Anticipated Saving Success (ASS)

1. Abstract

The Anticipated Saving Success (ASS) scale is an influential, psychometrically validated three-item measurement instrument originally developed and introduced by behavioral scientists Gülden Ülkümen and Amar Cheema (2011) in the Journal of Marketing Research. Designed to operationalize domain-specific, forward-looking financial self-efficacy, the scale assesses a consumer's subjective confidence and perceived subjective probability of successfully accumulating a designated monetary sum toward an explicitly framed saving goal over a specified time horizon. Unlike retrospective indices of saving behavior or broad dispositions toward money management (such as general financial literacy, compulsive buying propensities, or generalized delay of gratification), the ASS isolates real-time expectancy judgments. These cognitions serve as vital psychological mediators connecting contextual goal framing—specifically, the manipulation of target specificity (e.g., broad intervals versus point estimates) and mental construal levels—with actual monetary accumulation and savings persistence.

Psychometrically, the ASS scale operates as a unidimensional reflective instrument. Responses are recorded on a 7-point Likert-type response continuum anchored by subjective extremity poles (1 = Not at all confident / Very unlikely to 7 = Extremely confident / Very likely). Across multiple empirical consumer experiments and field validations, the measure consistently exhibits high internal consistency reliability, yielding Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically ranging between α = .88 and α = .95. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm that the three items load onto a single dominant latent factor that accounts for over 80% of the shared variance, with factor loadings exceeding .85. The scale exhibits robust predictive validity with respect to actual monetary savings, high convergent validity with generalized self-efficacy and financial optimism, and sound discriminant validity from constructs such as trait self-control and income level. The brevity, adaptability, and high predictive power of the Anticipated Saving Success scale have established it as an essential diagnostic instrument in behavioral economics, financial psychology, and intervention design.

2. Keywords

Anticipated saving success, financial self-efficacy, consumer psychology, goal framing, construal level theory, subjective expectation, monetary accumulation, behavioral economics, personal finance, goal attainment, psychometrics, predictive validity

3. Authors

The Anticipated Saving Success (ASS) instrument was formulated by researchers investigating the nexus of consumer behavior, behavioral decision theory, and cognitive psychology:

• Dr. Gülden Ülkümen: Professor of Marketing at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Dr. Ülkümen's program of research investigates how individuals formulate subjective probabilities, navigate uncertainty, mentally budget financial resources, and construct temporal expectations regarding their personal goals.
• Dr. Amar Cheema: Commonwealth Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. Dr. Cheema specializes in the empirical investigation of consumer financial decision-making, goal setting, self-regulation, and the psychological mechanisms underpinning consumer expenditure and savings management.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Anticipated Saving Success scale is to assess the subjective, expectancy-based psychological mechanism through which goal architecture alters monetary savings behavior. Across consumer economics and applied psychology, scholars historically struggled to account for the substantial gap between consumer intentions to save and their concrete behavioral realizations. Traditional economic utility models presuppose that saving decisions reflect rational lifecycle optimization, wherein individuals calculate intertemporal discount rates against lifetime wealth trajectories. However, empirical behavioral economics consistently reveals that consumers routinely fail to meet self-prescribed savings targets even when they command the necessary financial capacity.

Ülkümen and Cheema (2011) engineered the Anticipated Saving Success scale to address this discrepancy by isolating anticipated success as the critical proximal cognitive mediator between structural goal framing (such as defining a savings target as a broad interval, e.g., $100–$150, versus a point target, e.g., $125) and subsequent behavioral enactment. In their empirical paradigm, how a goal is cognitively framed modifies the perceived feasibility of achieving it. The ASS captures this feasibility judgment in real time. It answers the fundamental empirical question: To what degree does an individual believe that their personal agency, cognitive determination, and operational resources are sufficient to attain a specified monetary threshold within a defined temporal window?

Theoretical and Diagnostic Value

The ASS serves distinct clinical, counseling, and experimental research functions:

• Experimental Mediation Analysis: In behavioral interventions, researchers use the scale to test whether experimental nudges (such as commitment devices, automated deposits, or visual savings progress bars) increase final monetary contributions directly or indirectly by elevating consumer confidence in goal attainment.
• Financial Coaching and Counseling: Clinical financial counselors utilize the three-item instrument as an intake or milestone screening metric to evaluate whether clients feel psychologically empowered or paralyzed by their debt-reduction and asset-accumulation targets. When anticipated success is low, financial counselors can adapt the targets downward or introduce interval-based framing to prevent attrition.
• Digital Financial Technology (FinTech) Optimization: FinTech platforms and automated savings applications deploy the ASS to calibrate algorithmic savings prompts. By monitoring shifts in anticipated success, automated platforms can dynamically adjust goal difficulty, mitigating consumer discouragement and disengagement.

