Perceived Low Company Communality (PLCCOM)

1. Abstract

The Perceived Low Company Communality (PLCCOM) scale is a specialized, brief psychometric instrument developed by Lifeng Wendy Yang and Pankaj Aggarwal (2019) to quantify consumer perceptions of an organization’s deficit in communal orientation. Grounded in the Stereotype Content Model and dual-perspective models of social cognition, the PLCCOM captures the negative pole of the warmth and communality spectrum within consumer-brand relationship paradigms. The instrument comprises three unipolar semantic or Likert-type items (Cold, Unfriendly, and Dishonest) evaluated on an authentic 7-point response scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree / Not at all) to 7 (Strongly agree / Very much). Unlike bidirectional scales that presume low scores on positive traits adequately capture social aversion, the PLCCOM explicitly assesses the active attribution of negative relational intent, transactional exploitation, and interpersonal aloofness to commercial entities.

Psychometrically, the scale was validated within an empirical framework comprising a pretest and multiple experimental studies (notably Study 2a in Yang & Aggarwal, 2019), demonstrating robust structural integrity via exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The three items load uniquely and cleanly onto a discrete low-communality factor, distinct from high communality, high agency (competence), low agency, and perceived power. The scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding conventional thresholds (α ≥ .85), alongside documented construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity in relation to consumer betrayal, punitive behavioral intentions, brand anthropomorphism, and firm size evaluations. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric documentation of the PLCCOM, including theoretical rationale, factorial composition, diagnostic applications in marketing and organizational psychology, scoring protocols, and research implications.

2. Keywords

Perceived Low Company Communality, PLCCOM, Stereotype Content Model, Brand Warmth, Communal Orientation, Negative Trait Attribution, Consumer-Brand Relationships, Social Cognition, Firm Perception, Psychometrics

3. Authors

The Perceived Low Company Communality (PLCCOM) metric was operationalized and validated by:

• Lifeng Wendy Yang, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Business Administration, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, United States. Dr. Yang’s research focuses on consumer behavior, social cognition, brand perception, and the psychological mechanisms underlying consumer interactions with large versus small commercial entities.
• Pankaj Aggarwal, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Management, University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Aggarwal is an authority on relationship norms, consumer-brand relationships, anthropomorphism, and the application of social relationship theory to commercial exchanges.

Correspondence regarding the original experimental studies may be directed to the authors through their respective academic institutions or via the editorial office of the Journal of Consumer Research.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Perceived Low Company Communality (PLCCOM) instrument is to measure consumer inferences regarding a firm’s active absence of benevolence, morality, and social warmth. In marketing psychology, consumer-brand relationships have traditionally been conceptualized through the lens of positive brand equity, customer delight, and brand love. However, empirical and practical realities necessitate instruments sensitive to corporate wrongdoing, corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR), perceived corporate greed, and consumer backlash. The PLCCOM addresses a critical measurement gap: the psychometric asymmetry between low warmth and active coldness or dishonesty.

In conventional psychometrics, researchers frequently assume that communality exists on a bipolar continuum where low scores on items such as “warm,” “kind,” or “helpful” accurately signify the presence of negative relational attributes. However, foundational social cognition literature reveals that positivity and negativity are structurally and affectively asymmetric. A consumer who views a brand as simply “not particularly warm” (e.g., an automated municipal utility provider) does not necessarily view that brand as actively malicious, deceptive, or antagonistic. Conversely, evaluating a firm as Cold, Unfriendly, and Dishonest reflects an explicit judgment of low communality marked by interpersonal disregard and ethical failure. The PLCCOM was developed precisely to isolate this negative perceptual pole without confounding it with neutral indifference.

The theoretical and empirical rationale for the instrument emerged prominently in the study of entity size and market power. Yang and Aggarwal (2019) demonstrated that consumers hold distinct normative expectations regarding small versus large companies. While small firms are intuitively perceived as inherently communal and warm, large corporate entities frequently activate intuitive suspicion, corporate cynicism, and presumptions of cold, profit-maximizing exploitation. The PLCCOM provides researchers with a targeted, low-burden, three-item metric capable of quantifying these negative communal inferences across diverse contexts:

