Misleading information pervades marketing communications, and is a long-standing issue in business ethics. Regulators place a heavy burden on consumers to detect misleading information, and a number of studies have shown training can improve their ability to do so. However, the possible side effects have largely gone unexamined. We provide evidence for one such side-effect, whereby training consumers to detect a specific tactic (illegitimate endorsers), leaves them more vulnerable to a second tactic included in the same ad (a restrictive qualifying footnote), relative to untrained controls. We update standard notions of persuasion knowledge using a goal systems approach that allows for multiple vigilance goals to explain such side-effects in terms of goal shielding, which is a generally adaptive process by which activation and/or fulfillment of a low-level goal inhibits alternative detection goals. Furthermore, the same goal systems logic is used to develop a more general form of training that activates a higher-level goal (general skepticism). This more general training improved detection of a broader set of tactics without the negative goal shielding side effect.

误导性信息充斥着营销传播，是商业道德中的一个长期问题。监管机构在发现误导信息方面给消费者带来了沉重负担，许多研究表明，培训可以提高他们这样做的能力。然而，可能的副作用在很大程度上未经检查。我们提供了这样一种副作用的证据，即培训消费者检测特定策略（非法代言人），使他们更容易受到同一广告中包含的第二种策略（限制性限定脚注）的影响，相对于未经培训的控制。我们使用目标系统方法更新了说服知识的标准概念，该方法允许多个警戒目标来解释这种在目标屏蔽方面的副作用，这是一个通常的自适应过程，通过该过程，低级目标的激活和/或实现会抑制替代检测目标。此外，相同的目标系统逻辑用于开发一种更一般的训练形式，以激活更高级别的目标（一般怀疑论）。这种更通用的训练改进了对更广泛的战术集的检测，而没有负面目标屏蔽副作用。