T R U S T I N D O U B T: C O N S U M I N G I N A P O S T- T R U T H W O R L D

Introduction to Special Issue: Trust in Doubt:

Consuming in a Post-Truth World
R O B E R T V. K OZ I N E T S , A N D R E W D. G E R S H O F F , A N D T I F F A N Y B A R N E T T W H I T E

THE POST-TRU T H E RA but a preferred one” in many interactional circumstances.

The 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 mis-
truths and misrepresentation—in politics, in the market-
place, 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 Amer-
ica 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 justifica-
tion for the Gulf Wars, Tesich contended that the American
people actually preferred the world of comfortable false-
hoods to the difficulties of confronting truths. The implica-
tions 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 wander-
ing 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 pro-
moting acceptance, hiding rejection, and preferring social soli-
darity. They speculated that not only is lying “a possible action,
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 “al-
lows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishon-
est,” 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 cor-
porations 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.
F RO M PO ST-T RU T H T O P OST- T RUST
Trust happens any time we take on vulnerability based on ex-
pectations—whenever we place our reliance in the integrity
or truthfulness of someone or something (Rousseau et al.

Robert V. Kozinets (kozinets@us.edu), Hufschmid Chair of Strategic PR, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, Marketing Department, Mar-
shall School of Business, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 80089, USA. Andrew D. Gershoff (andrew.gershoff@mccombs
.utexas.edu), Marketing Department Chair, Foley’s Professorship in Retailing, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, USA. Tiffany Barnett
White (tbwhite@illinois.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.

JACR, volume 5, number 2. Published online March 31, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1086/708543

© 2020 the Association for Consumer Research. All rights reserved. 2378-1815/2020/0502-0001$10.00