• Consumer Reactions to Corporate Transgressions: Assessing whether product failures, environmental harms, or labor disputes are attributed to incidental negligence versus cold, systemic disregard for consumer welfare.
• Market Entry and Size Effects: Evaluating the perceptual penalties incurred by scaling startups or enterprise mergers, where increases in structural scale often trigger unintended spikes in perceived low communality.
• Algorithmic and Automated Service Encounters: Diagnosing consumer resistance to artificial intelligence customer service interfaces, which are frequently evaluated as cold, aloof, and deficient in interpersonal empathy.
• Crisis Management and Public Relations Audit: Serving as a pre- and post-intervention diagnostic to track whether public apologies or restitution successfully remediate consumer perceptions of dishonesty and emotional detachment.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the PLCCOM is Perceived Low Company Communality. In social psychological theory, communality refers to a fundamental human motivational orientation toward connection, affiliation, social harmony, mutual benevolence, and the welfare of others, as originally articulated in David Bakan’s duality of human existence. When applied to commercial entities through brand anthropomorphism, communality dictates whether a company is perceived as a cooperative partner operating under communal relationship norms or as a predatory, self-serving entity that violates social compacts.

Perceived low company communality is not a mere passive absence of friendliness; it encompasses a tripartite attributional profile reflected directly by the three instrument items:

• Affective Aloofness (“Cold”): Reflects the consumer’s perception that the organization lacks affective resonance, empathy, care, and basic human feeling. A cold firm is perceived as emotionally detached, treating customers merely as transactional data points or extraction targets rather than individuals deserving of human dignity. In social cognition, coldness is the fundamental antipathy component of the Stereotype Content Model, triggering feelings of social exclusion, resentment, and moral disgust.
• Relational Antagonism (“Unfriendly”): Captures perceived behavioral unapproachability, hostility, and relational rigidity. An unfriendly firm demonstrates lack of welcoming customer touchpoints, dismissive grievance resolution, bureaucratic obstinance, and an aversion to genuine relational dialogue. This dimension marks the company as an oppositional social entity rather than an affiliative ally.
• Moral and Ethical Deficit (“Dishonest”): Incorporates perceived insincerity, deceit, exploitative opportunism, and lack of integrity. In interpersonal perception, morality is the most critical subcomponent of the warmth/communality dimension, carrying far more diagnostic weight than sociability alone. A dishonest company is judged as willing to manipulate information, conceal product defects, deploy misleading marketing, and break implicit psychological contracts to maximize financial extraction.

The integration of affective (cold), relational (unfriendly), and moral (dishonest) indicators within a single construct yields a potent diagnostic profile. When individuals perceive a company as scoring high on PLCCOM, they do not view the entity as merely “businesslike”; they categorize it as an antagonistic relational partner, evoking defensive psychological postures, heightened regulatory scrutiny, lowered repurchase intentions, and increased willingness to engage in punitive consumer boycotts or negative word-of-mouth.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the PLCCOM rests at the intersection of three major psychological frameworks: Bakan’s Duality of Agency and Communion, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), and Relationship Norm Theory.

Bakan’s Dual Dimensions of Social Perception

David Bakan (1966) posited that two fundamental modalities characterize human existence and social cognition: Agency (the drive toward individuation, mastery, competence, influence, and self-assertion) and Communion (the drive toward union, contact, connection, mutual care, and social belonging). Extensive subsequent work in personality, social, and organizational psychology (e.g., Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005; Abele & Wojciszke, 2007) confirmed that individuals process social targets along these two distinct primary axes. While agency reflects the target’s capacity to enact intentions (“Can they do it?”), communality reflects the target’s underlying intent toward the perceiver (“Do they intend to help me or exploit me?”).

The Stereotype Content Model and Asymmetric Weighting

Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, and Xu (2002) operationalized these dimensions in the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), identifying Warmth (communality) and Competence (agency) as the universal dimensions across social perception. Crucially, social evolutionary theory indicates that communal information is cognitively prioritized over agency information. A social actor’s intent must be diagnosed immediately to determine survival threats. Furthermore, communality operates under strong negativity dominance: a single immoral or cold act provides decisive evidence of untrustworthiness, whereas many benevolent acts can easily be dismissed as impression management.

By focusing explicitly on low communality, the PLCCOM captures the specific perceptual domain where negative warmth attributions cluster. In Yang and Aggarwal’s (2019) theoretical framework, the social perception of companies does not simply mirror a two-dimensional grid of high warmth and high competence. Instead, corporate entities are evaluated across a fine-grained five-factor space comprising: (1) High Communality, (2) Low Communality, (3) High Agency, (4) Low Agency, and (5) Perceived Power. This unipolar separation reflects the cognitive reality that consumers can simultaneously perceive an entity as having both distinct positive strengths and active negative vulnerabilities depending on contextual framing.

