Cognitive Effects of Deceptive Advertising

Abstract

Although much has been written about deception in advertising, no studies have been reported in which a deception and its impact on consumers were demonstrated empirically. The authors present a behavioral definition of deception and illustrate its operationalization in the context of a longitudinal experiment in which the effects of an explicit, deceptive product claim on a variety of cognitive variables were measured both before and after product trial. Issues related to the measurement of deception seriousness are emphasized. The basic approach appears generalizable to nonexperimental studies of real-world deception.