Dishonesty in the name of product promotion makes people see themselves as less trustworthy, with knock on effects on the wider economy.

By Rebecca Tan

SMU Office of Research and Tech Transfer - Being involved in sales or product promotion can make people think of themselves as less honest, according to a study recently published in Organization Science. These consequences extend beyond the individual to have a society-wide impact in the form of lowered social trust, says study leader Associate Professor Marko Pitesa of the Singapore Management University (SMU) Lee Kong Chian School of Business.

In the course of working for an organisation, employees may have to project an image of the organisation that they know to be not entirely truthful. In particular, salespeople have to present the products that they are selling as overwhelmingly positive, omitting negative properties if necessary, in order to meet sales targets.

Existing academic research on this topic – known as mandated attitude expression – has focused on whether this cognitive dissonance has any impact on customers’ purchase decisions. Although these studies examine the ability of salespeople to do their jobs effectively, they do not assess the impact that such tactics have on the salespeople themselves.

To investigate the psychological and social impact of mandated attitude expression on salespeople, Professor Pitesa first conducted a large-scale attitudinal survey asking how trustworthy people perceive themselves to be. He found that people in sales perceived themselves as less honest, while conversely, people in occupations where honesty is highly important rated themselves as more trustworthy.

In a subsequent study, participants who had been instructed to write product reviews for a questionable product also rated themselves as less trustworthy, even if they had not been explicitly told to only be positive. “People intuitively knew that they needed to present the product in a way that is not reflective of their true, negative opinions,” Professor Pitesa explains.

Furthermore, Professor Pitesa found that people not only tended to see themselves as less trustworthy but also projected that negative view onto others. To simulate the experience of in-person promotion techniques, Professor Pitesa gave participants poorly made MP3 players and recorded their efforts at marketing them. He then asked how willing the participants would be to trust the experimenters leading the study – overwhelmingly, the participants were less trusting of the experimenters.

“From an economic value-generation standpoint, this erosion of trust is a bad thing because trust is fundamental to the economy. In low trust economies, processes are slower, contracting is more extensive and the overall economic dynamism is lower,” Professor Pitesa says.

“While this study does not suggest that marketing departments should be closed down, it highlights that there are psychological and social costs to marketing efforts that have been thus far overlooked,” he adds. “More broadly, it also suggests that organisations should scale back on unnecessarily aggressive or overwhelmingly positive marketing, for the sake of their employees as well as the overall economy.”

For more information, please contact:

Goh Lijie (Ms)
Office of Research & Tech Transfer
DID: 6828 9698
Email: ljgoh [at] smu.edu.sg

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