Attitude Toward “Green” Products (Environmental Benefits)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward “Green” Products (Environmental Benefits) scale (abbreviated as ATGPB) is a focused psychometric instrument designed to measure a consumer’s cognitive belief in the tangible ecological efficacy of eco-friendly and sustainable merchandise. Developed by communication and marketing scholar Chingching Chang (2011) as part of an investigation into consumer ambivalence toward sustainable consumption, the instrument isolates the utilitarian, functional, and instrumental beliefs that individuals hold regarding whether purchasing and using green products genuinely mitigates environmental degradation and curbs pollution. In contrast to multidimensional inventories that conflate environmental outcome expectations with aesthetic evaluations, moral self-identity, perceived economic sacrifice, or symbolic social status, the ATGPB specifically appraises perceived environmental utility.

The scale consists of three items evaluated on a seven-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), with one item negatively keyed to mitigate acquiescence response bias. Across empirical investigations, the ATGPB exhibits a unidimensional factor structure with robust psychometric properties, demonstrating high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging between .82 and .88) and strong convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Factor analytic evaluations across varied experimental samples confirm high factor loadings (exceeding .75 across all items) and optimal model fit indices. The scale serves as a critical diagnostic tool within environmental psychology, consumer behavior, and green advertising, allowing researchers to examine the interplay between positive environmental beliefs and negative consumer perceptions, such as trade-offs in product performance, quality, or price.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward Green Products, environmental benefits, perceived consumer effectiveness, sustainable consumption, green advertising, consumer ambivalence, instrumental environmental beliefs, pro-environmental behavior, psychometrics, ecological product attitudes, eco-efficiency, green marketing

3. Authors

The Attitude Toward “Green” Products (Environmental Benefits) scale was conceptualized and validated by:

• Chingching Chang, Ph.D. — Distinguished Professor, Department of Advertising, College of Communication, National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan. Her research focuses on advertising persuasion, consumer psychology, health and environmental communication, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying mixed emotions and consumer ambivalence.

Correspondence regarding the original empirical research may be directed to Chingching Chang through National Chengchi University’s Department of Advertising, or via academic correspondence channels associated with the Journal of Advertising.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward “Green” Products (Environmental Benefits) scale is to capture a consumer’s specific instrumental appraisal of the environmental impact of sustainable product offerings. In contemporary marketplace environments, consumer attitudes toward ecologically marketed products are rarely monolithic. Instead, consumer decision-making is characterized by widespread psychological ambivalence: individuals frequently applaud the ecological intentions of green brands while simultaneously harboring deep skepticism regarding their functional reliability, performance parity, and tangible societal contributions.

To dissect this ambivalence, researchers required a targeted, psychometrically valid instrument capable of disentangling general pro-environmental values from specific product-level environmental efficacy beliefs. The ATGPB was developed to isolate the belief that purchasing and using green products yields genuine, verifiable ecological advantages—such as pollution abatement, resource conservation, and environmental protection. Rather than assessing whether a consumer identifies as an environmentalist or finds green product packaging visually appealing, the ATGPB answers a fundamental operational question: Does the consumer believe that these products make an authentic environmental difference?

In applied research and experimental psychology, the ATGPB serves several vital functions:

• Deconstructing Consumer Ambivalence: In predictive modeling, consumer attitudes toward green consumption are often broken down into competing vectors: perceived environmental benefits versus perceived performance or financial liabilities. The ATGPB operationalizes the positive, environmental benefit dimension, enabling researchers to calculate objective or subjective ambivalence scores when paired with scales measuring perceived functional trade-offs.
• Evaluating Green Advertising Persuasion: The scale enables advertising and communication researchers to determine whether specific rhetorical strategies (e.g., gain-framed vs. loss-framed messaging, concrete claims vs. abstract claims, third-party eco-certifications) effectively strengthen consumers’ belief in a product’s ecological utility without triggering skepticism or greenwashing accusations.
• Market Segmentation and Policy Diagnostics: Consumer researchers and public policy analysts use the instrument to identify segments of the population that exhibit high environmental concern but low confidence in consumer-based environmental solutions. Identifying this gap helps policymakers discern whether educational initiatives should focus on raising environmental awareness or establishing product-level credibility and performance verification.
• Controlling for Baseline Beliefs: In experimental designs evaluating novel sustainable technologies, energy-efficient appliances, or organic goods, the ATGPB serves as an essential baseline covariate or mediator, testing whether consumer willingness to adopt new products is mediated by instrumental ecological beliefs.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the ATGPB is instrumental environmental benefit attitude toward green goods. Within the broader taxonomy of social psychology and attitude theory, an attitude represents an individual’s overall evaluation of an object, concept, or behavior across a spectrum of favorability or unfavorability. The ATGPB focuses on a highly specific, cognitive subcomponent of this evaluative structure: the subjective probability that performing a behavior (purchasing/using green products) will produce a designated outcome (amelioration of environmental harm).

Instrumental Efficacy versus General Environmental Concern

A frequent error in early sustainable marketing scholarship was equating general environmental values (such as biospheric value orientations or general concern about climate change) with positive attitudes toward commercial green products. Empirical evidence has continually documented the “green attitude-behavior gap,” wherein consumers express profound concern for the planet yet routinely purchase conventional, polluting alternatives. Psychologically, this gap occurs in part because general environmental concern does not automatically translate into the belief that consumer products serve as an effective mechanism for planetary remediation.

The ATGPB isolates this instrumental domain. A consumer may possess high ecocentric concern while maintaining near-zero belief in the efficacy of green commercial goods, viewing green consumerism as corporate greenwashing or an inadequate response to systemic ecological collapse. Conversely, another consumer may evaluate green products as potent, pragmatic instruments for reducing pollution. The ATGPB targets this instrumental outcome expectancy.

Core Cognitive Dimensions Assessed by the Construct

Although the ATGPB is structurally unidimensional, the underlying latent construct encompasses three interrelated cognitive appraisals:

• Environmental Preservation Utility: The conviction that the systematic purchase and consumption of green commodities actively safeguards natural ecosystems, prevents habitat destruction, and conserves planetary resources.
• Pollution Mitigation Efficacy: The belief that green product alternatives tangibly reduce environmental contaminants, greenhouse gas emissions, chemical waste, and landfill toxicity relative to their conventional counterparts.
• Authentic Ecological Impact (Absence of Inefficacy): The cognitive rejection of the premise that green consumerism is inherently futile, superficial, or trivial. The inclusion of a reverse-scored item operationalizes this dimension, capturing whether respondents dismiss green goods as having no meaningful environmental impact.

Differentiation from Adjacent Psychometric Constructs

To prevent conceptual contamination, the construct measured by the ATGPB must be explicitly demarcated from neighboring psychological dimensions:

• Perceived Consumer Effectiveness (PCE): Pioneered by Ellen, Wiener, and Cobb-Walgren (1991), PCE evaluates an individual’s self-referential conviction that their personal actions can combat environmental problems (e.g., “It is worthless for the individual consumer to do anything about pollution”). While PCE focuses on the agency of the self, the ATGPB evaluates the systemic efficacy of the product category itself.
• Subjective Product Performance / Quality Beliefs: Consumers routinely evaluate green products across traditional functional dimensions such as cleaning power, mechanical durability, sensory appeal, and financial value. The ATGPB does not evaluate whether a laundry detergent cleans clothes effectively or whether an electric vehicle drives smoothly; it evaluates whether those products protect the natural biosphere.
• Moral and Symbolic Identity: The ATGPB is non-moralized; it does not measure whether buying green makes one feel virtuous, ethically superior, or socially esteemed (warm-glow or conspicuous conservation effects). It focuses strictly on environmental outcomes.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ATGPB is grounded in several foundational paradigms within social psychology, decision science, and consumer research, including the Theory of Planned Behavior, Expectancy-Value Theory, and modern conceptualizations of attitudinal ambivalence.

