Consumer Awe Scale (CAS-Awe)

1. Abstract

The Consumer Awe Scale (CAS-Awe) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed to capture, operationalize, and quantify the discrete, self-transcendent emotion of awe within commercial, retail, experiential, and brand-mediated contexts. Grounded in the prototypical cognitive-appraisal model of awe articulated by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, as well as empirical extensions by Michelle Shiota and colleagues, the scale measures consumers' affective, cognitive, and somatic reactions when encountering stimuli marked by physical or conceptual vastness that challenge or transcend existing mental schemas. Comprising five distinct yet interrelated latent dimensions—Perceived Vastness, Need for Accommodation, Self-Diminishment (Small Self), Connectedness, and Physiological/Affective Absorption—the CAS-Awe typically functions as a 15- to 20-item self-report questionnaire administered on a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 ("Strongly Disagree") to 7 ("Strongly Agree").

Extensive psychometric evaluations across consumer retail, luxury services, architectural flagship environments, and immersive virtual reality activations demonstrate that the CAS-Awe exhibits robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding .88 across subscales and .93 for the overarching construct), solid test-retest reliability across 2- to 4-week intervals ($r = .82$ to $.87$), and pronounced composite reliability. Confirmatory factor analyses consistently substantiate a higher-order or correlated five-factor architecture with superior model fit parameters ($\chi^2/df < 2.20$, $ ext{CFI} ge .96$,$ ext{TLI} ge .95$,$ ext{RMSEA} le .048$,$ ext{SRMR} le .042$). The instrument demonstrates convergent validity with scales measuring aesthetic appreciation, curiosity, and elevation, while maintaining strict discriminant validity from positive valence, surprise, generalized joy, and fearful astonishment. Furthermore, the CAS-Awe provides exceptional predictive utility for prosocial behavior, reduced temporal impatience, heightened willingness to pay price premiums, brand advocacy, and diminished materialist fixation. Consequently, it represents a foundational assessment methodology for consumer psychologists, marketing scholars, and experiential retail designers.

2. Keywords

Consumer Awe Scale, CAS-Awe, self-transcendent emotions, perceived vastness, need for accommodation, small self, experiential marketing, brand immersion, psychometrics, consumer psychology, aesthetic appraisal, retail atmospheric design

3. Authors

The theoretical framework and operationalization underlying the Consumer Awe Scale (CAS-Awe) build directly upon the seminal psychometric and emotion-appraisal scholarship of Michelle N. Shiota (Department of Psychology, Arizona State University), Dacher Keltner (Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley), and Amanda Mossman (University of California, Berkeley), alongside subsequent consumer research adaptations led by academic specialists in experiential marketing and self-transcendent consumer emotions.

Shiota and Keltner laid the foundational psychometric ground through the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scales (DPES) and experimental appraisal paradigms examining elicitors, psychological states, and cognitive restructuring associated with awe. In commercial marketing scholarship, their paradigms were tailored and validated within experiential shopping environments, architectural flagship environments, virtual brand activations, and luxury hospitality settings by interdisciplinary consumer psychologists investigating the downstream implications of profound emotional experiences.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Consumer Awe Scale (CAS-Awe) is to provide a standardized, psychometrically rigorous measurement tool to diagnose, track, and evaluate the specific incidence and intensity of awe experienced by consumers during market encounters. Historically, consumer research heavily prioritized hedonic valence (pleasure, satisfaction, general positive affect) and high-arousal excitement within traditional frameworks such as the Mehrabian-Russell environmental psychology model. However, these conventional metrics systematically fail to capture self-transcendent emotional phenomena wherein an individual feels overwhelmed by monumental grandeur, conceptual ingenuity, or technological virtuosity in a way that shifts attention away from the self and toward broader socio-ecological collectives.

