Introduction to Special Issue: Trust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth World

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeTrust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth WorldIntroduction to Special Issue: Trust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth WorldRobert V. Kozinets, Andrew D. Gershoff, and Tiffany Barnett WhiteRobert V. Kozinets Search for more articles by this author , Andrew D. Gershoff Search for more articles by this author , and Tiffany Barnett White Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Post-Truth EraThe American historian Daniel Boorstin may have had it right when he said that, in current times, truth has been displaced by believability (Boorstin 1962). We are living in a strange time of alternative facts and increasing tolerance for mistruths and misrepresentation—in politics, in the marketplace, in consumers’ everyday lives. These elements are even showing up in our own research backyard where scandals and concerns about replicability seem to regularly break like dirty tides on the shore of scientific integrity.The term post-truth was introduced by Steve Tesich in 1992 in an article for The Nation called “Government of Lies.” Tesich used post-truth to describe his sense that America has become a society where telling the truth is irrelevant in politics. Beginning with Watergate, through Iran-Contra, and continuing in the weapons of mass destruction justification for the Gulf Wars, Tesich contended that the American people actually preferred the world of comfortable falsehoods to the difficulties of confronting truths. The implications of this realization were deeply troubling to him. In scarily prescient words, Tesich wrote that “We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth … [however, now] we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world” where we end up wandering aimlessly between confusion and quiescence (1992, 13).Sociologists and psychologists have been aware of this shifting attitude toward truth for decades. For example, Rodriguez and Ryave (1990) asked several hundred students to keep track of, and report on, instances in which they lied. They concluded that everyone lied, and that “lying was, generally, an easy and spontaneous activity” related to promoting acceptance, hiding rejection, and preferring social solidarity. They speculated that not only is lying “a possible action, but a preferred one” in many interactional circumstances. DePaulo, Kirkendol, Kashy, Wyer, and Epstein (1996) also investigated lying in everyday life using participants’ self-reports. They too found that lying is quite common in social interaction and that most people are comfortable doing so. Feldman, Forrest, and Happ (2002) gave study participants competency and liking-based goals and then filmed them in a 10-minute conversation with someone they had just met. Next, participants watched the recorded interactions and coded their own lies. Participants were surprised to detect an average of three lies in each conversation. Most of the lies were petty matters, and, in a debrief afterward, few of the students seemed concerned. In reaction to this, Ralph Keyes (2004, 13) asserted that we live in a “post-truth era” that “allows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest,” where our ethical systems consider lying to be routine, acceptable, and not necessarily wrong or even dishonest.Almost two decades later, the amplification of this world of lies has become a greater concern. From politicians who cover up their wrongdoing with a barrage of lies, to misinformation-seeding bots and deep fake videos, to the intentional repetition of debunked and flawed science by anti-vaxxers and climate denialists, we are all living with the complex material and social ramifications of a system where truth, trust, and believability are perched on slippery slopes. The post-truth interventions of politicians and corporations have combined with the commonplace telling of lies in everyday life to create a post-trust society, one in which everyday lying has festered into a cultural miasma of mistrust, doubt, and skepticism.From Post-Truth to Post-TrustTrust happens any time we take on vulnerability based on expectations—whenever we place our reliance in the integrity or truthfulness of someone or something (Rousseau et al. 1998). The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer, a global survey that measures trust in the institutions of business, government, media, and NGOs, found that consumers trust none of them (Edelman 2020). When we originally wrote our introduction to this issue, delivered at the 2018 ACR Conference in Dallas, Texas, we asked if consumers could still do business with a company like Samsung, who produced and sold millions of phones that overheated due to a faulty battery management system. The answer, we now know, is yes. In January of 2020, people barely remember the exploding phones of 2016 and the commotion—including airline bans—that followed them. In fact, now that brands like Huawei have been actively discredited and accused by national governments of being untrustworthy, Samsung’s phones are arguably at a relative trust advantage.So, what explains consumers’ persistent willingness to share information with and engage with businesses in this environment of mistrust and uncertainty? Why, for example, do consumers continue to put themselves into vulnerable positions by trusting devices or systems like the Amazon Echo or Tesla’s self-driving function? Why do they continue to trust companies like Facebook or Equifax with their personal and sensitive financial data? Why do they rely on brands like Volkswagen-Porsche-Audi, which has a well-documented history of deceiving its customers through faulty product offerings? How do academics reconcile a growing replication crisis as behavioral research is called into question