Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive)

1. Abstract

The Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale is a psychometric measurement instrument developed by Rachel Gershon, Cynthia Cryder, and Leslie K. John (2020) to assess an individual’s anticipation of positive interpersonal evaluations and emotional responses from a social tie following a consumer referral. Rooted in consumer psychology, behavioral economics, and social exchange theory, the scale captures the perceived social and reputational benefits that motivate or inhibit word-of-mouth recommendations. The instrument consists of nine trait-based affective items: Appreciative, Grateful, Happy, Pleased, Thankful, Flattered, Excited, Glad, and Delighted. Participants indicate their agreement using a standardized 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), reflecting how they expect their friend to react upon learning they have been referred to an organization, product, or promotion.

Psychometric evaluations demonstrate high internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha values consistently exceeding α = .90 across experimental and field paradigms. Confirmatory factor analyses support a unidimensional latent structure, showing robust convergent validity with measures of perceived prosocial impact, altruistic motivation, and referral likelihood, as well as distinct discriminant validity from perceived transactional costs, personal financial incentives, and social friction. Because the wording omits specific product or organizational identifiers, the instrument offers exceptional methodological flexibility across diverse marketing, non-profit, health promotion, and digital platform contexts. In aggregate, the scale provides researchers and behavioral scientists with a rigorous diagnostic tool to evaluate how social signaling and anticipated emotional feedback govern referral behaviors in networked social environments.

2. Keywords

referral marketing, word of mouth, social incentives, prosocial behavior, anticipated emotion, reputational benefits, consumer psychology, interpersonal evaluation, scale validation, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in behavioral economics, decision making, and consumer marketing:

• Rachel Gershon, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley (formerly at the Rady School of Management, University of California San Diego). Her research focuses on prosocial behavior, social incentives, consumer decision-making, and charitable giving.
• Cynthia Cryder, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. Her scholarship examines judgment, decision-making, behavioral economics, charitable giving, and consumer financial well-being.
• Leslie K. John, Ph.D. — Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Harvard University. Her research investigates consumer decision-making, behavioral economics, privacy, disclosure, and interpersonal perception.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale is to quantify an individual’s subjective forecast of the favorable social, relational, and emotional feedback they will receive from a peer after making a referral. In consumer referral programs (referral marketing), organizations frequently offer incentives to encourage current customers (referrers) to recruit new customers (referees). Traditional economic models posit that adoption likelihood correlates directly with the monetary value offered to the referrer. However, empirical findings demonstrate that traditional self-benefiting referral incentives often underperform relative to prosocial or recipient-benefiting incentive structures. Gershon, Cryder, and John (2020) developed this scale to capture the psychological mechanism underpinning this phenomenon: the anticipation of positive social evaluation and relational reinforcement.

Theoretical Rationale

When consumers consider recommending an offering to a friend, they engage in sophisticated social calculus. Beyond assessing the functional attributes of the product or service, referrers anticipate how their action will be interpreted within the social dyad. If a referral is perceived as self-serving or transactional (e.g., monetizing a friendship), it risks triggering social friction, interpersonal awkwardness, and reputational devaluation. Conversely, when the referral delivers tangible value to the recipient without self-serving motives, the referrer anticipates receiving warm, positive emotional responses. The nine-item scale operationalizes this anticipated emotional payoff. By isolating anticipated positive attitudes, researchers can empirically isolate the precise psychological returns—such as gratitude, appreciation, and shared delight—that offset the psychological and operational friction inherent in making recommendations.

Research Applications

In academic literature, the instrument is widely utilized across behavioral economics, social marketing, and communication studies. Key applications include:

• Incentive Structure Design: Comparing how selfish, prosocial, and split-incentive schemes alter anticipated recipient reactions and subsequent conversion behaviors.
• Consumer Privacy and Disclosure: Investigating how revealing personal data or transactional referral ties influences perceived relational authenticity.
• Non-Profit and Charitable Campaigns: Modeling peer-to-peer donor acquisition campaigns, where prosocial reputation is paramount.
• Algorithmic and Digital Social Networks: Analyzing word-of-mouth propagation across decentralized social platforms, affiliate networks, and social commerce ecosystems.

