Why Do You Think They Do That? Consumer Elaboration in the Detection of Manipulative Intent and Its Consequences on Product Judgments

Consumer awareness of deception is important in order to effectively cope with marketers’ strategic attempts to unfairly influence them. Yet, in spite of the widespread prevalence of marketplace deception, consumers are typically insensitive to situations where they are being manipulated. The current research attempts to answer the call for research in best practices for consumer education in detecting manipulative intent (Boush, Friestad, & Wright, 2009). Across three studies, each featuring a different deception tactic, we show that consumer elaboration of marketer motives enhances inferred manipulative intent (IMI), leading to less favorable product judgments. We argue that by elaborating on marketer motives using a specialized form of System 2 thinking, consumers will become more sensitive to marketplace deception. IMI is a measure of consumer recognition that an attempt to persuade is inappropriate, unfair, or manipulative (Campbell, 1995). The assumption here is that the marketer intends to deliberately mislead. Other researchers have conducted studies exploring consumer education regarding marketplace deception (Bolton, Bloom, & Co hen, 2011; Sagarin, Cialdini, Rice, & Serna, 2002). Unfortunately, in operationalizing a tactic, these studies have explicitly identified the behavior as unethical. In contrast, we refrain from telling respondents whether or not the use of a tactic is unethical. In our studies, respondents are merely educated about the tactic, but not about the ethics of its use.