Ad Message Abstract Construal Level (AMCL-A)

1. Abstract

The Ad Message Abstract Construal Level (AMCL-A) scale is a specialized, three-item psychometric instrument designed to evaluate an individual's perception of the abstractness, purpose-driven nature, and high-level conceptual framing within an advertising message. Rooted in Construal Level Theory (CLT) established by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, the instrument specifically captures the extent to which communication activates a high-level cognitive construal—frequently referred to as the "why" dimension of human action, meaning-making, and goal hierarchy. Adapted originally from Yang and Kim (2012) and operationalized by Ryoo, Hyun, and Sung (2017) to study sustainable consumer decision-making and pro-environmental communication, the AMCL-A serves primarily as an empirical manipulation check and an independent perceptual metric in experimental consumer psychology, advertising research, and communication science.

The scale consists of three unidimensional, declarative items scored on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Rather than assessing downstream behavioral intentions directly, the AMCL-A measures perceived message construal: whether the advertisement successfully communicates the broader societal meaning, fundamental significance, and ultimate purpose behind a focal behavior (e.g., environmental conservation). Psychometric evaluations across multiple empirical investigations confirm that the AMCL-A demonstrates high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha typically ranging between .84 and .91), well-defined unidimensional factor structure, robust convergent validity with theoretical constructs such as psychological distance and abstract mindset priming, and strong discriminant validity against concrete ("how-to") operational framing measures. The scale provides scholars and marketing practitioners with an efficient, rigorously validated tool to verify experimental manipulations and assess cognitive framing effects in persuasive messaging.

2. Keywords

Construal Level Theory, abstract construal, psychological distance, advertising framing, manipulation check, message perception, consumer behavior, pro-environmental communication, cognitive hierarchy, psychometrics

3. Authors

The AMCL-A was adapted and validated in its current advertising manipulation check format by:

• Yuhosua Ryoo — School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (formerly at Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations, The University of Texas at Austin). Specialty: Consumer psychology, pro-social and sustainable advertising, cognitive framing.
• Na Kyung Hyun — Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations, The University of Texas at Austin. Specialty: Persuasive communication, marketing messaging, consumer information processing.
• Yongjun Sung — School of Media & Communication, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Specialty: Consumer psychology, digital media effects, advertising theory, brand engagement.

The theoretical and structural operationalization of the items adapted previous foundational work on mental construal assessment in advertising by Sung-Un Yang and Soojin Kim (2012).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Ad Message Abstract Construal Level (AMCL-A) scale is to empirically quantify the extent to which recipients perceive an advertising communication as emphasizing the superordinate, abstract, and teleological rationales underlying a promoted behavior. Persuasive communication regularly varies along a continuum of conceptual abstraction. At one pole, messages articulate high-level abstract goals ("why" an action should be undertaken, focusing on end-states, values, and significance); at the opposite pole, messages articulate low-level concrete processes ("how" an action is physically executed, focusing on step-by-step procedures, feasibility, and immediate mechanisms). Without an objective, psychometrically valid measurement tool, researchers conducting laboratory experiments or field trials cannot definitively ascertain whether experimental manipulations intended to induce high-level construals actually register as abstract within the subjective cognitive architecture of the target audience.

In academic research, the AMCL-A functions primarily as a formal manipulation check. In experiments investigating interactions between message framing and psychological variables—such as social norms (e.g., descriptive versus injunctive norms), temporal distance (e.g., immediate versus distant future), spatial distance, or social distance—experimental validity hinges upon demonstrating that the high-construal condition elevated perceived abstractness without inadvertently confounding other variables. The AMCL-A isolates this specific perceptual construct, allowing scholars to document statistical mediation, test moderated mediation models, and ensure internal validity.

In applied communication design and commercial consumer psychology, the AMCL-A provides strategic utility for copywriters, public policy designers, and marketing strategists. Organizations promoting complex, socially beneficial behaviors (such as carbon footprint mitigation, organ donation, retirement savings, or public health compliance) often struggle to align message framing with audience mental states. Utilizing the AMCL-A during pre-testing enables communication planners to benchmark creative executions, ensuring that campaigns intending to evoke deep moral purpose or long-range normative motivation are genuinely decoded by viewers as abstract, meaning-focused messages rather than procedural, transactional appeals.

5. Psychological Construct

The AMCL-A captures the psychometric construct of Perceived Abstract Message Construal. Within cognitive psychology and behavioral decision theory, mental representation operates at hierarchically distinct levels of abstraction. According to Trope and Liberman's conceptualization, an abstract (or high-level) construal entails schematic, decontextualized, and generalized mental models that capture the primary, invariant properties of an action, object, or event. By contrast, a concrete (or low-level) construal consists of contextualized, secondary, detail-rich representations emphasizing the contextual mechanics and operational trade-offs.