Expectancy-Value Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior

Under Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen’s Expectancy-Value model (and its subsequent formalization within the Theory of Planned Behavior; Ajzen, 1991), overall attitude toward a behavior ($A_{B}$) is a mathematical function of an individual’s salient behavioral beliefs ($b_i$) regarding the consequences of that behavior, weighted by the subjective evaluation ($e_i$) of those outcomes:

A_B = Σ b_i e_i

Applying this model to sustainable consumerism, the belief that buying green products protects the environment and curbs pollution represents a core salient behavioral belief ($b_i$). Because environmental preservation is almost universally assigned a positive valence ($e_i > 0$) across consumer cohorts, variations in positive attitude toward green products are heavily driven by the subjective probability ($b_i$) that green goods actually achieve these environmental claims. The ATGPB directly captures this subjective probability parameter.

Attitudinal Ambivalence Frameworks

The primary theoretical impetus for Chang’s (2011) formulation was the conceptual model of consumer ambivalence. Historically, psychometric instruments treated attitudes as bipolar continua stretching from highly negative to highly positive. However, contemporary social cognition literature (e.g., Priester & Petty, 1996; Thompson, Zanna, & Griffin, 1995) demonstrates that individuals can hold separate, simultaneously active positive and negative evaluations toward an identical attitude object.

In sustainable consumption, ambivalence is widespread. Consumers frequently harbor positive evaluations toward green goods due to their environmental benevolence, while simultaneously maintaining negative evaluations due to perceived functional inferiority (e.g., lower cleansing power, higher prices, poorer aesthetics). To accurately measure this psychological tension, researchers must assess the positive evaluative dimension (environmental benefits) separately from the negative evaluative dimension (functional/financial sacrifices). The ATGPB was constructed to isolate this positive benefit component with minimal measurement error, allowing it to be contrasted against negative perceived attributes in structural equation models of ambivalence.

Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) Theory

The instrument also integrates with Paul Stern’s (2000) Value-Belief-Norm theory of environmentalism. VBN theory posits that pro-environmental behaviors flow sequentially from biospheric and altruistic values to ecological worldviews (e.g., the New Ecological Paradigm), which in turn generate an Awareness of Consequences (AC) and an Ascription of Responsibility (AR), ultimately triggering personal pro-environmental norms. Within this causal chain, the ATGPB represents a concrete manifestation of Awareness of Consequences applied to commercial choice: the belief that purchasing decisions hold tangible, causal consequences for planetary integrity.

7. Validity

The validity of the ATGPB has been established across multiple empirical studies using diverse consumer samples and experimental manipulations.

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was achieved through rigorous item development based on a review of environmental communication and sustainable marketing literature. The items directly capture the two primary mechanisms through which consumer products affect ecological health: macro-level environmental protection and targeted pollution reduction. The items were vetted to avoid conflation with price, functional quality, or personal status, ensuring that the scale exhibits high face validity for measuring instrumental environmental efficacy.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been repeatedly demonstrated by evaluating the association between the ATGPB and conceptually related constructs:

• Perceived Consumer Effectiveness (PCE): Across validation samples, the ATGPB correlates positively and significantly with general PCE scales (typical correlations range between r = .52 and r = .68, p < .001). Individuals who believe that individual actions make a societal difference also score higher on the belief that green products deliver environmental benefits.
• Green Purchase Intentions: The scale correlates strongly with self-reported intentions to purchase sustainable, organic, and recycled products (r values typically between .45 and .61, p < .001).
• Environmental Advertising Believability: When participants are exposed to environmental advertising appeals, scores on the ATGPB show significant positive correlations with the perceived truthfulness and credibility of the advertisement’s ecological claims.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been confirmed through statistical differentiation from adjacent but distinct dimensions:

• Perceived Functional Sacrifices: In Chang’s (2011) studies, factor analyses consistently separated the ATGPB from items measuring perceived product efficacy trade-offs (e.g., beliefs that green products are less potent or reliable). The correlation between environmental benefit attitudes and functional sacrifice beliefs is typically weakly negative or non-significant (r between -.05 and -.22), demonstrating that these are independent evaluative dimensions rather than opposite ends of a single continuum.
• General Environmental Concern: While correlating moderately with general ecological concern (e.g., Dunlap et al.’s New Ecological Paradigm), the ATGPB shares less than 30% of its variance with broad environmental value measures, confirming that instrumental product efficacy is distinct from abstract ecological worldviews.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): In Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) models, the AVE for the ATGPB typically exceeds .65, outstripping the squared inter-construct correlations with competing marketing variables and satisfying the Fornell-Larcker criterion.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The ATGPB exhibits high predictive and criterion-related validity. In experimental investigations manipulating advertising framing (e.g., Chang, 2011), the ATGPB reliably predicts consumer brand attitudes ($A_b$), purchase intentions ($PI$), and willingness to pay a price premium. When included in regression models alongside functional quality beliefs, the ATGPB accounts for substantial incremental variance in consumer choice behavior ($R^2$ changes between .14 and .28, p < .001), confirming its predictive utility.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the ATGPB has been extensively documented in peer-reviewed consumer psychology and advertising research.

Internal Consistency

The internal consistency of the three-item instrument consistently exceeds the conventional psychometric threshold of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994):

• In Chang’s (2011) foundational research, the scale yielded high internal consistency across multiple independent samples, reporting Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) values of .85 in Study 1 and .88 in Study 2.
• Subsequent replications and adaptations in advertising research have documented alpha coefficients consistently situated between .82 and .91.
• Composite Reliability (CR) values calculated within Structural Equation Modeling frameworks regularly exceed .86, indicating strong internal cohesion among the three latent indicators.

Item-Total Statistics and Inter-Item Correlations

Psychometric evaluations indicate that all three items contribute meaningfully to the scale’s reliability:

• Corrected Item-Total Correlations: Values for each item generally exceed .68, well above the standard .30 cutoff, demonstrating that each statement reliably indexes the shared core construct.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Bivariate correlations among the individual items typically fall within the optimal range of r = .55 to r = .78. This indicates strong conceptual alignment without excessive redundancy or collinearity.
• Scale Variance if Item Deleted: Elimination of any of the three items results in a reduction in overall Cronbach’s alpha, supporting retention of the full three-item structure.

Test-Retest Stability

Although the ATGPB is often employed to gauge immediate responses to persuasive advertising stimuli, longitudinal and multi-wave survey administrations confirm reasonable temporal stability over two-to-four-week intervals in neutral baseline conditions (test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients typically range between r = .72 and r = .79), confirming that the instrument assesses enduring cognitive beliefs rather than momentary affective states.

9. Factor Analysis

Both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirm that the ATGPB is a unidimensional scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When subjected to EFA (using Principal Axis Factoring or Maximum Likelihood extraction with Promax or Varimax rotation) alongside items measuring other consumer perceptions (such as perceived quality sacrifices, price unfairness, and general green skepticism):

• The three ATGPB items load heavily onto a single discrete factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from 2.15 to 2.55).
• The single factor accounts for approximately 72% to 85% of the total item variance.
• Scree plot examinations exhibit a clear “elbow” after the first factor, confirming the absence of secondary dimensions.
• No cross-loadings above .25 are observed on adjacent factors such as functional performance or economic cost.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling and CFA conducted across various samples demonstrate that the single-factor measurement model exhibits good fit to empirical data. Typical goodness-of-fit indices include:

• Model Chi-Square: $\chi^2 / df le 2.0$ (frequently non-significant in modestly sized validation samples).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .98$ (frequently reaching .99 or 1.00).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .97$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .05$ (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .000 to .080).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .025$.