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 pro-
duced 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—includ-
ing airline bans—that followed them. In fact, now that
brands like Huawei have been actively discredited and ac-
cused 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 exam-
ple, do consumers continue to put themselves into vulnera-
ble positions by trusting devices or systems like the Amazon
Echo or Tesla’s self-driving function? Why do they con-
tinue 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 grow-
ing replication crisis as behavioral research is called into
question by falsified data scandals and postpublication sta-
tistical 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 vac-
cinate our children and us. They want to rely on their gov-
ernment 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 piv-
otal 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, un-
imaginative, 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
Volume 5 Number 2 2020 131
near-term utilitarian benefit or exchange. In this social envi-
ronment, the tendency of politicians, companies, and con-
sumers 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 ex-
periment. 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 de-
velopment. We will thus begin this special issue by introduc-
ing 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 im-
portant 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 con-
sumer research can help us gain a better understanding of
the complex and controversial times in which we live.
T H E S I X A R T IC L E S IN T H I S I S SUE
As 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 ac-
tions 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 arti-
cles 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 Communications
Regarding 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 rev-
elations of deceptive marketing by major American drug com-
panies seem to have played a role in America’s opioid crisis.
132 Trust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth World
Many large pharmaceutical companies have paid millions of
dollars in fines, and there have been criminal convictions
for their misleading marketing practices. This zealous over-
promotion of dangerous drugs led many physicians to over-
prescribe them (Enos 2019). Concurrently, and perhaps
unsurprisingly, there have been precipitous drops in con-
sumer trust in pharmaceutical companies (DTC Perspec-
tives 2018). A number of researchers suspect that this rap-
idly 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 suspi-
cious, but they also feel betrayed by marketers. As a conse-
quence, consumer researchers have found it necessary to in-
vestigate “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 market-
ers’ vested interests and consumers’ perceptions of trust-
worthiness. In their article “Consuming Information from
Sources Perceived as Biased versus Untrustworthy: Parallel
and Distinct Influences,” the authors point out that mar-
keters are often perceived as having ulterior motives for
making statements and claims. This perception leads con-
sumers to react defensively or skeptically to marketers’ at-
tempts 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 per-
ceived 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 sus-
Kozinets, Gershoff, and White
picions 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 Information
Massive new industries are now established based on the col-
lection and exchange of consumers’ personal data. Facebook
and Google, for instance, sell personal data to advertisers
valued at over $100 billion annually (Mahida 2020). Like-
wise, 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 commod-
ification 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 ma-
terial for translation into behavioral data, prediction prod-
ucts, 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 Equi-
fax, and outright deception such as that engaged in by Cam-
bridge Analytica, are becoming commonplace matters. Re-
cent 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 Cal-
ifornia have recently introduced regulations to help protect
the privacy of individuals’ data, these laws are arguably con-
voluted and only sporadically enforced. Yet these concerns
are constantly shifting and seem paradoxical at heart. Al-
though Phelps, D’Souza, and Nowak (2001) found that pri-
vacy concerns were an important driver of purchase deci-
sions, 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 ex-
perimental 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 manag-
ing any shared information, and also who is in control of
doing so (self vs. business). When privacy is difficult to man-
age, 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 nu-
anced 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 re-
search 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. Consum-
ers can place their trust in the device itself, in the voice in-
terface, 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 techno-
logical device itself. This article helps develop our under-
standing about how consumers develop trust of particularly
important and intrusive items—smart devices—and dem-
onstrates the complex and culturally embedded paths that
this trust development takes, emphasizing not only anthro-
pomorphizing, but the complex calculus consumers in the
post-trust era make regarding the trustworthiness of pro-
ducers, software, hardware, and even families and friends.
Researching Consumers’ Responses to Fake News
and Brand Rumors
Consumers 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 willing-
Volume 5 Number 2 2020 133
ness to trust marketers, brands, and objects with their per-
sonal 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 infor-
mation) and disinformation (false information that is pur-
posely 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 fi-
nancial goods, for instance. Brand rumors, such as that cer-
tain 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 reli-
able 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’ expo-
sure 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 lib-
eral 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 general-
izes 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 au-
thors find that entertainment is a common reason that peo-
ple spread rumors about brands. Although trust and truth
seem to have become more malleable concepts than ever be-
fore, consumers still possess a strong need for social connec-
tion, and being perceived as entertaining is one manner in
which consumers achieve this. The authors find that the so-
cial 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
134 Trust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth World
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 un-
lucky 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.
E X T EN D I N G O U R U N D E R ST A N D I N G O F P O ST-
TRUT H AN D POST-TRUST CONSUMPTION
The 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. How-
ever, a strong body of work in prior consumer research has
illuminated a variety of topics that are also valuable for re-
searchers 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 infor-
mation, 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 con-
sumers’ 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 mar-
keting mix activities that had the strongest impact on con-
sumers’ 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 per-
ceive 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 contem-
porary consumers express this disappointment with brands
Kozinets, Gershoff, and White
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 particu-
larly strong aversion to avoid harm from products like air-
bags 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 re-
sponse, 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 re-
sulted in the disclosure of marketing practices that violated
these norms, advertising effectiveness was reduced. How-
ever, 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 on-
line behavior data to show a targeted ad, consumers react
positively if it appears the firm has made an accurate in-
ference 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 institu-
tions such as government, science, and education. For ex-
ample, Thompson (2005) examined how consumers hold
or develop mistrust, or doubt, of medical experts’ assess-
ments of various risks associated with childbirth. Once trust
in one authoritative domain was called into question, the
authoritative knowledge of related experts (pediatrician, ed-
ucators, and child psychologists) was also cast into a state
of reflexive doubt. In some circumstances, media and pop-
ular 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 un-
derstand 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 nar-
ratives 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. Seek-
ing 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 diffi-
culty. 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 gen-
eral 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 dis-
approves 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, specifi-
cally, or people, generally, can lead to increased persuasion be-
cause 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 judg-
ments in reaction to flattery by retail salespersons. Connect-
ing 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 cir-
cumstances to bolster trust, just as it can also be used to in-
crease mistrust.
In all, these studies provide a rich basis for further inqui-
ries into the world of post-truth and post-trust consump-
tion that surrounds us. Because our world is changing so
rapidly, there are many gaps in our knowledge, and oppor-
tunities for consumer research scholars to investigate top-
Volume 5 Number 2 2020 135
ics such as consumers’ trust in brands, betrayals by brands,
trust of and betrayal by products, trust in firm’s use of pri-
vate information, trust in experts and institutions, inter-
personal trust and its effects, and distrust, skepticism, and
suspicion. We hope that you enjoy this special issue on “Con-
suming 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 de-
cide if you believe it.
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