Deception In The Marketplace: The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion

Book Preface

This book grew out of conversations among the authors that began about four years ago. When we considered the immense literature on marketplace 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 psychology 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 deceptive persuasion and consumer self-protection should be a central goal for future consumer behavior research.