When Is Honesty The Best Policy? The Effect of Stated Company Intent on Consumer Skepticism

Sonya A. Grier and Mark R. Forehand
Additional contact information
Sonya A. Grier: Stanford U
Mark R. Forehand: U of Washington

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: Prior research suggests that consumers evaluate firms more negatively if they attribute the firm's business practices to firm-serving motivations rather than to motivations that serve the public good. The authors propose an alternative hypothesis: firm-serving attributions lower evaluation of the firm only when they are inconsistent with the firm's expressed motive. As such, the negative effect of consumer skepticism regarding a firm's motives can be inhibited by public acknowledgment of the strategic benefits to the firm. The power of this inhibition procedure was demonstrated in an experiment that manipulated the salience of firm-serving benefits and the firm's publicly stated motive. Consumer evaluation of the sponsoring firm was lowest in conditions when firm-serving benefits were salient and the firm outwardly stated purely public-serving motives. This experiment also revealed that the potential negative effects of skepticism were the most pronounced when individuals engaged in causal attribution prior to company evaluation. Finally, this study measured the different effects on attribution and evaluation of two distinct forms of skepticism: situational skepticism--a momentary state of distrust of an actor's motivations--and dispositional skepticism--an individual's ongoing tendency to be suspicious of other people's motives.

Date: 2002-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/rp1665.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to gsbapps.stanford.edu:443 (certificate verify failed) (http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/rp1665.pdf [302 Found]--> https://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/rp1665.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:stabus:1665r

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().