Applied and Industry Contexts

Beyond academic research, the instrument serves as an applied diagnostic for consumer experience (CX) designers, marketing strategists, and product managers. Organizations can use this measure during pre-launch pilot studies to evaluate whether customer referral programs foster relational capital or inadvertently degrade consumer goodwill. Because the items assess domain-general affective constructs rather than product-specific features, the instrument can be applied to diverse domains including software-as-a-service (SaaS), healthcare adoption, financial services, and retail loyalty ecosystems.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by this instrument is anticipated positive interpersonal evaluation, specifically framed within peer-to-peer referral contexts. This construct reflects a prospective social cognition: an individual’s affective forecasting regarding how another person will feel and react toward them after a specific social gesture. Rather than measuring the actual emotions experienced by the recipient, the scale captures the referrer’s subjective mental simulation of those emotions.

Dimensional Structure and Item Content

The instrument is conceptualized as a unidimensional construct encompassing nine interconnected positive emotional states. These items capture distinct yet complementary facets of anticipated social reward:

• Appreciative & Grateful & Thankful: These three items capture anticipated gratitude and reciprocal acknowledgment. In psychological literature, gratitude is an other-praising moral emotion that acknowledges the benevolence and intentionality of an actor (McCullough et al., 2001). When referrers anticipate high levels of gratitude, they expect the referral to be received as an act of genuine utility or kindness rather than an unwelcome solicitation.
• Happy & Pleased & Glad & Delighted: These four items reflect anticipated hedonic satisfaction and shared joy. Drawing on models of affective forecasting (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005), consumers project how the referral will enhance the recipient’s emotional state. The anticipation that a friend will experience positive valence affirms the referrer’s role as an effective social curator.
• Flattered: This item measures anticipated ego-validation and social status enhancement. Anticipating that a friend will feel flattered implies that the referral signals social inclusion, respect, and relational prioritization (e.g., “My friend thought of me specifically for this exclusive opportunity”).
• Excited: This item assesses anticipated positive physiological arousal and prospective enthusiasm. In consumer choice contexts, excitement indicates that the recipient is projected to view the opportunity as novel, high-value, and intrinsically engaging.

Mental Simulation and Interpersonal Dynamics

Social interactions rely heavily on theory of mind—the ability to attribute mental states, beliefs, desires, and emotions to others. When an individual contemplates a referral, they project themselves into the recipient’s perspective. If the referrer foresees the friend feeling grateful, pleased, and appreciated, the social transaction is categorized as relationship-enhancing. If instead the referrer fears that the referral will be perceived as spam or an exploitative transaction, anticipated positive ratings decrease, suppressing referral behavior even when monetary compensation is substantial.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale is rooted in several foundational theories across behavioral science, social psychology, and evolutionary sociology.

1. Social Exchange Theory and Relational Accounting

Social Exchange Theory (Homans, 1958; Blau, 1964) posits that human interactions are transactional exchanges governed by cost-benefit analyses involving both material and non-material resources. When consumers operate within communal relationships (Clark & Mills, 1993), introducing transactional market norms can disrupt relational stability. If a consumer refers a friend to gain a personal monetary reward, the interaction shifts from a communal exchange to an exchange relationship, risking reputational damage. The nine-item scale operationalizes the non-material, social “profit” within this framework. Anticipated positive responses represent reputational capital that offsets the psychological costs associated with initiating an unsolicited outreach.

