According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in 2018 there were over 1.4 million reports of fraud resulting in an estimated loss to consumers of $1.48 billion (Federal Trade Commission, 2019). A natural reaction to the prevalence of fraudulent transactions is apatephobia, or a fear of intentional deception leading to less desirable outcomes in a market exchange. The current paper relates apatephobia to the literature on trust, risk, suspicion, defensive processing, emotions, and counterfactual thinking and offers 15 propositions related to these constructs. Further, a nomological network is proposed which relates these constructs together, identifies the conditions under which apatephobia will result in a consumer declining to engage in an exchange, and the feedback mechanism by which being deceived strengthens the motivation to avoid any future reoccurrence. Little academic attention has been paid to a fear of being deceived, thus I expect the current work to be of interest to researchers in the area of trust, risk, and deception.
The Role of Dispositional Optimism, Upward and Downward Counterfactual Thinking towards Student Persistence in Joining Competitions
