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Deception
in the Marketplace
Deception
in the Marketplace
The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion
and Consumer Self-Protection
%BWJE.#PVTIt.BSJBO'SJFTUBEt1FUFS8SJHIU
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are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Boush, David M.
Deception in the marketplace : the psychology of deceptive persuasion and
consumer self protection / David M. Boush, Marian Friestad, Peter Wright.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8058-6086-3 (hardback : acid-free paper) – ISBN
978-0-8058-6087-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Deceptive advertising--United States. 2. Marketing--United States. 3.
Consumer protection--United States. I. Friestad, Marian. II. Wright, Peter. III.
Title.
HF5827.8.B68 2009
659.101’9--dc22 2008043548
v
Contents
Preface xi
The Authors xv
vii
viii Contents
The Run-Around 55
Omissions 56
ἀ is book grew out of conversations among the authors that began about
four years ago. When we considered the immense literature on market-
place persuasion, there seemed to be a 500-pound gorilla in the room
that no one really wanted to recognize—deception. ἀ e more we talked
about it, the more we agreed that deception is a more fundamental issue
in consumer research and marketing than was reflected in the research
literature. After exploring the diverse writings on deception in the social
sciences, humanities, marketing, and popular culture literatures, and
wrestling with how to integrate and synthesize these perspectives usefully,
we crafted this book.
Our goal here is to motivate more research on marketplace deception.
We view this as the first research-grounded book to fully address the topics
of the psychology of deceptive persuasion in the marketplace and the psy-
chology of consumer self-protection. Deception permeates the American
marketplace, harms consumers’ health, welfare, and financial resources,
and ultimately undermines trust in society. Individual consumers must
try to protect themselves from marketers’ deceptive communications by
acquiring personal marketplace deception protection skills that go beyond
reliance on legal protections. Deception protection skill is a critical life
skill. ἀ erefore, we believe that understanding the psychology of decep-
tive persuasion and consumer self-protection should be a central goal for
future consumer behavior research.
Marketplace deception is not solely or mainly a legal issue, although
that is how current marketing textbooks and writings on marketplace
deception treat it. Further, deceptiveness in persuasion is a more important
topic than is acknowledged in research and writing on the science of social
influence. ἀ ere is a tremendous opportunity and need for educational
interventions that focus directly on teaching people deception protection
skills applicable to the marketplace. Our motivation for analyzing the
social psychology of deception in the marketplace is not just intellectual
xi
xii Preface
David M. Boush
Marian Friestad
Peter Wright
The Authors
Marian Friestad is the vice provost for graduate studies at the University of
Oregon, and professor of Marketing in the Lundquist College of Business. She
was previously dean of the graduate school and a visiting scholar at Stanford
University. Professor Friestad’s research on persuasion and social influ-
ence has been heavily cited and won a best-paper award from the Journal of
Consumer Research. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer
Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of
Public Policy & Marketing, and Communication Research. Professor Friestad
is a past president and fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology.
Peter Wright is the Edwin E. and June Woldt Cone Professor of Marketing at
the Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. He was previously
a professor and head of the marketing department at the Graduate School of
Business, Stanford University, and a visiting scholar at the Harvard University
School of Business. His work has been published in the Journal of Consumer
Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Marketing
Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Management Science, Journal
of Marketing, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Professor Wright is a
past president and fellow of the Association for Consumer Research.
xv
1
Deception in the Marketplace
1
2 Deception in the Marketplace
Legalistic Definitions
(Killen & Smetana, 2006), which reviews research on how children and
others develop moral values and belief systems, there is scarcely a men-
tion of how people learn to think about deception. When we asked one of
the editors about this, she explained to us unhesitatingly that researchers
on moral behavior believe that deception is not inherently immoral. It is
relatively easy to think of situations where the ends appear to justify the
deceptive means, at least according to some systems of ethics beliefs. For
example, deceiving someone who is reluctant to try a new pharmaceutical
drug into using it can seem justifiable and ethical when in fact using that
drug alleviates their pain and cures their illness, while not using the drug
leaves them in pain and debilitated. However, our point of view is that, in
the marketplace, corporations rarely perpetrate deceptions on consumers
“in the consumer’s best interests,” or with benign intent, and that actual
deceptions harm consumers, harm fair competition, harm corporate
assets, and destroy corporate cultures. Moreover, using or appearing to
use intentional or negligent deception is a risky, desperate, and often ill-
conceived management strategy. Relying on deceptive marketing is a fail-
ure of intelligent management, true innovation, and long-range vision.
about how to cope with her friends’ and suitors’ persuasion and deception
ploys will not, by itself, prepare her sufficiently to engage competently with
sophisticated telemarketers, trained salespeople, or multimedia marketing
campaigns. A major challenge for today’s consumer is to become skilled
at making successful cross-context adaptations when protecting against
deceptive persuasion. Deception self-protection among high school friends
or in everyday work environments is not the same as effective self protec-
tion against professional marketers’ ploys. We highlight throughout this
book the unique environment of marketplace deception. Doing so should
help us better understand how research on deceptive persuasion in other
specialized contexts (e.g., autobiographical lying between acquaintances;
eyewitness reports; interrogations of suspected criminals; courtroom tri-
als; auditing of corporate financial reports) applies, or does not apply, to
the modern marketplace, and how future research on deception in the
marketplace must proceed.