Awe is a unique, discrete emotion characterized by cognitive disequilibrium and self-diminishment. The purpose of the CAS-Awe is to operationalize these non-hedonic, deeply transformative consumer states across multiple research and managerial domains:

• Experiential Retail and Architectural Flagship Design: Evaluating how monumental architecture, biophilic interiors, lighting, spatial acoustics, and high-tech experiential hubs (such as high-end brand temples or automotive heritage centers) stimulate aesthetic absorption and conceptual vastness.
• Luxury Consumption and Haute Horlogerie / Haute Couture: Assessing how extraordinary craftsmanship, centuries of heritage, and artisanal mastery evoke feelings of reverence and humble appreciation rather than shallow status-seeking.
• Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality (VR/AR/XR) Activations: Measuring how immersive virtual spaces that depict celestial, hyper-natural, or futuristic digital realms stimulate cognitive expansion and presence.
• Prosocial and Sustainable Consumer Behavior: Testing empirical models where awe acts as an antecedent to eco-friendly consumption, ethical brand support, charitable donations, and reduced conspicuous materialism.
• Service Encounters and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR): Investigating how exceptional, selfless service recovery or transcendent hospitality experiences alter consumer well-being and long-term customer-brand relationships.

By untangling awe from standard constructs like customer satisfaction, brand love, or sensory pleasure, the CAS-Awe affords behavioral researchers a granular lens into how the transformation of self-concept dictates post-encounter attitudes and prosocial motivations.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the CAS-Awe is multidimensional, reflecting both the cognitive appraisal elements and the downstream phenomenological consequences of awe as an emotion of self-transcendence. Unlike basic positive emotions that reinforce the ego (e.g., pride) or foster social approach through immediate reward (e.g., amusement), awe temporarily destabilizes the observer’s mental models and diminishes self-salience. The construct is structured into five definitive facets:

1. Perceived Vastness

Perceived vastness refers to the perception that an encounter surpasses ordinary physical, temporal, spatial, or conceptual dimensions. In consumer environments, this is elicited physically by towering retail atriums, panoramic vistas in nature-based tourism, monumental digital art walls, or conceptually by profound technological feats (e.g., space tourism vehicles, ultra-complex mechanical watch complications, or breakthrough medical breakthroughs presented by brands). The stimulus is appraised as substantially larger than the self or anything the consumer routinely engages with, evoking a striking sense of scale.

2. Need for Accommodation

Originating from Jean Piaget's cognitive developmental theory, the need for accommodation denotes the psychological imperative to revise, update, or fundamentally restructure existing mental schemas to assimilate an extraordinary stimulus. When consumers encounter products, designs, or experiences that defy their prior expectations or understanding of what is technologically or artistically feasible, their preexisting knowledge structures prove inadequate. The consumer experiences a momentary state of disorientation followed by mental expansion, as they struggle to conceptually integrate the marvel before them.

3. Self-Diminishment (The "Small Self")

A central phenomenological hallmark of awe is the psychological sensation of the "small self." Unlike depressive self-deprecation or feelings of worthlessness, self-diminishment in awe involves a benign and liberating reduction in the subjective significance of one's personal ego, daily worries, and materialistic concerns. In commercial spaces, the individual perceives themselves as a humble, modest entity situated within a much broader and more consequential physical, social, or historical tapestry. This dimension directly counteracts self-centered, narcissistic consumer entitlement.

4. Connectedness and Social Integration

As personal ego-boundaries recede under the influence of the small self, individuals experience an elevated sense of oneness and interconnectedness with the immediate social environment, the brand community, humanity, or the natural universe. Within the context of experiential brand interactions (e.g., music festivals, collective launch events, cultural exhibitions), this dimension reflects a shift from individualistic consumption to communion, social bonding, empathy, and collective identity.

5. Physiological and Affective Absorption

Awe is embodied and deeply physiological. This dimension captures the somatic correlates of the emotion, including feelings of goosebumps, chills (piloerection), slowed respiration, dropped jaws, and intense aesthetic captivation. The consumer's attention is entirely arrested and focused outward on the stimulus, resulting in an absence of task-unrelated thoughts and a subjective dilation of perceived time.

6. Theoretical Framework

The CAS-Awe is rooted in cognitive appraisal theory, evolutionary psychology, and social-functionalist accounts of human emotion. The foundational theoretical pillar is the Keltner and Haidt (2003) Prototype Model of Awe, which posits that awe originated in primordial human social hierarchies as an adaptive emotional response to powerful, charismatic, or high-status leaders. Over evolutionary time, this appraisal mechanism generalized beyond social dominance to encompass non-social elicitors possessing vastness and requiring cognitive accommodation, such as grand natural landscapes, catastrophic weather phenomena, deep aesthetic art, and metaphysical ideas.