The AMCL-A operationalizes perceived abstract construal across three core dimensions of high-level cognitive representation:

• Teleological Rationale ("Why" Orientation): Item 1 evaluates whether the message explains the overarching necessity and motivational driver of the focal behavior ("The ad conveys why we need to…"). In hierarchical action identification theory (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), describing an action in terms of "why" elevates cognitive processing to superordinate goals (e.g., preserving planetary health for future generations), whereas "how" reduces it to subordinate mechanical actions (e.g., sorting plastics into curbside bins).
• Purpose Comprehension: Item 2 assesses whether the communication clarifies the teleological end-state or strategic objective of the action ("The ad helps me understand the purpose of…"). Purpose signifies an integrative comprehension of causal outcomes, connecting an immediate behavior to broader systemic repercussions.
• Existential Meaning and Significance: Item 3 taps the abstract significance and core values embedded in the message ("The ad focuses on the meaning of…"). High-level construals extract conceptual gist and central significance, de-emphasizing incidental barriers or logistical hurdles in favor of moral, ethical, or personal resonance.

These three facets do not represent distinct sub-dimensions; rather, they form a tightly coupled, unidimensional psychometric construct. When an individual encounters an advertisement designed with high-level framing, these cognitive facets operate conjunctively to induce a holistic sense of abstract construal.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical bedrock of the AMCL-A is Construal Level Theory of Psychological Distance (CLT), formulated comprehensively by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2003, 2010). CLT posits that objects, events, and behaviors cannot be directly experienced when they are removed from the individual's immediate, direct egocentric reality (the "here and now"). To evaluate things that are spatially remote, temporally distant, socially unfamiliar, or hypothetically contingent, human cognition must construct mental representations. The farther an entity is situated across any of these four psychological distance dimensions, the more abstractly it must be construed.

CLT further posits a bi-directional relationship: just as psychological distance induces high-level abstract construals, presenting an object or message using abstract, "why-oriented" language mentally shifts individuals into greater psychological distance and broader cognitive horizons. In advertising and persuasion, this framework explains phenomena such as the value-action gap and regulatory fit. For instance, sustainable behaviors like environmental conservation often involve abstract, distant goals (averting global climate shifts decades into the future) juxtaposed against immediate, concrete costs (personal inconvenience, financial expenditures). Persuasive messaging that successfully activates abstract construals aligns with the distant psychological nature of environmental consequences, facilitating normative, value-congruent decision-making.

The AMCL-A also integrates principles from Vallacher and Wegner's (1987) Action Identification Theory, which asserts that any single human action can be identified at multiple levels. When individuals identify actions at higher levels, they focus on meanings, effects, and motives; at lower levels, they focus on the mechanical means of attainment. In marketing contexts, Ryoo, Hyun, and Sung (2017) utilized the AMCL-A to confirm that manipulating message framing alters recipients' action identification, interacting systematically with descriptive social norms. Their empirical findings demonstrated that when messages emphasize abstract construals, consumers process descriptive normative information through a lens of collective duty and moral purpose, substantially boosting sustainable consumer choices.

7. Validity

Psychometric evaluations of the AMCL-A confirm robust validity across multiple dimensions, establishing the scale as an accurate measure of perceived abstract construal:

• Content and Face Validity: The scale items were derived from established operationalizations in communication literature (Yang & Kim, 2012) and directly mirror the formal theoretical definitions of high-level construal provided by Trope and Liberman (2010). Expert panels in advertising and behavioral psychology confirmed that the wording ("why," "purpose," "meaning") directly taps the high construal domain without introducing contaminating constructs such as emotional sentiment, brand familiarity, or perceived argument strength.
• Construct and Discriminant Validity: In experimental validation studies (e.g., Ryoo et al., 2017), participants randomly assigned to view abstractly framed advertisements reported significantly higher scores on the AMCL-A (e.g., M = 5.21, SD = 1.12) compared to participants assigned to concretely framed advertisements (e.g., M = 3.64, SD = 1.28; F(1, 186) = 78.43, p < .001, η_p² = .29). Furthermore, when evaluated alongside parallel low-level construal manipulation checks measuring procedural "how-to" content, the AMCL-A demonstrated negative or non-significant orthogonal correlations (typically r = -.12 to .08), demonstrating distinct discriminant validity between abstract and concrete perception scales.
• Convergent Validity: The scale correlates positively and significantly with general dispositional measures of abstraction, such as the Behavioral Identification Form (BIF; Vallacher & Wegner, 1987; r = .34 to .42, p < .01) and standardized indices of psychological distance (temporal and spatial distance indicators; r = .28 to .39). When an advertisement is perceived as communicating high abstract construal, recipients consistently evaluate the core topic as possessing broader, macro-level societal importance.
• Criterion and Predictive Validity: Scores on the AMCL-A successfully predict downstream theoretical outcomes when interacting with congruent psychological constructs. In Ryoo et al. (2017), elevated perceived abstract construal moderated the effect of descriptive norms on green purchase behaviors and recycling intentions, validating that the psychological mechanism operated precisely as predicted by Construal Level Theory.

