Corporate Reputation and Public Belief Formation in the Evaluation of Arguments for Past Events

Companies, athletes, celebrities, and politicians all attempt to present persuasive arguments supporting their desired accounts about past events. After such attempts, consumers can evaluate the content of different proposed explanations and come to their own conclusions. In such instances, how do consumers weigh each explanation, and what determines their degree of belief in each explanation? This study explores the impact of alternative explanations on consumer lay beliefs, focusing particularly on the explanatory virtues of each explanation that correspond to established criteria for justifying past descriptions in historical analysis. In a study involving 200 participants, individuals were asked to evaluate two proposed causal explanations for a recent hypothetical event connected to a potential corporate scandal. After providing initial degrees of belief for each cause, participants were introduced to additional information intended to improve support for one of the explanations along different dimensions of established explanatory criteria. Results indicate that all arguments along the dimensions of explanatory criteria increased belief in the favored cause while simultaneously reducing belief in the unfavored cause.