President's Showcase
Alyssa Croft
Supervising Professor: Patrick Merle
Alyssa Croft is a fourth-year Public Relations major admitted in the BA/MA pathway program at the School of Communication. She joined a research group in Fall 2023 with Dr. Nicole Lee from Arizona State University and Dr. Patrick Merle, her school director. She was involved in a project presented at the International Public Relations Research Conference in Orlando in March 2024. Alyssa is currently an Honors in the Major student and has used her funding from the IDEA Grant to conduct an experiment examining misleading claims that employs scientific terminology. After the conclusion of the IDEA Grant program, she plans to continue working on her project until her presentation before her committee. Alyssa will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in spring 2025, and a master’s degree in the spring of 2026. In the future, she hopes to use her communication and research skills to help companies involved in environmental preservation.
Abstract
Scienceploitation has been defined as the misleading use of scientific language to present unsubstantiated claims to promote products. A plethora of industries such as beauty care, supplements, and at times specialized health procedures such as stem cell therapy continuously use this messaging tactic to market their products.
This study contributes to the existing literature that has shown how scientific jargon can increase consumers’ trust and therefore affect their purchasing intentions. The proposed work specifically addresses a gap in the scholarship and test cross-cultural differences over two studies through an examination of the effect of language on trust and purchasing behavior. This work is particularly valuable as it will help understand the extent to which minorities may be more vulnerable to misleading scientific claims. It also examines the purchasing behaviors consumers have depending on lower or higher credibility sources.
Study 1 determined the stimuli for study 2’s experiment, where participants were exposed to handwarmers, rain jackets, sunscreen, sunglasses, and water filters. In this within-subject design, the intent was to determine which products yield the strongest influence on participants. In study 2, the two most influential products from study 1 will be selected and presented to participants. Study 1 has laid out the groundwork for study 2, which will consist of a 2(presence or absence of scientific jargon) by 2(low and high credibility source) between-subjects experiment comparing purchasing behavior responses of Hispanic bilinguals and monolinguals.
Presentation Materials
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