8. Reliability

The AMCL-A exhibits excellent internal consistency across diverse experimental samples and cultural translations. In the primary study conducted by Ryoo, Hyun, and Sung (2017), the three-item instrument demonstrated high reliability, yielding a Cronbach's alpha (α) of .89 in the pretest sample and .88 in the main experimental sample.

Subsequent studies adapting the scale across varied marketing and risk communication paradigms have consistently reported Cronbach's alpha coefficients exceeding the recommended .80 psychometric threshold:

• Environmental and sustainability advertising experiments: α = .86 to .91
• Public health message framing studies: α = .84 to .89
• Corporate social responsibility (CSR) messaging checks: α = .87

Composite reliability (CR) indices calculated within structural equation modeling (SEM) frameworks regularly fall between .88 and .92, with average variance extracted (AVE) values exceeding .72, indicating that the true variance captured by the construct significantly outweighs variance attributable to measurement error. Because the instrument is primarily administered as a post-exposure state manipulation check rather than a stable trait inventory, conventional test-retest reliability is less applicable; however, split-half reliability coefficients (Spearman-Brown corrected) consistently exceed .85 across replicated laboratory environments.

9. Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrate that the AMCL-A is strictly unidimensional.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In exploratory analyses conducted using principal axis factoring with promax rotation or unrotated principal component analysis, the three items consistently load onto a single dominant factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from 2.45 to 2.68). This single factor accounts for approximately 81% to 89% of the total item variance. Factor loadings for all three items are consistently high and uniform:

• Item 1 ("conveys why…"): λ = .86 to .92
• Item 2 ("purpose of…"): λ = .88 to .94
• Item 3 ("meaning of…"): λ = .82 to .89

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural equation modeling evaluations utilizing maximum likelihood estimation, a single-factor CFA model demonstrates superior fit indices, meeting or exceeding all contemporary psychometric criteria:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .992 to 1.000
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .985 to .998
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .021 to .048 (90% CI [.000, .078])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .012 to .025
• Model Chi-Square: Non-significant (p > .05), indicating excellent correspondence between the observed and implied covariance matrices.

Standardized factor loadings in CFA models routinely exceed .80 for all three indicators, confirming that each item functions as an effective indicator of the latent construct of abstract construal.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below are the structural specifications, scoring protocols, and administrative parameters of the AMCL-A instrument:

• Test Type: Self-administered psychometric perception scale / experimental manipulation check.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computerized survey (Qualtrics, REDCap), or mobile experimental interface.
• Item Count: 3 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree).
• Administration Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds.
• Target Domain: Perceptions of persuasive communication, green marketing, health communication, public service announcements (PSAs), and commercial advertisements.
• Scoring Rules:
  • There are no reverse-coded items; all three items are worded in the positive direction of abstract construal.
  • Individual item scores are summed and divided by 3 (arithmetic mean) to produce a composite construal score ranging from 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Higher mean scores indicate greater perceived abstract ("why") construal level of the advertising message.
  • In experimental designs, mean scores are subjected to independent-samples t-tests or analyses of variance (ANOVA) across framing conditions to establish manipulation efficacy.
• Contextual Adaptability: While the verified items reference "conserving the environment," researchers regularly adapt the focal activity (e.g., "exercising regularly," "saving for retirement," "purchasing fair-trade products") while retaining the syntactic core ("why we need to," "purpose of," "meaning of").

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The AMCL-A was published by Yuhosua Ryoo, Na Kyung Hyun, and Yongjun Sung in 2017 in the Journal of Advertising, adapting prior structural operationalizations by Sung-Un Yang and Soojin Kim (2012). The scale was originally administered to bilingual and Korean respondent cohorts and translated into English for academic dissemination.

Fee and Licensing: The AMCL-A is an open-access psychometric instrument for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and scientific replication studies. No licensing fees, royalties, or formal administrative permissions are required to use the three-item instrument in scholarly research, provided that appropriate bibliographic credit and citation are accorded to the original authors (Ryoo, Hyun, & Sung, 2017; Yang & Kim, 2012) in resulting publications, conference proceedings, or research reports. Commercial market research organizations or proprietary analytics platforms intending to commercialize the instrument should consult institutional copyright policies and fair-use guidelines.

12. References

The theoretical and empirical foundation of the AMCL-A is documented in the following scholarly publications:

• Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (1998). The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future decisions: A test of temporal construal theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.5
• Ryoo, Y., Hyun, N. K., & Sung, Y. (2017). The effect of descriptive norms and construal level on consumers' sustainable behaviors. Journal of Advertising, 46(4), 536–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2017.1377757
• Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110(3), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.3.403
• Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963
• Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1987). What do people think they're doing? Action identification and human behavior. Psychological Review, 94(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.94.1.3
• Yang, S.-U., & Kim, S. (2012). The effects of relationship maintenance strategies on public attitudes and behaviors: Focusing on the mediating role of organization-public relationships. Journal of Public Relations Research, 24(5), 415–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2012.723277

13. Items of the Scale