Fake News, a Possible Reason Against Consumers’ Intentions to Adopt New Technology? Persuasion Knowledge and Its Moderating Effect

This study will examine how a Romanian sample would react, as far as adoption intention of a new technology/innovation, such as 5G, if targeted by health-related fake news (FN). We will address this gap by developing and testing a conceptual model that integrates various behavioral models— Value-based Adoption (VAM), Behavioral Reasoning Theory (BRT), Diffusion of Innovation (DOI), Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM)—relevant for assessing the predicting of intentions in the context of the consumer decision-making process, all underlined by an Stimulus-Organism-Behavior-Consequence (SOBC) paradigm framework. Originality/value—We will approach fake news about 5G technology as a persuasion attempt that targets consumers pretending to be a reason against adoption of new technology. We will extrapolate from the behavioral reasoning theory, aiming to discover whether a fake news can be a reason that predicts intention to adopt new technology. As we predict that fake news can generate, in the context of the decision-making process, variance at the level of adoption intention, we propose to measure whether the activation of persuasion knowledge could function as a moderator of the effect fake news might have on adoption intentions of new technology. Practical insights could result for consumers and marketers, especially from the point of view of the concern for the failure of new products due to fake news malign effect.