Past research on disconfirmation of consumer expectations is criticized for its methodological problems and for its failure to clearly conceptualize the expectation construct. An explicit definition of consumers' product expectations as pretrial beliefs about the product is proposed. Specific expectations about a product characteristic were created by exposing consumers to three advertisements, each of which described one salient attribute of the product. Then these expectations were negatively disconfirmed by a controlled trial experience with the product. For a wide range of cognitive variables, the disconfirmation caused negative changes in product evaluations. However, postdisconfirmation evaluations were not so negative as the product ratings of a nondisconfirmed control group that merely evaluated the product in absence of manipulated expectations. These results are consistent with both dissonance and assimilation-contrast theory. Conceptual and practical issues to be resolved in future research are discussed.Subjective expectations have long been considered important in explaining people's 'behavior, particularly their economic behavior. According to George Katona (1972), "One . . . of the important human factors that manifest themselves in economic action is to be found in the expectations of the actors" (p. 549). Others, including social and industrial psychologists, have used the concept of expectations in explaining a wide variety of phenomena including perception of self-performance (Aronson & Carlsmith,

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Although much has been written about deception in advertising, no studies have been reported in which a deception and its impact on consumers were demonstrated empirically. The authors present a behavioral definition of deception and illustrate its operationalization in the context of a longitudinal experiment in which the effects of an explicit, deceptive product claim on a variety of cognitive variables were measured both before and after product trial. Issues related to the measurement of deception seriousness are emphasized. The basic approach appears generalizable to nonexperimental studies of real-world deception.