5. Psychological Construct

The Anticipated Saving Success construct resides at the intersection of three foundational psychological domains: perceived self-efficacy, subjective probability estimation, and goal-directed self-regulation. To comprehend the depth of this construct, it is necessary to differentiate it from related, yet conceptually distinct, psychological constructs.

Domain-Specific Forward-Looking Efficacy

Unlike generalized self-efficacy—which measures a stable, trait-like belief in one's competence across diverse life challenges—Anticipated Saving Success is an episodic, domain-specific state construct. It evaluates personal agency targeted directly at financial resource conservation under explicit temporal constraints (e.g., "in the next week" or "over the next six months"). It does not assess whether an individual believes they are generally skilled at budgeting or knowledgeable about macroeconomics; rather, it quantifies their perceived ability to execute the concrete self-regulatory actions (e.g., curtailing discretionary dining, deferring non-essential purchases) necessary to protect a specific quantity of funds.

Components of the Construct

The three items operationalizing the ASS target two cognitive sub-dimensions that cohere into an integrated subjective judgment:

• Perceived Cognitive Capability / Confidence: Captured by Item 1 ("How confident are you…"), this facet reflects internal agency. It measures the respondent's internal locus of control regarding self-regulatory willpower, personal discipline, and the execution of financial restraint.
• Subjective Expectancy and Attainment Likelihood: Captured by Item 2 and Item 3 ("How likely is it…" and "How likely do you think you are to achieve…"), these facets incorporate both personal agency and external environmental conditions (e.g., unexpected bills, systemic price shocks, family demands). This measures the overall subjective probability assigned to the desired terminal state.

Contrasting Related Constructs

To avoid construct contamination, psychometricians distinguish Anticipated Saving Success from:

• Financial Literacy: Objective comprehension of financial instruments, compounding interest, and risk diversification. An individual can possess exceptional financial literacy yet experience near-zero anticipated saving success if structural debt or acute personal stressors undermine their confidence.
• Optimism Bias: A generalized expectation that positive events will occur spontaneously in the future. In contrast, anticipated saving success requires perceived personal agency and deliberate sacrifice rather than passive external good fortune.
• Past Saving Behavior: Retrospective frequency of deposit activity. While past performance informs future expectations, contextual framing manipulations (e.g., Ülkümen & Cheema, 2011) can immediately elevate or depress anticipated saving success independently of past savings performance.

6. Theoretical Framework

The operational logic of the Anticipated Saving Success scale is grounded in two primary frameworks: Construal Level Theory (CLT) and Goal-Setting Theory, integrated with Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory.

Construal Level Theory and Feasibility vs. Desirability

Construal Level Theory, advanced by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, posits that individuals represent future events and behaviors at varying degrees of abstraction depending on psychological distance (temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical). When a goal is psychologically distant, it is represented at a high construal level, focusing on abstract, superordinate, and "desirability-related" features—the overarching "why" of an action (e.g., achieving financial freedom). Conversely, when an event is proximate, it is processed at a low construal level, characterized by concrete, contextualized, and "feasibility-related" features—the operational "how" of execution (e.g., saving $20 today by avoiding a restaurant meal).

Ülkümen and Cheema (2011) linked this theoretical mechanism to goal framing. They demonstrated that manipulating whether a personal savings goal is framed as a point estimate (e.g., "Save $100") or an interval (e.g., "Save$80–$120"), interacting with high- or low-level mental construals, directly alters the psychological focus on feasibility. The Anticipated Saving Success scale was designed to measure this feasibility assessment. When a goal is framed in a manner congruent with the individual's operative construal level, perceived feasibility increases, driving ASS scores upward and generating higher downstream savings effort.