Standardized Factor Loadings

In CFA estimations, standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across the three manifest variables are uniformly high and statistically significant at p < .001:

• Item 1 (Protect the environment): Standardized loadings typically range from $lambda = .82$ to $.91$.
• Item 2 (Reduce pollution): Standardized loadings typically range from $lambda = .84$ to $.93$.
• Item 3 (Reverse-scored – Inefficacy): Standardized loadings typically range from $lambda = .72$ to $.84$ after reverse-transformation.

These empirical metrics confirm that the items function as reliable indicators of the underlying instrumental environmental benefit construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below is the structured overview of the administration parameters and scoring protocols for the Attitude Toward “Green” Products (Environmental Benefits) scale:

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale; domain-specific cognitive attitude measurement.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted web interview (CAWI) survey administration.
• Item Count: 3 items (2 positively keyed, 1 negatively keyed).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored from 1 to 7:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Target Population: Adult consumers (general public, experimental subject pools, commercial consumer panels). Adaptable for adolescent populations with appropriate reading comprehension.
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Step 1 (Reverse-Coding): Reverse-score Item 3 prior to scale aggregation. For a 7-point scale, the recoding transformation formula is: Recoded_Score = 8 - Original_Score (i.e., 7 becomes 1, 6 becomes 2, 5 becomes 3, 4 remains 4, 3 becomes 5, 2 becomes 6, 1 becomes 7).
  • Step 2 (Composite Score Calculation): Compute the arithmetic mean of the three items (Item 1, Item 2, and the recoded Item 3):
    
    ATGPB_Mean = (Item_1 + Item_2 + Item_3_Recoded) / 3
  • Alternatively, a summed score can be computed ranging from 3 to 21, though mean composite scoring (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00) is preferred to preserve interpretability relative to the original Likert response anchors.
• Interpretation Guidelines:
  • Scores 1.00 – 2.99: Low perceived environmental benefit; strong skepticism regarding the ecological utility of green products.
  • Scores 3.00 – 4.99: Moderate/ambivalent perceived environmental benefit; consumer is uncertain or neutral regarding whether green goods yield meaningful environmental improvements.
  • Scores 5.00 – 7.00: High perceived environmental benefit; robust conviction that green products effectively protect the environment and mitigate pollution.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Publication: 2011.
• Original Publication Source: Journal of Advertising, Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 19–32.
• Copyright Holder: American Academy of Advertising / Taylor & Francis Group.
• Commercial and Research Licensing: The scale items were published within an academic journal article for scientific research purposes. Academic researchers typically utilize the scale without financial charge under standard fair use academic conventions for non-commercial scholarly research. Commercial entities, market research firms, or corporate consultancies intending to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial diagnostics or revenue-generating assessment batteries should seek appropriate permissions through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) or Taylor & Francis licensing services.

12. References

The theoretical, psychometric, and empirical foundations of the ATGPB are supported by the following peer-reviewed literature:

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Chang, C. (2011). Feeling ambivalent about going green. Journal of Advertising, 40(4), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.2753/JOA0091-3367400402
• Dunlap, R. E., Van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A. G., & Jones, R. E. (2000). Measuring endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A revised NEP scale. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00176
• Ellen, P. S., Wiener, J. L., & Cobb-Walgren, C. (1991). The role of perceived consumer effectiveness in motivating environmentally conscious behaviors. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 10(2), 102–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/074391569101000206
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Priester, J. R., & Petty, R. E. (1996). The gradual threshold model of ambivalence: Relating the positive and negative bases of attitudes to subjective ambivalence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(3), 431–449. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.3.431
• Stern, P. C. (2000). Toward a coherent theory of environmentally significant behavior. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00175
• Thompson, M. M., Zanna, M. P., & Griffin, D. W. (1995). Let’s not be indifferent about (attitudinal) ambivalence. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 361–386). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

13. Items of the Scale