Steven E. Permut

An Approach to the Evaluation of Deception in Television Advertising

Abstract Public policy decisions dealing with the behavioral responses to deceptive television advertising have relied strictly on a legal definition of deception. This study provides tentative factor analytic dimensions for the evaluation of deception across eight television commercials unofficially rated for deceptiveness by the FTC. Using two different measurement approaches, some degree of factorial similarity was observed. Deception emerged as an independent factor—a finding not previously acknowledged in the literature. While summary (aggregate) judgments across all test ads were used. future research might focus on specific components of an ad to be more compatible with current FTC and judicial requirements. Suggestions for future research are offered.

Exploring deception and puffery in television advertising

Public policy decisions dealing with deceptive advertising have relied extensively on case-by-case adjudication with the Federal Trade Commission. Unfortunately, behavioral evidence has not been considered in the vast majority of these cases. The final determination rests with the Commission’s own expertise in judging an advertisement’s “capacity to deceive.” Consumer response data are not required, although recent developments suggest the FTC is seriously considering the inclusion of meaningful behavioral evidence in policymaking and adjudicative proceedings. This study is one of a series dealing with dimensions of perceived deception across different respondent populations (including students, lawyers, housewives, children, and minority groups). The focus here is on the semantics of deception, i.e., the way in which subjects evaluate selected television commercials which were unofficially rated for deception by FTC staff attorneys. The factor analytic paradigm provides one approach for generating summaries of viewer’s evaluative (affective) responses, and thereby providing some normative or benchmark data of potential value in the regulatory process.

TRIMAT: a FORTRAN IV Program for Creating Lower Triangular Matrices

MANY users of specialized computer programs find that data input formats are required to conform to special configuration. For instance, some multidimensional scaling routines (e.g., Kruskal and Carmone’s [1969] M-D-SCAL, and Young and Torgerson’s [ 1967] TORSCA) expect a user-created lower triangular matrix without diagonal entries. Newer versions of these and other programs are, however, incorporating such special input modes directly. TRIMAT accepts response data for similarity (or dissimilarity) judgments using the popular n-dimensional rank order (&dquo;anchorpoint&dquo;) method (Torgerson, 1960). Subjects are asked to judge all p items against every other item, with each item acting in turn as the reference item. Thus, a square symmetrical response matrix of size (p 1) is obtained. The simple program handles up to 14 stimuli (easily expanded, if necessary) and any number of subjects. Results are printed and punched in any user-specified format. Only two control cards are needed: (1) to specify number of stimuli, and (2) to indicate format