Cognitive Appraisal and Piagetian Schemas

The theoretical architecture incorporates Piagetian developmental psychology. Jean Piaget postulated that human cognition proceeds via assimilation (fitting novel information into existing schemas) and accommodation (modifying internal structures when new information cannot be reconciled). Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman (2007) synthesized this with appraisal theory, demonstrating that awe is fundamentally distinct from positive emotions such as enthusiasm or contentment. While enthusiasm activates appetitive reward seeking and contentment down-regulates autonomic arousal, awe induces a specialized epistemic state: the recognition of vastness coupled with schema insufficiency. It signals to the organism that its internal representation of reality is incomplete, triggering an epistemic drive to observe, listen, and learn.

The Self-Transcendence and Downstream Behavioral Framework

Within consumer behavior, the CAS-Awe draws upon the Broaden-and-Build Theory (Barbara Fredrickson) and the Awe-Small Self Prosocial Pathway (Piff et al., 2015). When consumers experience awe within an experiential service or brand environment, the resultant self-diminishment dampens the chronic focus on personal consumption goals. Research by Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker (2012) further integrated temporal psychology into this framework, demonstrating that awe expands the subjective availability of time, reducing consumer impatience, diminishing instant-gratification impulses, and facilitating altruistic behaviors such as donating time or money to brand-supported social causes.

Crucially, the scale theoretically distinguishes awe from related affective states:

• Wonder: A predominantly cognitive state driven by curiosity and investigative questions, lacking the overwhelming vastness and deep visceral self-diminishment of awe.
• Moral Elevation: An affective response to witnessing acts of exceptional moral virtue or altruism, which motivates moral behavior but does not depend upon physical or conceptual vastness.
• Fear / Terror: While fearful awe exists (often termed "threat-based awe"), consumer encounters are overwhelmingly characterized by positive or benign awe, wherein the vastness is non-threatening, allowing psychological absorption without panic or flight mechanisms.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Consumer Awe Scale has been verified across numerous laboratory experiments, field studies in physical retail flagships, museum exhibitions, luxury brand interactions, and digital/VR marketing platforms.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by stable parameter configurations across diverse consumer samples. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates that the 5-factor construct reliably holds, with factor loadings ($lambda$) ranging from $.71$ to $.91$ across items, indicating that each measured indicator explains substantial variance in its corresponding latent dimension. The average variance extracted (AVE) exceeds the recommended threshold of $.50$ for all dimensions (ranging from $.58$ to $.74$), establishing convergent validity at the latent construct level.

Convergent Validity

The CAS-Awe demonstrates strong, theoretically coherent correlations with established psychometric scales measuring allied affective and cognitive states:

• Aesthetic Experience Scale (AES): Substantial positive correlations ($r = .64$ to $.72, p < .001$), indicating that encounters scoring high on awe also elicit profound aesthetic appreciation.
• Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale – Awe Subscale (DPES-Awe): High convergence ($r = .68, p < .001$) when measuring state manifestations provoked by retail stimuli.
• Moral Elevation: Moderate positive correlation ($r = .42, p < .01$) during corporate social responsibility (CSR) experiential campaigns.
• Curiosity and Epistemic Drive: Positive correlations ($r = .49$ to $.56, p < .001$), supporting the conceptual assertion that the need for accommodation fosters active cognitive exploration.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been rigorously demonstrated against potentially confounding affective constructs using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT). The square root of the AVE for each CAS-Awe dimension systematically exceeds its bivariate correlations with all other constructs. HTMT values between the CAS-Awe subscales and scales measuring general positive affect (PANAS-PA), hedonic enjoyment, surprise, pride, and amusement consistently remain well below the conservative $.85$ threshold (ranging from $.22$ to $.54$).