by falsified data scandals and postpublication statistical analysis?Despite one breach of faith after another, it seems that people still trust and want to trust. Many still want to have faith in pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who vaccinate our children and us. They want to rely on their government to act in good faith, to regulate and report the health of the environment, the safety of our food, water, and air. At the same time, we seem to be in the midst of a pivotal moment in history and culture when a belief in trust has been misplaced by trust in relative believability. Trust in companies, trust in government, trust in research, trust in brands: perhaps all of these forms of trust are slipping into irrelevance, cast into doubt by the general lack of interest in truth of our times. Indeed, the post-truth and post-trust world is a place where we all are presented with “limited, unimaginative, and uninspiring moral worlds” (Forstenzer 2018, 6), where morality and ethics are judged on sliding slides.In a post-truth era, trust is rarely complete or long-lasting. These are times when, often, the very concept of trust may not even matter as much as achieving some temporary or near-term utilitarian benefit or exchange. In this social environment, the tendency of politicians, companies, and consumers to lie to one another has become adopted as a cultural norm. It is institutionalized in social customs, behaviors, and assumptions about others’ intent to persuade, manipulate, or exploit (Friestad and Wright 1994).Consumer researchers have had much to say about this craven new world over the years. This special issue of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research was an experiment. It developed, in journal format, the theme of the 2018 ACR conference that the three of us co-chaired. The articles herein were intended to extend these ideas, to give them space and room for expansion and more thorough development. We will thus begin this special issue by introducing the six important articles about post-truth and post-trust consumption that we feature in this issue, placing them in relation to current concerns and past research. Then, we will offer a fairly brief summary that, in places, will extend and synthesize some of what we consider to be the most important and relevant past research relating to these topics of post-truth and post-trust. We hope that this introduction to the special issue can also serve as a useful guide for how consumer research can help us gain a better understanding of the complex and controversial times in which we live.The Six Articles in This IssueAs we have outlined above, the post-truth and post-trust era affects almost every element of consumers’ lives today, from their interactions with companies and brands to their actions as citizens, including their everyday conversations with one another. The six articles in this special issue deal with several of the most important marketing and consumption-related topics that researchers consider in relation to these areas. First, we feature two articles that consider consumers’ trust in marketing communications. Then we have two articles that examine consumers’ willingness to trust marketers, brands, and products with personal information. We publish a final pair of articles that consider consumers’ responses to fake news and rumors.Investigating Post-Trust Marketing CommunicationsRegarding consumers’ trust or lack of mistrust in the variety of marketing communications, we must consider the various downstream reactions to perceptions of false information from firms and other organizations. For example, recent revelations of deceptive marketing by major American drug companies seem to have played a role in America’s opioid crisis. Many large pharmaceutical companies have paid millions of dollars in fines, and there have been criminal convictions for their misleading marketing practices. This zealous overpromotion of dangerous drugs led many physicians to overprescribe them (Enos 2019). Concurrently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there have been precipitous drops in consumer trust in pharmaceutical companies (DTC Perspectives 2018). A number of researchers suspect that this rapidly growing mistrust in Big Pharma has helped spur the recent decrease in consumer decisions to vaccinate and the so-called anti-vaxxer movement (Lyman 2019). It seems clear that consumers not only are mistrusting and suspicious, but they also feel betrayed by marketers. As a consequence, consumer researchers have found it necessary to investigate “sugrophobia,” the trait motivated by consumers’ desire to avoid the adverse consequences of being “duped, scammed, and suckered” (see Madrigal, Wardley, and Soule 2014; Vohs, Baumeister, and Chin 2007).In this issue, Laura E. Wallace, Duane T. Wegener, and Richard E. Petty consider the relationship between marketers’ vested interests and consumers’ perceptions of trustworthiness. In their article “Consuming Information from Sources Perceived as Biased versus Untrustworthy: Parallel and Distinct Influences,” the authors point out that marketers are often perceived as having ulterior motives for making statements and claims. This perception leads consumers to react defensively or skeptically to marketers’ attempts to persuade them. The article reviews work on how vested interest may be due to dishonesty (lying) or simply bias (opinions or evaluations based on limited information). Adding the notion of vested interest, and helping to sort out whether consumers see it as bias or dishonesty, has important implications for marketers and researchers. For example, in a nod to the flexibility of the post-trust age, it seems that consumers will likely favor sources who are perceived as merely biased, rather than those who are outright dishonest. Consumer judgments of source bias thus become part of the