Impacts of consumer cognitive process to ascertain online fake review: a cognitive dissonance theory approach

Abstract

Online reviews of the products by consumers are very important to organizations as well as to prospective consumers. Ideally, online reviews by consumers should be an accurate and true representation of consumers’ feelings and experiences towards a particular product. But the online review process is also vulnerable to unethical representations of consumers’ experiences feeling towards particular product. Although if a deceptive review has been posted or not, it is essential to understand the perception of the consumers regarding deception because it is the perception of a consumer that leads them to the subsequent opinion and the follow-up action in the form of biased and fake online review. Very little study has been conducted on the impacts of consumer cognitive process to detect the intention of the reviewer to give fake reviews. In this background, the aim of this study is to examine the impact of consumer cognitive process towards detection of fake review. The study also investigates the moderating impacts of product knowledge towards online fake review. With the help of cognitive dissonance theory approach and existing literature, a theoretical model has been developed conceptually which subsequently validated using partial least square structural equation modelling considering responses from 342 respondents. The study found that there is a significant impact of consumer cognitive process on reviewer attitude towards detecting fake review. The study also revealed that there is a significant moderating impact of consumer product knowledge which influences the relationship between consumer attitude towards online review and perceived intention to give online fake review by the reviewers.