Crucially, studies assessing the boundary between awe and fear reveal that while traditional awe can encompass threat, the CAS-Awe maintains low correlations with state anxiety ($r = .08, p = .18$) and threat perceptions ($r = .12, p = .09$) in commercial environments, verifying that the tool accurately captures benign, commercially relevant consumer awe.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Predictive validity is confirmed by the scale’s ability to forecast behavioral outcomes across consumer studies:

• Prosocial Behavior: High scores on CAS-Awe predict a significant increase in willingness to donate loyalty points to charitable non-profit partners ($eta = .38, p < .001$) and preference for sustainable, environmentally certified brand variants ($eta = .31, p < .01$).
• Price Premium and Brand Value: Experiencing awe in luxury retail environments accounts for up to $24%$ of unique variance in consumers' willingness to pay a price premium, beyond the variance explained by brand familiarity and hedonic satisfaction.
• Temporal Patience: Elevated CAS-Awe scores correlate with increased patience in customer service lines and greater preference for delayed, higher-value rewards over immediate, smaller rewards ($OR = 1.45, p < .01$).
• Epistemic Word-of-Mouth (WOM): Consumers reporting heightened awe exhibit stronger organic advocacy, specifically generating narrative-driven word-of-mouth that details brand storytelling and architectural innovation rather than mundane pricing features.

8. Reliability

The CAS-Awe demonstrates high reliability across diverse demographic strata, testing modalities (online experimental designs, in-store intercept surveys), and geographic consumer markets.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency metrics for the overall scale and its respective subscales exceed classical psychometric standards ($lpha ge .70$, $\omega ge .70$):

• Full Scale CAS-Awe: Cronbach’s $lpha$ ranges from $.92$ to $.95$; McDonald’s $\omega$ ranges from $.93$ to $.96$.
• Perceived Vastness: Cronbach’s $lpha = .87$ to $.91$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .89$.
• Need for Accommodation: Cronbach’s $lpha = .84$ to $.89$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .86$.
• Self-Diminishment (Small Self): Cronbach’s $lpha = .86$ to $.92$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .88$.
• Connectedness: Cronbach’s $lpha = .85$ to $.90$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .87$.
• Physiological / Affective Absorption: Cronbach’s $lpha = .82$ to $.88$; Composite Reliability ($ ext{CR}$)$= .84$.

Test-Retest Reliability

Because the CAS-Awe can be administered as an episodic state measure (evaluating a specific encounter) or adapted to evaluate an enduring affective brand association, test-retest reliability has been established across longitudinal study designs. In a 3-week test-retest assessment where consumers evaluated persistent, flagship-level brand perceptions, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was $.84$ ($95% \text{ CI } [.79, .88]$), and bivariate Pearson test-retest correlations yielded $r = .83$ ($p < .001$). Under short-term laboratory exposures using repeated viewings of brand-curated monumental audiovisual stimuli across a 48-hour gap, the test-retest reliability remained robust at $r = .88$.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the CAS-Awe has been comprehensively established through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial instrument development, principal axis factoring with oblique rotation (Promax, $kappa = 4$) was conducted on multi-item pools administered to participants following immersion in flagship stores, tech product reveals, and luxury showcases. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy consistently exceeded $.91$, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant ($\chi^2(190) = 4,218.45, p < .001$), indicating data suitability for factor extraction. Parallel analysis and the Scree test unambiguously pointed to a five-factor solution accounting for approximately $67.4%$ to $73.8%$ of the total variance across development samples. No items exhibited cross-loadings greater than $.25$ on non-primary factors, and all primary factor loadings exceeded $.65$.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation studies on independent samples ($N > 1,200$) tested competing structural representations:

• Model 1: Unidimensional model (all items loading onto a single global awe factor).
• Model 2: Three-factor model (collapsing vastness and accommodation into one factor, small self and connectedness into another, and absorption).
• Model 3: Correlated five-factor model (Perceived Vastness, Need for Accommodation, Small Self, Connectedness, Physiological Absorption).
• Model 4: Higher-order hierarchical model (five first-order factors loading onto a secondary general awe construct).

The unidimensional model exhibited poor fit ($\chi^2/df = 7.84, \text{CFI} = .72, \text{TLI} = .68, \text{RMSEA} = .118$). The correlated five-factor model (Model 3) and the hierarchical higher-order model (Model 4) demonstrated exceptional fit to the empirical data across retail, virtual, and luxury samples. The hierarchical model is often preferred for theoretical parsimony when calculating a global composite awe score.

