The Anatomy of Green Deception: How Perceived Corporate Hypocrisy, Claim Vagueness, and Nature-Evoking Elements Drive Perceived Greenwashing

Ann, Wen Hong (2026) The Anatomy of Green Deception: How Perceived Corporate Hypocrisy, Claim Vagueness, and Nature-Evoking Elements Drive Perceived Greenwashing. Masters thesis, Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology.

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Abstract

As corporate sustainability communications saturate the global market, greenwashing has evolved into a sophisticated matrix of deceptive signals, sparking a severe credibility crisis. Existing literature frequently treats greenwashing as a monolithic construct, leaving a critical gap in understanding the specific psychological mechanisms that drive consumer retaliation. This study investigates the anatomy of green deception by evaluating how three distinct stimuli: perceived corporate hypocrisy (behavioural), claim vagueness (linguistic), and nature-evoking elements (visual) drive perceived greenwashing. Anchored in a negative lens of Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, the research isolates the parallel cognitive and affective pathways consumers use to decode and penalise corporate environmental manipulation. Adopting a positivist, deductive, and quantitative cross-sectional design, primary data was gathered via an online survey. Through purposive sampling, 429 valid responses were collected from Malaysian consumers aged 18 and above who had recently encountered green marketing claims. The measurement and structural models were rigourously evaluated using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) via SmartPLS 4, supplemented by SPSS for preliminary descriptive and bias analyses. The empirical findings validate a dual-pathway processing architecture, confirming that consumers navigate deception through parallel cognitive (green scepticism) and affective (perceived consumer betrayal) routes. Results demonstrate that all three deceptive stimuli successfully trigger parallel mediation. However, perceived corporate hypocrisy exhibits a profound structural asymmetry; while it is registered cognitively, the clarity of the behavioural say-do gap inflicts a systemic shock that enacts an affective override, heavily subordinating prolonged cognitive doubt to instantaneous emotional betrayal. Mediation analyses confirm perceived consumer betrayal as the dominant mechanism cementing the ultimate verdict of perceived greenwashing. Within this dynamic, nature-evoking elements emerge as the most structurally potent stimulus due to their dual-pathway exploitation, while perceived corporate hypocrisy stands as the absolute foundational vulnerability, inflicting the most severe and direct emotional damage. Furthermore, moderation analyses revealed the asymmetric role of environmental knowledge: it acts as a powerful cognitive accelerant that amplifies scepticism but remains irrelevant to the universal sting of emotional betrayal. Crucially, green perceived risk functioned as a cognitive circuit breaker in the context of low-involvement fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), frequently dampening sustained psychological processing by prompting immediate transaction avoidance. Ultimately, this study concludes that modern consumers actively disaggregate green signals, penalising visual puffery and operational say-do gaps predominantly through severe affective retaliation. These insights offer critical managerial implications, mandating that brands must abandon superficial green aesthetics and vague linguistics in favour of absolute behavioural consistency and risk-mitigated, literacy-segmented communications to preserve brand equity.