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Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 16, Pages 1725: The Neurotypical Assumption in Consumer Research: Rethinking Consumer Heterogeneity Through Neurocognitive Diversity
Understanding why individuals perceive, interpret, and respond differently to the same environmental stimuli represents one of the central questions in the behavioral sciences. Across the psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and behavioral decision research, substantial effort has been devoted to explaining the mechanisms underlying human attention, perception, learning, judgment, and decision making. Although these disciplines increasingly acknowledge considerable individual variability in cognitive functioning, theoretical models have often emphasized generalizable cognitive mechanisms, raising questions about the conditions under which behavioral theories generalize across populations. This article introduces the neurotypical assumption as a heuristic concept for identifying an under-specified scope condition in consumer research: the extent to which established theoretical mechanisms and empirical regularities generalize across neurocognitive variation. Rather than presuming that consumer theories are inherently neurotypical, the concept directs attention to whether neurocognitive characteristics constitute theoretically meaningful sources of heterogeneity that may qualify particular consumer-theory mechanisms and predictions under particular conditions. Building on insights from consumer research, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and neurodiversity scholarship, we develop a conceptual framework that examines how neurocognitive variation may interact with marketplace environments and potentially qualify processes of attention, information processing, learning, judgment and decision making, and marketplace interaction. The framework therefore positions neurocognitive variation as a potential source of mechanism-relevant consumer heterogeneity whose theoretical significance requires empirical examination. This article makes three contributions. First, it introduces the neurotypical assumption as a heuristic for identifying potentially under-specified neurocognitive scope conditions in consumer theory. Second, it integrates interdisciplinary evidence to examine whether documented neurocognitive variation provides a theoretically plausible basis for specifying additional sources of consumer heterogeneity. Third, it develops an integrative framework that positions neurocognitive variation within person–environment interactions and identifies testable research directions for examining when and how neurocognitive characteristics may qualify established consumer-theory mechanisms and predictions.