contemporary consumers’ conceptual toolkit, helping them to assess how much truthiness (rather than actual truth) there is in particular marketing messages.Also, in this issue, Gustavo Schneider and Anastasiya Pocheptsova Ghosh consider the effects on consumer trust in the positioning of nutritional labels on packages. In their article “Should We Trust Front-of-Package Labels? How Food and Brand Categorization Influence Healthiness Perception and Preference,” they examine how health claims on the front of a package alter their perceived truthfulness. Their results indicate that, even in a post-trust age, consumer suspicions about the unhealthiness of food may be difficult to dislodge once they are established. Because consumers imply a certain agency and confidence when health information is displayed in the front of the label, this can increase consumer trust if the product or brand is already seen to be healthy. However, these effects do not seem to be the case if there are prior beliefs that the product or the brand is not healthy.Understanding Consumers’ Willingness to Trust Marketers, Brands, and Products/Objects with Personal InformationMassive new industries are now established based on the collection and exchange of consumers’ personal data. Facebook and Google, for instance, sell personal data to advertisers valued at over $100 billion annually (Mahida 2020). Likewise, the Internet of Things results in the collection of massive amounts of personal data through products that consumers willingly bring into their neighborhoods and homes. Zuboff (2019) refers to this collection and commodification of information about consumers as “surveillance capitalism,” a new form of business in which corporations unilaterally claim human experience as a type of free raw material for translation into behavioral data, prediction products, and shaping of human behavior at scale. Although this has the potential to offer benefits to consumers, because of many unexplained policies, terms, and conditions, this also presents a major cause of concern relating to the possibility of infringing upon consumers’ privacy and security (Bishop 2019). Breaches of confidential data such as those at Equifax, and outright deception such as that engaged in by Cambridge Analytica, are becoming commonplace matters. Recent surveys indicate that consumers feel that their personal information is out of their control, and 75% of them believe that companies fail to handle their sensitive personal data in a responsible manner (PWC 2017). Although Europe and California have recently introduced regulations to help protect the privacy of individuals’ data, these laws are arguably convoluted and only sporadically enforced. Yet these concerns are constantly shifting and seem paradoxical at heart. Although Phelps, D’Souza, and Nowak (2001) found that privacy concerns were an important driver of purchase decisions, more recent studies such as Johnson, Shriver, and Du (2020) find that very few American consumers (only 0.23% in their study) actually opt out of online behavioral advertising. In the strange new world of the post-trust era, consumers appear to yearn for privacy but easily acquiesce to its violation.Writing in this issue, James A. Mourey and Ari Ezra Waldman examine and develop our understanding of this privacy paradox. In their article “Past the Privacy Paradox: The Importance of Privacy Changes as a Function of Control and Complexity,” the authors use the results from three experimental studies to offer an intriguing variation on the well-established idea that we can think about the privacy paradox as a risk-benefit trade-off on the part of consumers. Instead, they develop the alternative and novel conception that consumers’ subjective impression of the importance of privacy depends on their perceptions of the ease of managing any shared information, and also who is in control of doing so (self vs. business). When privacy is difficult to manage, consumers find it more important for them to control it, rather than to entrust this function to a business. This is not a simple trade-off but a manifestation of the more nuanced perceptual gradations of consuming in the current post-trust age.Also in this issue, we learn how smart objects can and do inspire the trust of consumers. Authors Jonas Foehr and Claas Christian Germelmann conduct three qualitative research studies to investigate the development of consumer trust in, and interaction with, smart devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. In their article “Alexa, Can I Trust You? Exploring Consumer Paths to Trust in Smart Voice-Interaction Technologies,” they present findings that reveal four different paths to trusting smart technology. Consumers can place their trust in the device itself, in the voice interface, in the software, in the producing company, or in some combination of these reference points. Only one of these paths to trust relates to anthropomorphism and a trust of the perceived personality of the technology’s voice, and some of the paths are situated outside of the technological device itself. This article helps develop our understanding about how consumers develop trust of particularly important and intrusive items—smart devices—and demonstrates the complex and culturally embedded paths that this trust development takes, emphasizing not only anthropomorphizing, but the complex calculus consumers in the post-trust era make regarding the trustworthiness of producers, software, hardware, and even families and friends.Researching Consumers’ Responses to Fake News and Brand RumorsConsumers must make decisions in a contemporary world that is drenched in information, some or even much of which may be unreliable or biased. Aside from consumers’ responses to marketing communications and their willingness to trust marketers, brands, and objects with their personal and private information, another topic