In this section we present a basic general framework that we hope will give
readers an organized overview of the phenomenon of marketplace decep-
tion. ἀ is framework is not a general theory or model of marketplace decep-
tion — that would be premature. Rather we describe what a complete theory
of marketplace deception should ultimately be able to explain. Studying
marketplace deception makes for an important, but manageable, domain
of inquiry. It is sufficiently bounded to get researchers to initiate research
projects. It gives us a specific, familiar, important, well defined, and richly
detailed real world context to stimulate our thinking. And it yields insights
of practical value to consumers, educators, managers, and regulators trying
to make sense of and intervene in the marketplace. So, a conceptual frame-
work of marketplace deception should include the following factors.
We must ultimately explain how marketing planners think about
deception, that is, the belief systems, learning experiences, acquired skills,
judgment processes, personal and professional values, organizational cul-
tures, and situational conditions that influence marketing managers and
their helpers in planning and executing attempts to mislead and deceive
consumers, or in planning (or failing to plan) how to take reasonable
preventive actions to protect consumers from being misled. A complete
theory must explain how marketplace institutions and societal values
shape the deception-related actions of marketers. In America societal
18 Deception in the Marketplace
21
22 Deception in the Marketplace
Deception Theory
singled out arousal, guilt and anxiety, and the purported complexity of
lying, relative to truth telling. Ekman (1992) focused more deeply on the
role of emotions in lying. He examined, for example, leaked displays of
emotion due to a liar’s supposed detection apprehension, guilt, excitement
from “duping delight”, and the faking of emotions. Buller and Burgoon
(1996) emphasized, in addition to inner emotions, the stresses and dynam-
ics of ongoing social interactions that entail sequences of give-and-take
actions and adjustments. Buller and Burgoon (1996) emphasized that the
liar’s early discomfort and awkwardness may dissipate as the interaction
moves along, if the liar invests in monitoring the target’s reactions, adapt-
ing the delivery, and thereby gaining more control, and experiencing less
emotionality. ἀ ey introduced a realistic but complicated view of everyday
lying and lie detection, in which the deceiver’s expectations, motivations
and relationship to the target, and the target’s general suspiciousness,
interact.
Depaulo and her colleagues (Depaulo et al., 2003) have emphasized a
self-presentational perspective on everyday lying. ἀ ey focus on the large
subset of instances when everyday lying about inner self and autobio-
graphical details is done for self-presentational purposes. ἀ ey noted that
effective self-presentation requires effortful deception and equally effort-
ful truth telling. ἀ is explains the now-abundant empirical evidence that
cues to deception of the types studied so far are at best faint. ἀ ey derive
five theoretical propositions about better cues that might distinguish lie
telling from not-lie-telling in everyday conversation. ἀ ey predict that
liars will be “less forthcoming” than truth tellers (slow to respond; express
limited details); that their stories will be less compelling (less internally
consistent, engaging, fluent, and active voiced); that liars will be less pleas-
ant and more tense than truth tellers; and that liars will include in their
stories fewer ordinary “imperfections” and less “unusual” content (e.g.,
meanderings in self reports of prior events from memory that stray off
into unexpected associative “asides”).
In our minds, the domain of marketplace deception is in many ways
the polar opposite of the everyday lie-telling context. So, even though
these pioneering ideas about everyday deception are rich and stimulating,
they strike us as fairly irrelevant to understanding marketplace deception.
In marketplace deceptions, there is lying per se, and there is also a huge
array of other clever, deceptive acts and tactics beyond a blatant lie. ἀ e
deception agents are professionally trained and professionally invested in
the success of their deceptions. ἀ ey collaboratively plan a deceptive stra
tegy, consider alternate combinations of tactics to accomplish it, pretest it,
24 Deception in the Marketplace
and revise it before using it on key targets, and then monitor and revise it
once it begins. ἀ ey use professional communication craftspeople to con-
struct every element of it. ἀ ey rehearse and rehearse until the speakers
perfect their deliveries and the story presentation is as they intend it to
be. ἀ ey carefully assess targets’ vulnerabilities, distinguishing the easy
prey from the vigilant, skilled consumers. ἀ ey usually do not display
emotional leakage cues, or reflect ongoing cognitive complexities from
suddenly overloading their cognitive processes during execution. ἀ ey
choose the time and place for every transmission. ἀ ey subjugate personal
self-presentational motives to strategic motives. ἀ ey treat their profes-
sional deception activity as a distinct domain of deception, and try not to
confuse it with other interpersonal domains. ἀ ey are savvy about what
psychologists and others believe will be “give-away” cues; they eliminate
such cues, pointedly do the opposite (display “truth-telling” cues), or
invalidate deception cues strategically by varying how they do a deception
attempt and how they do truth telling.
