pie gag taken to extremes. These kids are assumed to have short attention spans, to love noise and spend their time running around. They are not spoken to in ‘Motherese ’ 21 but rather a louder version with lots of non-verbal support such as hand gestures and laughter. The adult role frequently involves usurping authority figures such as school teachers and parents with ‘gunge’ which is brightly coloured thick liquid released from a bucket above the victim’s head. Kids like anarchic scenes rather than set-piece theatre. This is pantomime but not the kind that originated in commedia dell’arte. This is the original world of Dennis the Menace and The Bash Street Kids circa 1955.
Sorin (2005) gives us several more images of children in her analysis of how we view children and childhood as they grow up. There is the noble or saviour child who is mature beyond his or her years and helps her poor and aged mother in the home . Or characters like Tiny Tim in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (op. cit., p. 14) and Sorin even mentions the ubiquitous Harry Potter as another similar example in this regard. Another image that is particularly relevant for this book is the commodified child who appears in marketing literature personifying the virtues of the brand or commodified in a darker sense with the sexualised child in beauty pageants.
The list of images or constructions that have been used to typify children and childhood is as long as the time taken to pick over the evidence drawn from history and culture. What is hinted at by Sorin (op. cit.) with her interest in educational practice is the context within which these images appear. Children occupy roles in different settings and situations in their lives and when we examine the representations that are used to make sense of the child in these contexts then we can see the power of such representations. And one of course is the child in the commercial world.
So far we have seen that there are multiple ways to portray children and represent childhood and these can be found in historical accounts, contemporary media, and literature both for and about children through the ages to name but three sources. Whether these images are described as aspects of culture or attributed a psychological status as mental constructs that mediate the ways we perceive, think, feel or act on the world is probably best answered by saying ‘both’. However they come into their own as a resource when we are talking about children in different contexts. So in the next part I will examine the child in the commercial world and how that relationship is discussed in the literature.
In 1990, I analysed the relationship between advertising and children as one where, in the public imagination advertisers are seen as seducers and children as innocents (Young, 1990, Chapter 1). At the heart of the argument was a core assumption which I will now call ‘rightful place ’ which is a tacit recognition that certain people, or roles or institutions have a canonical position in the correct order of things. For example for many years until the latter part of the twentieth century, women did not go into pubs or clubs in England alone and if they did they were seen as running a justifiable risk. Men were much less restricted and their rightful place would often be in positions of power and control. Children were often viewed as similar to women in this respect but although women these days have to some extent been liberated from the tyranny of being rightfully placed or are en route to achieving it, children have not been freed—yet. But we have seen that childhood is a slippery concept and we can cast our children in several different moulds. Where is the child’s rightful place ? Perhaps in the home or the school or playground but it’s doubtful if the world of commerce would be chosen as a natural place for children. The antipathy between children and commerce can be traced back to the structural economic changes that occur when a society become industrialised. Kessen (1979) has argued that the changes from a rural to an industrial economy in the United States in the nineteenth century resulted in far-reaching changes in the way people viewed the family and childhood. For example women in the 1830s and 1840s became separated from men in the world of work as men did real work in another place and women (and children) did ‘home work’. The world of commerce and industry was centred round the town. This was where men worked. This was where wheeling and dealing, haggling, arguing, buying and selling and negotiation in smoke-filled saloons occurred. The world of commerce and industry was rough, tough, sinful and self-interested. In contrast, the world of home was romanticised and transformed into an idealised world of domestic bliss and motherly values . Childhood was sentimentalised. Children were to be protected from the decadence of downtown and to be a child was to be innocent and pure. This vision of home as a sanctuary was, of course, not solely a result of large-scale changes in patterns of work in the United States. Home in a frontier setting was a refuge, a place that needed to be protected from marauders, real or imagined. Home was where childhood and motherhood existed and thrived. Given the changes that are occurring now worldwide as societies industrialise one would predict that a similar physical separation of the male breadwinner from home and the romanticisation of the nucleus of mother and child(ren) and home will become more common.
Notes
1.A term used by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Their thinking is contained in several books and my favourite is Lakoff (1987) with the compelling title Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.