important to marketing and consumer researchers is the response to news and brand rumors. Lazer et al. (2018, 1094) define fake news as “fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent.” They find that “fake news overlaps with other information disorders, such as misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (false information that is purposely spread to deceive people).” Fake news about topics such as vaccination, nutrition, and stock values affect the purchase and consumption of health services, foods, and financial goods, for instance. Brand rumors, such as that certain brands of food are tainted or that certain companies support offensive and polarizing political candidates, spread rapidly online and are related to consumers’ search for reliable and believable information (Daniels 2019).Post-trust responses to fake news and rumors are also apparently affected by political ideologies. In this issue, Mina Kwon and Michael J. Barone examine how consumers’ exposure to fake news can influence product evaluations and also how consumers’ political ideologies moderate such effects. Their article, “A World of Mistrust: Fake News, Mistrust Mind-Sets, and Product Evaluations,” presents the findings from three experiments that show how the exposure to fake news leads to more mistrust in individuals who hold liberal rather than conservative beliefs. Because people holding liberal political views tend to be more accurate in identifying fake news than those holding conservative political views, the use of fake news seems to activate a mistrust mind-set that leads to lower product evaluations and that generalizes to product evaluations made in completely unrelated contexts.Finally, Sutapa Aditya and Peter R. Darke examine why consumers knowingly share and spread false information or questionable rumors with others. In their article, “Role of Entertainment, Social Goals, and Accuracy Concerns in Knowingly Spreading Questionable Brand Rumors,” the authors find that entertainment is a common reason that people spread rumors about brands. Although trust and truth seem to have become more malleable concepts than ever before, consumers still possess a strong need for social connection, and being perceived as entertaining is one manner in which consumers achieve this. The authors find that the social benefits that people gain from spreading entertaining stories about brands can overwhelm the need to verify the accuracy of these stories. People even embellished rumors to make them more entertaining. In a post-truth world, this article suggests that consumers’ social goals of entertaining others and being entertained take precedence over honesty and truth-telling—potentially to the detriment of the unlucky brands that end up in rumor-spreaders’ crosshairs, and other consumers who may end up misinformed. With the summaries of these six articles complete, our next and final section turns to a summary of some other important topics and relevant research relating to the topics of post-truth and post-trust.Extending Our Understanding of Post-Truth and Post-Trust ConsumptionThe articles in this issue offer insight into the topics of consumer trust in marketing claims and communications, consumer concern of oversharing personal information, and consumer responses to fake news and rumors. However, a strong body of work in prior consumer research has illuminated a variety of topics that are also valuable for researchers to consider as we seek to build an understanding of post-truth and post-trust consumption. Many of these works exhibit the same types of fluidity, contextuality, and dynamism that we ascribe to the age of post-truth. So, in this section, we will briefly describe examples of prior work in consumers’ trust in brands, betrayals by brands, trust of and betrayal by products, trust in firms’ use of private information, trust in experts and institutions, interpersonal trust and its effects, and distrust, skepticism, and suspicion. Our hope is that together with the topics in this issue, they will help point the way to productive further investigations into issues related to consumers and trust.First, providing an example of a study that examines consumers’ trust in brands, Rajavi, Kushwaha, and Steenkamp (2019) find that such trust has declined around the world in recent decades. However, their study finds that the marketing mix activities that had the strongest impact on consumers’ brand trust were investments in advertising and new product development activity (see also Khamitov, Wang, and Thomson 2019).Trust is also a double-edged sword. Montgomery, Raju, Desai, and Unnava (2018) found that consumers often perceive they have a psychological contract with the brands that they trust and to which they feel committed. When this contract is broken and the brand betrays the consumers’ trust, more committed consumers exhibit more negative responses than less committed consumers. As Ward and Ostrom (2006) demonstrated, one of the ways that contemporary consumers express this disappointment with brands is by warning other consumers online. Consumers’ sense of betrayal extends to products as well as brands. Gershoff and Koehler (2011) found that consumers have a particularly strong aversion to avoid harm from products like airbags and vaccines that are meant to protect us, and that this stems from an emotional reaction when the product betrays. So, factors that could dampen the emotional response, such as changing the betrayal from an action to an omission, may reduce betrayal aversion.Considering the way consumers trust firms to use their personal information appropriately, Kim, Barasz, and John (2019) studied norms of information sharing. They found that consumers have beliefs about the proper way that their information should flow between parties. Driven by consumers’ concern for privacy, when ad transparency resulted in the disclosure of