Secrets and Lies: How Consumers Manage the Flow of Ego-Threatening Information

Previous research suggests that consumers react negatively to price disparities (Feinberg, Krishna and Zhang 2002), view policies that produce them as unfair (Xia, Monroe and Cox 2004) and find the prospect of facing them to be threatening to the self (Argo, White and Dahl 2006). In response, they are willing to lie about the prices they have paid to minimize the ego-threat of having been “taken” (Argo et al. 2006; Sengupta, Dahl and Gorn 2002). Despite finding expected patterns of lying to avoid sharing ego threatening information, these studies also report levels of lying intentions suggesting a general reluctance to lie. For example, across four studies in Argo et al. (2006), the mean score on the lying index exceeded the scale midpoint in only two of 16 experimental conditions. That is, on average, participants reported being unlikely to lie. If these participants were being honest about their lying intentions, then how else might they respond to requests for information about unfavorable social comparisons when the truth is perceived as an unattractive option? We examine evasion (i.e. ambiguous, vague or avoidant responding) as an alternative to deception (lies) in the face of potential disclosures of ego-threatening consumer information. Evasive self-presentation has been described as a non-obvious alternative to authentic and deceptive self-presentation (Leary 1995), theorized as a probable response to concerns about presenting oneself unfavorably in group conversations (Wooten and Reed 2000), and found to be an effective response to difficult questions (Rogers and Norton 2011). Accordingly, we conduct four studies to: (1) assess evasion as an alternative to deception as a means of managing the flow of ego-threatening information, (2) examine the psychological mechanism underlying the use of evasion or deception in such social predicaments, and (3) explore factors that differentially affect consumers’ intentions to evade versus deceive.