of course a good investor will first do its own research (whitepaper, roadmap and etc), besides that what is your biggest motivation?
Good project team,their advertisement strategy and even their website design make fall investors to invest on their projects but still all investments comes with risky and risk means profits to be earned so this can be the biggest motivation for most of us to invest on the projects.
You are right it is very important to know all of those things which are really important to have good finance, try to know what are they planning for and what they are using to achieve the goal of life, we are living in modern age so we should not trust anyone blindly, try to know all about them, how much they wana invest and how much they will get as profit so I am sure this thing will give us profit.