McCornack (1992,1997) presents the useful idea that deception can be
understood, generally, as doing the opposite of cooperative communica-
tion as described by the Gricean principles. ἀ e starting point here is the
well-accepted principle that in every communication between humans,
a listener must, to determine what a speaker means, go beyond his or
her understanding of the simple literal content of the message. To make
this interpretational process work fluently, there is a social “contract” in
which both parties apply shared pragmatic rules to allow the receiver to
accurately infer what the speaker intends to convey via the literal utter-
ances. ἀ ese Gricean maxims of cooperative communication (Grice,
1975) are:
1. Maxim of quantity: ἀ e speaker will hard try to make his or her message
as informative as required, but not more so, for the current purposes of
the exchange. Say just enough so the receiver can understand what you
intend to convey, but no more than that.
2. Maxim of quality: ἀ e speaker will try hard to maximize the message’s
“quality” in terms of veracity and validity. Do not say anything that you
believe to or suspect to be false or for which you lack adequate evidence
about its validity, one way or the other.
3. Maxim of relevance: ἀ e speaker will try hard to say only what he or she
believes will be directly relevant to the receiver for the purposes of the
conversation or exchange.
4. Maxim of manner: ἀ e speaker will try hard to be brief, clear, and crisp,
while avoiding ambiguity and obscurity of expression.
Theoretical Perspectives on Deceptive Persuasion 25
Persuasion Theory
from lab experiments over the past 30 years may be a science of deceptive
persuasion, that is, of persuasion as it occurs when one party skillfully
creates a fictional psychological reality in another’s mind via misdirec-
tion, lying, concealment, omissions and simulations of false reality. It is
useful to appreciate, if readers already do not, that in many psychology
experiments which are the backbone of the science of persuasion, inten-
tional deceptions are common and rampant. Neither social psychologists
nor marketers wait for favorable circumstances; they engineer them even
if deception is required. Arguably, the level of and totality of deception
in social psychologists’ fabricated situations exceed that in marketplace
analogs, because psychological researchers often just make up the content
of the messages they present to subjects, without substantiating the valid-
ity or veracity of the statements made on a topic; routinely attribute the
message’s authorship to some person or source other than the true author
(themselves); and routinely camouflage from target subjects the fact that
some deception is likely to occur under the disarming easy-to-exploit
mask of “this is research,” a mask not available to marketers for the most
part. We will not belabor this point, but readers should keep it in mind
as they interpret (or reinterpret) the persuasion tactics that Pratkanis and
Cialdini have catalogued as effective.
Resistance to Persuasion
Friestad and Wright (1994) take the view that people are “consumers of
marketplace persuasion.” ἀ e fundamental premise of the persuasion
knowledge model (PKM; Friestad & Wright, 1994, 1995) is that people
try to become skilled consumers of persuasive messages, and that skillful
persuasion consumption is instrumental to successful product consump-
tion. How skillful a person is at evaluating and judiciously using market-
er’s persuasion attempts determines in part the wisdom of their ultimate
buying decisions and product consumption experiences. ἀ e persuasion
knowledge model emphasizes a consumer’s capacity to learn about per-
suasion and to eventually self-regulate in detecting, neutralizing, resist-
ing, and penalizing unfair and deceptive persuasion. In first presenting the
PKM, Friestad and Wright did not single out deceptive persuasion; their
discussion of consumer self-protection dealt with persuasion in general.
Here, we summarize some of the PKM’s propositions with the emphasis
on deception protection beliefs and skills.
According to the PKM’s principles, lay beliefs about deceptive persua-
sion and metabeliefs about our own deception protection knowledge are
an especially important interpretive belief system because these tell people
about situations where an intelligent purposeful outside agent is skillfully
Theoretical Perspectives on Deceptive Persuasion 33
MEHILÄINEN W. 1840.
Huhtikuulta.
Runo tyttäristä.
B—-v-ll.
Jousesta.
Lisää suksista.
Wähänäkönen tyttö.
O. Karjaliini.
Rikka ompeleessa.
O. Karjaliini.
Paakunaisen nujakka.
O. Karjaliini.
MEHILÄINEN W. 1840.
Toukokuutta.
Onneton naimamatka.
(Kuhmosta.)
Kaipaksen elämäkerrasta.
***
***
***
Tarina Abrahamista.
Wakuus.
8. Lainatakki ei lämmitä.
Ihmisen ikä.
MEHILÄINEN W. 1840.
Kesäkuuta.
Mehiläisen Ainehisto.
1. Runoja ja Lauluja.
W. 1836.
W. 1839.
W. 1840.
3. Satuja.
W. 1636.
W. 1837.