2.Of course these customs might be different in other countries Some Australians eat witchetty grubs and dog is eaten in Korea. The English antipathy toward horsemeat is not shared by their French neighbours across the Channel.
3.Conative is a term that is rarely used these days and can be read as a mixture of motivation and behaviour. What used to be called ‘the will’.
4.‘Thinking about our thinking’ can be called metacognition and is a skill that emerges in childhood.
5.There is a parallel here with cognitive dissonance (see section on “Exploration” in the cycle of consumption in Chapter 1) and the striving for consistency as characteristic of human psychology.
6.I have given the mind three dimensions here and I hope you are comfortable with the metaphor.
7.A quick look on the net at DragonQueen’s Lair (n.d.) provides us with pages of slang for physicians.
8.Based on a paper: L.A. Zadeh (1965). Fuzzy sets. Information and Control, 8, 338–358.
9.It’s similar to a probability function where members of the class have different grades of membership. These can be interpreted as a function based on the idea of likelihood. Instances of a concept nearer the centre of the set are more likely to be a member of that set and as we go outwards to the fuzzy edge this probability decreases. However Zadeh is quite cagey about applying old math to this new idea so take the previous sentence as a gloss on what Zadeh says.
10.Well—you can google it! It’s not too this or too that and it’s just right.
11.I hope you will allow me a certain dramatic licence here and not ask the obvious question—well what else do you expect him to do to satisfy you?
12.Henry Head edited the journal Brain.
13.If someone asks you to recall an event from long ago for example you do not necessarily fish it out of your memory store—you use old partially remembered features of the event and fill in the gaps. Needless to say this reconstructive approach is very challenging to the validity of such established procedures such as eye-witness testimony.
14.This characteristic of human cognition to simplify and deal in categories is implicitly recognised in the phrase ‘the devil’s in the detail’ which exhorts one not to forget the irritating individual members of a group that don’t exactly fit in and that time needs to be spent in getting things exactly right.
15.A good working definition of stereotype would be ‘a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.’ which is taken from the OED online (2010) entry.
16.Socially constructed is a term used to suggest that particular concepts are products of a culture at a time in history and therefore have a different epistemological status from say concepts in nature like the Moon or rocks.
17.This book was the inspiration of a film in 1993 with the same title and I took my daughter to see it as her first visit to the cinema or ‘the pictures’ as we used to call it as children. When I asked her about watching the film she said it was ‘like a big TV’. Which says a lot about media and kids these days I guess.
18.The most recent changes at the time of writing for UK age of criminal responsibility mean that Scotland and Northern Ireland are now 12 years and England and Wales is considering changing the age to 12 years.
19.At the time British television was dominated by two institutions, the BBC and ITV. The former was the national broadcaster funded by the state through licences that each household had to purchase to watch television (and until 1971 a radio licence to listen to ‘the wireless’ was required). The latter was a looser conglomerate of regional companies after its inception in 1955.
20.In fairness this type of pitching occurs in other genres such as pantomime where the family audience is treated to ‘blue’ humour that (hopefully) children don’t really understand but adults will as well as the traditional ‘he’s behind you!’ kid’s fare. This operates at different levels to appeal to the different sensibilities of the different sectors that make up the audience.
21.Motherese or child directed language is a style of communication that is used by mums to their children, usually infants (Wong, 2004).
References
Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life (R. Baldick, Trans.). London: Jonathan Cape (Original work published 1960).
Belk, R. W., Wallendorf, M., & Sherry, J. F., Jr. (1989). The sacred and the profane in consumer behavior: Theodicy on the odyssey. Journal of Consumer Research, 16, 1–38.Crossref
Bjorklund, D. F. (2007). Why youth is not wasted on the young: Immaturity in human development. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bjorklund, D. F., & Green, B. L. (1992). The adaptive nature of cognitive immaturity. American Psychologist, 47(1), 46–54.Crossref
Bradshaw, A., & Canniford, R. (2010). Excremental theory development. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 9, 102–112.Crossref
Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. R., Greenfield, P. M., et al. (1966). Studies in cognitive growth. Oxford: Wiley.