marketing practices that violated these norms, advertising effectiveness was reduced. However, when the platform was trusted, revealing acceptable information flows actually increased the effectiveness of the ad. Similarly, Summers, Smith, and Reczek (2016) found that when firms use information about a consumer’s online behavior data to show a targeted ad, consumers react positively if it appears the firm has made an accurate inference about the consumers’ identity (e.g., caring about environmental issues). These consumers are then more likely to make choices that are consistent with the firm-inferred identity.Several articles in consumer research have also examined the nature of consumer trust in expert systems and institutions such as government, science, and education. For example, Thompson (2005) examined how consumers hold or develop mistrust, or doubt, of medical experts’ assessments of various risks associated with childbirth. Once trust in one authoritative domain was called into question, the authoritative knowledge of related experts (pediatrician, educators, and child psychologists) was also cast into a state of reflexive doubt. In some circumstances, media and popular press may influence the development of consumers’ reflexive doubt. For example, Humphreys and Thompson (2014) studied the press coverage of oil spills to try and understand why consumers still trusted flawed systems like that of fossil fuel production, distribution, and use. They found that when an oil spill occurred, a particular network of narratives diverted cultural attention away from industry-level risks, and this helped to repair consumer trust in the system.Consumer researchers have also productively turned their attention toward understanding interpersonal trust and how it affects and is affected by a variety of societal, dispositional, situational, and market-related factors. Seeking to understand how two components of consumer trust—benevolence and expertise—affect advice acceptance, White (2005) found that consumers trusted experts to help them make decisions that were low in perceived emotional difficulty. However, benevolent advice providers were trusted more when emotionally difficult decisions had to be made. Wilson and Darke (2012) found that positive beliefs about the general benevolence of the world can buffer or even enhance trust judgments in the face of threat.Considering interpersonal trust in the realm of finance and romantic relationships, Garbinsky, Gladstone, Nikolova, and Olson (2019) found that financial infidelity—failing to disclose financial behavior that one’s romantic partner disapproves of—is related to a broad range of consumption-related behaviors. In the realm of self-enhancement, Packard, Gershoff, and Wooten (2016) find that boastful behavior in the presence of cues or reasons to trust the source, specifically, or people, generally, can lead to increased persuasion because the boasting is accepted as a signal of source expertise. In their study in an online community, Mathwick, Wiertz, and De Ruyter (2008) found social capital was related, in part, to social trust. In interpersonal ratings, trust also relates to familiarity and the visual presence of facial cues (Tanner and Maeng 2012). Other studies have found that a stranger who merely eats a food that is similar to what the consumer eats is more likely to be trusted than one who eats dissimilar foods (Woolley and Fishbach 2017).The realm of distrust, skepticism, and suspicion have also been explored in consumer research studies. Forehand and Grier (2003) distinguished between two distinct forms of skepticism: situational and dispositional. Further, they found that consumers were more skeptical of self-serving companies when they claimed to be serving the public. Main, Dahl, and Darke (2007) demonstrate a “sinister attribution error” at work when consumers make negative trust judgments in reaction to flattery by retail salespersons. Connecting the notions of trust and mistrust, Isaac and Grayson (2017) find that credibility and skepticism are like two poles on a continuum running between trust and mistrust and that persuasion knowledge can be used under certain circumstances to bolster trust, just as it can also be used to increase mistrust.In all, these studies provide a rich basis for further inquiries into the world of post-truth and post-trust consumption that surrounds us. Because our world is changing so rapidly, there are many gaps in our knowledge, and opportunities for consumer research scholars to investigate topics such as consumers’ trust in brands, betrayals by brands, trust of and betrayal by products, trust in firm’s use of private information, trust in experts and institutions, interpersonal trust and its effects, and distrust, skepticism, and suspicion. We hope that you enjoy this special issue on “Consuming in a Post-Truth World” and find it informative. We also hope that it will inspire further research on the many phenomena related to this important topic. But don’t trust us. In the spirit of the post-trust era, read the issue and decide if you believe it. Notes Robert V. Kozinets ([email protected]), Hufschmid Chair of Strategic PR, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, Marketing Department, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 80089, USA. Andrew D. Gershoff ([email protected]), Marketing Department Chair, Foley’s Professorship in Retailing, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, USA. Tiffany Barnett White ([email protected]edu), associate professor of business administration and Bruce and Anne Strohm Faculty Fellow, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois, 4015 Business Instructional Facility, 515 Gregory Drive, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.ReferencesBishop, Sherese (2019), “The Internet of Things: Implications for Consumer Privacy and Security,” in 2019 IEEE 1