Bullshit in CX: Why Careless Brand Claims Erode Customer Trust

What happened

New psychology research published and reported by PsyPost has identified a distinct and particularly insidious vulnerability in human cognition: our susceptibility to "bullshit" — defined not as deliberate lying but as truth-indifferent communication, where the speaker neither knows nor cares whether their claims are accurate.

The study found that while people naturally raise their defences against known liars, they remain highly exposed to bullshitters precisely because no deceptive intent is detected. Repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims conditions the brain to treat them as familiar, and familiarity is routinely misread as credibility — a well-documented cognitive shortcut known as the illusory truth effect.

Why it matters

For customer experience and service design practitioners, this research surfaces a critical asymmetry: customers are not primarily at risk from brands that lie to them — they are at risk from brands that speak carelessly. Marketing copy, chatbot responses, onboarding scripts and frontline talking points are frequently written without rigorous truth-checking, not out of malice but out of indifference to precision. According to the underlying behavioural mechanics the research describes, that indifference is enough to erode trust over time, because customers who eventually notice the gap between claim and reality feel a specific kind of betrayal — one that is harder to forgive than a clear mistake.

From a behavioral economics standpoint, the illusory truth effect means that high-frequency customer touchpoints — push notifications, loyalty programme messaging, IVR scripts — carry outsized risk. Each repetition of a loosely worded claim incrementally raises a customer's internal "truth" rating for it, making the eventual disconfirmation more cognitively jarring and emotionally damaging to the relationship.

The Renascence take

Most organisations focus their trust-and-integrity efforts on avoiding outright falsehoods. The more pressing operational problem, this research suggests, is the vast volume of unverified content that ships daily across customer channels — not lies, just noise dressed as fact.

The real CX risk is not the brand that deceives deliberately — customers have learned to spot and punish that. It is the brand that communicates carelessly at scale, repeating half-accurate claims across dozens of touchpoints until customers internalise them as true. When reality eventually contradicts the claim, the customer does not think "they made a mistake"; they think "they were never straight with me." Customer-obsessed operators should treat content accuracy as a service-design standard, not a legal or compliance afterthought — auditing high-frequency messaging with the same rigour applied to product safety. The question to ask of every repeated customer-facing claim is not "is it technically defensible?" but "is it actually, precisely true?"