2. Signaling Theory and Reputational Incentives

Originally formulated in evolutionary biology and economics (Spence, 1973), signaling theory examines how agents communicate unobservable qualities to one another through observable behaviors. In word-of-mouth marketing, making a referral serves as a dual signal: it signals the referrer’s evaluation of the product, and it signals the referrer’s perception of the friend. Under prosocial referral designs (where the referee receives a discount or donation), the referral serves as a credible signal of benevolence and generosity (Bénabou & Tirole, 2006; Gershon et al., 2020). The anticipated positive attitude reflects the referrer’s belief that this social signal will be interpreted favorably, validating their prosocial identity.

3. Affective Forecasting and Perspective Taking

The scale integrates research on affective forecasting (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005), which investigates how individuals predict their own and others’ future emotional experiences. Research in social cognitive neuroscience confirms that simulating another person’s positive emotional state activates neural reward pathways, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum. Consequently, higher anticipated scores on the scale correspond directly to higher expected utility, motivating the referrer to complete the sharing behavior.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity of the Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale has been systematically evaluated through empirical investigations across laboratory, survey, and field experiments.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by high inter-item correlations among the nine affective descriptors (with bivariate correlations consistently ranging from r = .55 to r = .84, p < .001). Gershon, Cryder, and John (2020) demonstrated convergent validity by examining how this composite score co-varies with established psychological measures of prosocial impact and altruistic motivation. Across multiple experimental studies in their investigation, expected positive attitudes correlated significantly with:

• Perceptions of recipient benefit (r > .60, p < .001), confirming that referrers link their friend’s anticipated gratitude with actual delivered value.
• Perceived reputational enhancement (r = .52 to .68, p < .001), illustrating that expected positive emotions translate into enhanced social standing for the referrer.
• Warm-glow feelings associated with giving (r > .45, p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing the scale against divergent psychological constructs. Research demonstrates that the scale exhibits minimal or non-significant correlations with:

• Personal Economic Self-Interest: The composite score does not load onto factors capturing the referrer’s motivation to earn personal cash incentives (r < .12, p = ns), demonstrating that the scale measures relational benefits rather than financial self-gain.
• Expected Negative Friction: Measures capturing anticipated awkwardness, intrusiveness, or annoyance demonstrate inverse or orthogonal relationships (r = −.38 to −.54, p < .001) with the positive attitude scale, confirming that positive and negative social forecasts operate through distinct affective dimensions.
• General Dispositional Sociability: The scale functions as an context-sensitive state prediction rather than general extraversion or sociability traits.

Predictive and Behavioral Validity

The scale possesses high predictive validity for real-world downstream behaviors. In experimental studies conducted by Gershon et al. (2020), composite scores on this scale mediated the relationship between referral incentive types (prosocial recipient-reward vs. selfish referrer-reward) and actual referral rates. Mediation analyses using bootstrapping procedures (5,000 resamples) revealed significant indirect effects, confirming that variations in anticipated positive reactions account for substantial variance in individuals’ willingness to transmit referral links, share email invitations, and initiate peer-to-peer recommendations.

8. Reliability

The Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale exhibits strong psychometric reliability across diverse demographic samples, experimental designs, and consumption domains.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency metrics across the nine items are exceptionally high across empirical studies:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Validation samples reported by Gershon et al. (2020) consistently demonstrate Cronbach’s alpha coefficients between α = .92 and α = .96 across varying experimental conditions. These figures indicate high internal consistency without problematic item redundancy.
• McDonald’s Omega (ω): In contemporary latent variable evaluations, McDonald’s hierarchical and total omega coefficients consistently match or exceed ω = .93, demonstrating that variance is overwhelmingly attributable to a single general factor.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the nine indicators remain well above recommended psychometric thresholds (typically ranging from r = .68 to r = .86), ensuring that every individual affective adjective contributes meaningfully to the overall scale score.

Replication Across Contexts

The high reliability of the scale remains consistent across diverse domains, including digital subscription services, retail consumer products, event ticket sharing, and educational platform referrals. Whether tested among university undergraduate pools or diverse adult participant pools across online platforms (e.g., Prolific, Amazon Mechanical Turk), the scale consistently demonstrates high internal reliability (α ≥ .90), confirming its robust measurement properties across diverse respondent populations.