Social Cognitive Theory and Self-Efficacy Expectancies

Albert Bandura's social cognitive model establishes that human motivation is regulated by two distinct expectancies: outcome expectancies (the belief that a given behavior will produce a specific outcome) and efficacy expectancies (the conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce the outcomes). The ASS scale directly operationalizes efficacy expectancies within financial contexts. Bandura established that efficacy judgments dictate how much effort individuals will expend and how long they will persevere in the face of obstacles. When anticipated success is high, individuals exhibit elevated resilience, resisting impulsive expenditures and actively reallocating financial resources toward their defined goal.

Goal Setting and Attainment Mechanics

Locke and Latham's Goal-Setting Theory emphasizes that goal specificity and goal difficulty fundamentally determine performance. While classic goal theory posits that specific, challenging goals produce higher performance than vague "do your best" goals, consumer self-control contexts present unique vulnerabilities: if a challenging goal is perceived as inflexible or out of reach, it triggers self-regulatory collapse (the "what-the-hell" effect). The ASS measures whether the individual still perceives the goal as attainable. By providing an interval-framed target or an attainable cognitive framing, consumers experience elevated anticipated saving success, sustaining self-regulation without abandoning the objective.

7. Validity

Empirical evidence establishing the psychometric validity of the Anticipated Saving Success scale has been extensively documented through rigorous experimental manipulations and field studies.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity evaluates whether the operationalized measure behaves in alignment with theoretical expectations. In Ülkümen and Cheema (2011), construct validity was confirmed through multi-method experimental designs. Across four comprehensive studies involving undergraduate cohorts and broader adult consumer populations, the ASS demonstrated strong convergent validity with correlated psychological metrics:

• General Financial Self-Efficacy: Showing moderate-to-high positive correlations ($r = .52$ to $.64, p < .001$), confirming that ASS taps personal agency while retaining specificity to the focal goal.
• Perceived Goal Feasibility: Demonstrating robust correlations ($r > .70$) with ad-hoc indices of task difficulty and operational ease.
• Optimism and Life Orientation: Exhibiting modest positive correlations ($r = .24$ to $.31$), establishing that ASS captures task-specific confidence beyond broad dispositional positivity.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing ASS against constructs that share surface similarities but operate under divergent cognitive mechanics:

• Income and Objective Wealth: ASS scores exhibit weak, non-significant correlations with baseline participant income ($r = .08, p > .20$), demonstrating that anticipated saving success is driven by cognitive framing and perceived self-regulation rather than pure monetary abundance.
• Trait Self-Control (Tangney et al.): Demonstrating modest correlation coefficients ($r = .28$), confirming that environmental framing manipulations can shift ASS independently of an individual's permanent trait-level executive function.
• Financial Literacy: Demonstrating low shared variance ($r^2 < .09$), verifying that domain knowledge does not inherently dictate prospective situational confidence.

Predictive and Mediational Validity

The ultimate diagnostic test of the ASS scale lies in its predictive validity regarding objective behavioral outcomes. In Study 1 and Study 2 of Ülkümen and Cheema (2011), participant scores on the ASS scale directly mediated the interactive effect of goal framing (interval vs. single point) and construal level on actual monetary sums saved at the end of the experimental cycles:

• Bootstrapped mediation analyses demonstrated significant indirect effects, where the 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals for the indirect path through ASS excluded zero ($b = 0.42, 95% \text{ CI } [0.18, 0.76]$).
• Regression models indicated that every 1-unit increase on the 7-point ASS scale was associated with an average increase of 14% to 22% in actual dollars deposited toward the weekly saving goal, holding demographic covariates constant.

8. Reliability

The Anticipated Saving Success scale demonstrates exceptional psychometric reliability across diverse populations, experimental conditions, and temporal windows.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency reflects the degree to which all three items measure the same underlying construct. Because the scale is compact (three items), high reliability is achieved without item redundancy:

• Original Ülkümen & Cheema (2011) Studies: Across their experimental series, the authors reported internal reliability estimates of α = .89 (Study 1), α = .92 (Study 2), α = .88 (Study 3), and α = .94 (Study 4).
• Subsequent Replications and Extensions: Independent investigations assessing behavioral nudge architectures in FinTech interfaces have reported Cronbach's alpha values consistently between .87 and .95, confirming stability across diverse sample demographics.
• Composite Reliability: In structural equation modeling implementations, composite reliability ($
  ho_c$) routinely exceeds .90, far surpassing the standard psychometric adequacy threshold of .70.

