The Numbers (Never) Lie: Corporate Fraud, Generalized Suspicion and Investment Behavior

A dual information processing framework (Chaiken and Trope 1999) was used to investigate whether corporate fraud on individual investment decisions. The results of two experiments suggest that corporate fraud leads to a broad defensive bias towards stock investment in second-party firms due to its effects on generalized suspicion. Further, the prior reputation of the second-party firm did little to buffer the effects of generalized suspicion. Process measures indicated that these generalized effects of fraud occurred through biased heuristic processing, where second-party firms were essentially stereotyped as untrustworthy.

Citation:

Peter Darke and Jennifer Argo (2005) ,"The Numbers (Never) Lie: Corporate Fraud, Generalized Suspicion and Investment Behavior", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 7, eds. Karin M. Ekstrom and Helene Brembeck, Goteborg, Sweden : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 308-309.