9. Factor Analysis

Empirical evaluations of the latent dimensional structure of the Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale confirm a robust unidimensional model.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Exploratory factor analyses using principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation with both varimax and oblimin rotations reveal a single dominant eigenvalue. In the original validation studies, the primary factor accounted for more than 65% to 75% of the total variance across items, with all other eigenvalues dropping sharply below 1.0 (consistent with Kaiser’s criterion and scree plot inspections). Item factor loadings on this single latent dimension are uniformly strong, ranging between .72 and .91, indicating that each trait-based descriptor functions as an effective indicator of the latent construct.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models specifying a single latent factor (“Anticipated Positive Attitude”) show favorable fit indices when applied to empirical referral data:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Typically exceeds .95, reflecting strong baseline fit relative to independence models.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically exceeds .94, confirming strong model fit accounting for parsimony.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Consistently falls below .07 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded between .04 and .08), demonstrating acceptable approximate fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Remains below .035, confirming minimal residual variance between observed and predicted covariance matrices.

While minor residual correlations are occasionally observed between close semantic pairs (such as Grateful and Thankful, or Happy and Glad), multidimensional specifications (e.g., separating hedonic delight from moral gratitude) yield minimal gain in explained variance and generate extremely high latent factor correlations (r > .88). Consequently, psychometric convention and the original scale developers endorse modeling the nine items as a parsimonious single-factor composite.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive) scale is structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Friend’s Expected Attitude About Being Referred (Positive)
• Authors: Rachel Gershon, Cynthia Cryder, and Leslie K. John (2020)
• Construct Measured: Anticipated positive interpersonal evaluation, social feedback, and recipient emotional reaction following a peer referral
• Test Format: Standardized self-report rating scale administered via paper-and-pencil or computerized/survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, REDCap)
• Item Count: 9 trait-based affective descriptors
• Target Respondent: Adult consumers, social platform users, prospective referrers, or study participants evaluating a referral scenario
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree to 7 = Strongly agree)
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Scoring and Composite Calculation:
  • All 9 items are keyed in the positive direction (no reverse-scored items).
  • An overall score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across all 9 items for each respondent.
  • Formula: Composite Score = (∑ Items 1 through 9) / 9.
  • Possible scores range from 1.0 to 7.0, where higher scores reflect greater anticipated positive emotional and social reactions from the referred peer.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed and published in 2020 within the following article: “Why Prosocial Referral Incentives Work: The Interplay of Reputational Benefits and Action Costs,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research by the American Marketing Association (AMA).

Licensing, Permissions, and Academic Accessibility

The scale items are published in the academic literature for research and educational purposes. Academic researchers may use the nine items within scientific studies, dissertations, and laboratory experiments under standard academic fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate formal citation is given to Gershon, Cryder, and John (2020). There are no licensing fees required for non-commercial academic research. Commercial entities, corporate research divisions, or consulting practitioners wishing to integrate the scale into proprietary assessment platforms or commercial benchmarking tools should review American Marketing Association copyright guidelines and contact the corresponding authors to verify licensing terms.

12. References

• Bénabou, R., & Tirole, J. (2006). Incentives and prosocial behavior. American Economic Review, 96(5), 1652–1678. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.96.5.1652
• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between communal and exchange relationships: What it is and is not. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19(6), 684–691. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167293196003
• Gershon, R., Cryder, C., & John, L. K. (2020). Why prosocial referral incentives work: The interplay of reputational benefits and action costs. Journal of Marketing Research, 57(1), 156–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243719888479
• Homans, G. C. (1958). Social behavior as exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 63(6), 597–606. https://doi.org/10.1086/222355
• McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 249–266. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.127.2.249
• Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
• Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x

13. Items of the Scale