Test-Retest Stability

Because the ASS is designed to assess state-like efficacy in response to immediate cognitive framing, it exhibits high sensitivity to experimental shifts. However, in short-term control conditions where no interventions or framing alterations are introduced (e.g., 48-hour re-test intervals), the scale exhibits high stability ($r_{tt} = .81, p < .001$), confirming that the measure captures genuine expectations rather than random response error.

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive structural analysis confirms that the Anticipated Saving Success scale operates as a clean, unidimensional latent construct.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale validation, exploratory factor analysis utilizing principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation with oblique rotation yielded a single unrotated factor:

• Eigenvalue Structure: The primary factor yielded an eigenvalue of approximately 2.48, accounting for roughly 82.7% of the total variance across the three items. The second factor exhibited an eigenvalue of 0.31, far below the Kaiser-Guttman threshold of 1.0, decisively confirming unidimensionality.
• Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings across the three items were exceptionally high: Item 1 (.88), Item 2 (.93), and Item 3 (.91).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations evaluating the fit of the single-factor model against empirical data have consistently yielded exemplary goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Reported values typically reach .99 to 1.00 (values $ge .95$ indicate superior fit).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Consistently exceeds .98.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Point estimates range between .02 and .04, with the upper bound of the 90% confidence interval remaining below .06, indicating negligible residual error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values remain below .02, reinforcing model fit.

These factor analytic findings verify that the cognitive assessment of personal confidence (Item 1) and subjective probability (Items 2 and 3) form a unified latent factor without multidimensional splitting or correlated error terms.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structured technical characteristics of the Anticipated Saving Success scale are outlined below:

• Instrument Name: Anticipated Saving Success (ASS)
• Primary Authors: Dr. Gülden Ülkümen and Dr. Amar Cheema (2011)
• Psychometric Structure: Unidimensional reflective scale
• Number of Items: 3 items
• Construct Measured: Domain-specific, forward-looking financial self-efficacy and perceived subjective probability of saving goal achievement
• Response Scale: 7-point response scale (1 = Not at all confident / Very unlikely, 7 = Extremely confident / Very likely)
• Item Content:
  • Item 1: How confident are you that you will be able to save this amount in the next [time period / e.g., week]? (1 = Not at all confident, 7 = Extremely confident)
  • Item 2: How likely is it that you will be able to save this amount in the next [time period / e.g., week]? (1 = Very unlikely, 7 = Very likely)
  • Item 3: How likely do you think you are to achieve your personal saving goal in the next [time period / e.g., week]? (1 = Very unlikely, 7 = Very likely)
• Scoring and Index Calculation Rules:
  • No reverse scoring is required; all three items are framed positively.
  • An overall anticipated saving success index is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of the three completed items: $$\text{ASS Index} = \frac{\text{Item 1} + \text{Item 2} + \text{Item 3}}{3}$$
  • Composite scores range from 1.0 to 7.0, where higher scores reflect greater perceived feasibility and self-regulatory confidence toward the focal saving objective.
• Administration Time: Less than 60 seconds.
• Target Population: Consumers, experimental participants, financial counseling clients, and banking users aged 18 and older.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Anticipated Saving Success scale was formally introduced to the academic community in 2011 via the Journal of Marketing Research. As an academic psychometric measure published within peer-reviewed scientific literature, the instrument is widely accessible for academic, scientific, and educational research purposes without licensing fees, under standard scholarly fair-use principles.

Researchers conducting non-commercial scientific investigations do not require formal explicit written permission, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and bibliographic citation are accorded to the original authors (Ülkümen & Cheema, 2011). Organizations, commercial financial institutions, or technology developers seeking to embed the scale into proprietary commercial software, algorithmic financial wellness platforms, or fee-generating assessment suites should consult the copyright policies of the American Marketing Association (AMA) or contact the primary authors directly regarding commercial usage permissions.

12. References

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
• Cheema, A., & Soman, D. (2006). Malleable mental accounting: The effect of flexibility on the effectiveness of partition, budget, and savings goals. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(4), 570–577. https://doi.org/10.1086/500488
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
• Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004). High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72(2), 271–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x
• Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963
• Ülkümen, G., & Cheema, A. (2011). Framing goals to influence personal savings: The role of specificity and construal level. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(6), 958–969. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.09.0494

13. Items of the Scale