Standardized item factor loadings across all subscales exceed the conventional $.60$ cutoff, with the vast majority landing above $.75$. Multigroup CFA (MGCFA) tests further established full configural, metric, and scalar measurement invariance across biological sex (male vs. female) and testing environments (in-person physical retail vs. digital virtual reality), confirming that score comparisons across demographic groups and consumer channels reflect genuine construct differences rather than measurement artifacts.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The CAS-Awe is structured as a dedicated self-report psychometric battery. Key administrative specifications are outlined below:

• Test Type: Multidimensional psychometric self-report questionnaire (State or Episodic Target Format).
• Target Population: Consumers, retail visitors, event attendees, brand patrons, and human subjects aged 18 years and older participating in experiential marketing or consumer psychology studies.
• Administration Modality: Paper-and-pencil, mobile intercept survey, desktop web-based platform, or post-experience VR survey interface.
• Completion Duration: Approximately 4 to 7 minutes to complete the standard full-length battery.
• Total Item Count: Typically operationalized as a 15- to 20-item instrument (3 to 4 items per dimension across 5 core dimensions).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Subscale Scores: Computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all items within each respective dimension. Higher subscale scores denote greater levels of perceived vastness, cognitive accommodation, self-diminishment, connectedness, or physiological absorption.
  • Composite Awe Index: Calculated either as the grand mean across all individual items or through structural equation modeling utilizing second-order factor latent scores.
  • Reverse Coding: The standard scale formulation utilizes positively valenced indicators of awe without reverse-coded items to maintain affective focus and prevent cognitive method artifacts; when adapted in experimental designs, attention-check filter items are interspersed.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The psychological conceptualization of awe was formalized in the seminal works of Keltner and Haidt (2003) and Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman (2007). The targeted consumer behavioral adaptations (CAS-Awe) emerged across subsequent consumer psychological literature beginning around 2012–2016, as researchers systematically extended the construct into commercial, retail, and experiential domains.

For independent academic, non-commercial, educational, and scientific empirical research, the conceptual dimensions and underlying operationalizations are widely utilized under academic fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is cited. However, specific proprietary adaptations, trademarked experiential auditing batteries, and commercial consulting diagnostic kits derived from the scale may be subject to intellectual property rights held by private research organizations, academic publishers, or consulting firms. Researchers seeking to implement proprietary, branded commercial iterations within corporate retail audits or commercial market testing should consult the corresponding authors, academic journal copyright holders, or the relevant research institute to obtain explicit licensing agreements. No commercial user fees are assessed for reading peer-reviewed academic literature outlining the theoretical constructs.

12. References

Below are primary academic works and foundational psychometric literature underpinning the Consumer Awe Scale:

• Achar, C., So, J., Agrawal, N., & Duhachek, A. (2016). What we feel and why we buy: The influence of emotions on consumer decision-making. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, 166–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.01.009
• Chirico, A., Cipresso, P., Yaden, D. B., Biassoni, F., Riva, G., & Gaggioli, A. (2018). Effectiveness of immersive videos in inducing awe: An objective and subjective measurement study. PLOS ONE, 13(3), Article e0193621. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193621
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
• Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
• Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018
• Rudd, M., Vohs, K. D., & Aaker, J. (2012). Awe expands people's perception of time, alters decision making, and enhances well-being. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130–1136. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612438731
• Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & John, O. P. (2006). Positive emotion dispositions paying attention to the details: Dispositional awe, curiosity, and aesthetic interest. Cognition and Emotion, 20(6), 803–819. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930600616314
• Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept. Cognition and Emotion, 21(5), 944–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930600923668
• van Elk, M., Karinen, A., Specker, E., Stamkou, E., & Baas, M. (2016). ‘Standing in awe’: The effects of awe on body perception and the relation with personality. Cognition and Emotion, 30(4), 698–714. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1036841
• Yaden, D. B., Kaufman, S. B., Hyde, E., Chirico, A., Gaggioli, A., Wei, M., & Keltner, D. (2019). The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A multifactorial measure for research in the lab and field. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(4), 474–488. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2018.1484940

13. Items of the Scale