Cunningham, H. (2005). Children and childhood in Western society since 1500 (2nd ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Djalal, F. M., Ameel, E., & Storms, G. (2016). The typicality ranking task: A new method to derive typicality judgments from children. PLoS One, 11(6), e0157936. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157936.CrossrefPubMedPubMedCentral
DragonQueen’s Lair (n.d.). Doctors’ slang, medical slang and medical acronyms and veterinary acronyms & vet slang. Retrieved February 7, 2018, from http://messybeast.com/dragonqueen/medical-acronyms.htm.
Hogg, M., & Vaughan, G. (2005). Social psychology (4th ed.). London: Prentice-Hall.
Insko, C. A., & Schopler, J. (1967). Triadic consistency: A statement of affective-cognitive-conative consistency. Psychological Review, 74(5), 361–376.Crossref
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (p. 463). New York: Henry Holt & Company.
Kehily, M. J. (2004). Understanding childhood: An introduction to some key themes and issues. In M. J. Kehily (Ed.), An introduction to childhood studies (pp. 1–21). Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Kessen, W. (1979). The American child and other cultural inventions. American Psychologist, 34(10), 815–820.Crossref
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Crossref
Peters, R. S. (1962). Brett’s history of psychology (Rev. ed.). London: Allen & Unwin.
Pike, S. D., & Ryan, C. A. (2004). Destination positioning analysis through a comparison of cognitive, affective and conative perceptions. Journal of Travel Research, 42(4), 333–342.Crossref
Sorin, R. (2005). Changing images of childhood: Reconceptualising early childhood practice. International Journal of Transitions in Childhood, 1, 12–21.
Wong, K. (2004). Baby talk beginnings. Scientific American, 291(1), 30–32.Crossref
Young, B. M. (1990). Television advertising and children. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Yuksel, A., Yuksel, F., & Bilim. (2010). Destination attachment: Effects on customer satisfaction and cognitive, affective and conative loyalty. Tourism Management, 31(2), 274–284.Crossref
© The Author(s) 2018
Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_3
3. How Consumers’ Minds Work: An Introduction to the Basics
Brian M. Young1
(1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Brian M. Young
Email: [email protected]
Contexts, Environments and Ecology
Let’s start with the assumption that children are often seen by adults as having rightful places in society in the sense that we feel comfortable with them occupying and participating in certain environments . The home and school are two that immediately come to mind. We are less comfortable with them browsing on the Net and ‘certain places’ downtown are usually off-limits to kids below a certain age. We feel uncomfortable and ambiguous about childre
n working and being online as the boundaries between legitimate work and exploitation are ambiguous and problematic and the World Wide Web can be a dangerous place for children and at the same time an essential adjunct to their role as a school student in the twenty-first century. I have introduced this idea of children and the environment in which they operate in order to argue a case that we do not just need a psychology of development across the lifespan that deals with the mental growth and learning of individual children and adults but also a theory of the environment(s) in which they live and participate. I shall use the term ‘ecology ’ to describe these contexts and appeal to the ecological systems theory of Bronfenbrenner (1979, 2005) for support. The terms environment and ecology are originally part of the terminology used in the study of living organisms and their adaptation, and to that extent are borrowed terms in psychology and consumer research. Our environment has both physical and social aspects but our ecology is our environment with human beings, ourselves, fully integrated into the picture. So the weather is part of our physical environment but an ecological approach would be concerned with how a certain temperature range or wind-chill factor affects our thoughts, feelings and action or how prolonged lack of sunlight influences our mood and mental health. Similarly the architect is concerned with the built environment and also is (hopefully) aware that the ecology of her designs might influence the behaviour of a waiter needing to know automatically which are the ‘out’ and ‘in’ doors from kitchen to restaurant or how our thoughts differ in high ceilinged or low ceilinged rooms (see Chapter 4 on “Priming”). An associated term is ecological niche which originally referred to the range of environmental parameters that, taken together would optimise survival or enable the species to thrive over generations. Again this term has been borrowed and fits in nicely with the idea of the child adapting and thriving in certain homes and not in others. Both ecology and ecological niche can be applied to development throughout the lifespan and for example whether an older person will thrive emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally in a particular type of sheltered accommodation can be analysed using these terms.
Consumer Psychology Page 7