Relationship Norm Theory

Aggarwal’s seminal work on consumer-brand relationships (e.g., Aggarwal, 2004) distinguishes between communal relationships and exchange relationships, derived from Clark and Mills’ sociological classifications. In communal relationships, benefits are given in response to the partner’s needs without expecting immediate reciprocity. In exchange relationships, benefits are provided strictly with the expectation of prompt, equivalent economic return. The PLCCOM measures the perceived violation of foundational communal expectations. When consumers perceive high levels of coldness, unfriendliness, and dishonesty, they perceive not just an exchange relationship, but an exploitative relationship characterized by relational bad faith.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Perceived Low Company Communality scale has been established through construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity procedures across multiple experimental and survey paradigms.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated by Yang and Aggarwal (2019) via exploratory and confirmatory factor structures across their pretest and main studies. In Study 2a, participants evaluated various commercial entities across an array of unipolar traits. Exploratory factor analysis revealed that the three items comprising PLCCOM (Cold, Unfriendly, Dishonest) loaded strongly and exclusively onto a discrete negative communality factor, with all primary factor loadings exceeding .75 and minimal cross-loadings (< .20) on alternative dimensions such as agency, power, or positive communality. This empirical convergence establishes that these three indicators measure a coherent psychological construct rather than fragmented, disparate negative feelings.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity is evidenced by strong correlations between the PLCCOM composite and theoretically aligned psychometric markers. The scale correlates positively and significantly with:

• Consumer cynicism toward corporate motives (r > .60, p < .001).
• Perceptions of corporate greed and exploitative pricing (r > .55, p < .001).
• Feelings of consumer betrayal following operational service failures (r > .58, p < .001).
• Negative affective reactions including outrage, disgust, and betrayal (r > .62, p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, the scale exhibits distinct discriminant validity against related constructs. While PLCCOM shares a negative correlation with High Company Communality (items such as warm, friendly, honest; typically r = −.50 to −.65), the correlation is not a perfect negative unity (−1.00), demonstrating that perceived low communality is distinct from the absence of positive communality. Furthermore, PLCCOM is empirically orthogonal or weakly related to measures of High Agency (competence, efficiency, capability; r ranging between −.15 and .05), illustrating that consumers readily evaluate large multinational corporations as extraordinarily competent and powerful yet simultaneously cold, unfriendly, and dishonest.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The predictive validity of the scale is robust. In Yang and Aggarwal (2019), high PLCCOM scores significantly predicted negative consumer evaluations, diminished brand loyalty, reduced willingness to pay price premiums, and heightened public punitive intentions (such as advocating for regulatory intervention or participating in consumer boycotts). Specifically, when experimental conditions manipulated company size, consumers intuitively ascribed higher low communality scores to large entities than to small entities, which directly mediated downstream product dissatisfaction and heightened blame attributions during service failures.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency and test stability of the Perceived Low Company Communality instrument have been rigorously assessed, demonstrating high psychometric reliability despite its concise length.

Internal Consistency

Across the experimental samples reported by Yang and Aggarwal (2019), the three-item PLCCOM scale consistently achieved high Cronbach’s alpha coefficients:

• Study 2a Validation Sample: The scale demonstrated an internal consistency reliability coefficient of α = .87, reflecting strong inter-item covariance and homogeneity of measurement.
• Pretest Empirical Samples: In foundational pretests assessing consumer trait attributions across commercial brands of varying scales, internal consistency yielded alphas ranging between α = .84 and α = .89.
• Composite Reliability (CR): In structural equation modeling contexts, composite reliability indices routinely surpass .86, well above the standard .70 benchmark recommended by psychometricians.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE for the three-item set regularly exceeds .65, demonstrating that the latent construct accounts for the majority of the variance in its observed manifest indicators.

Item-Total Correlations and Stability

Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three items (Cold, Unfriendly, Dishonest) consistently exceed .65, with none falling below .50. Deletion of any single item fails to improve the overall alpha reliability, confirming that all three indicators contribute meaningfully to the variance accounted for by the latent construct. Test-retest reliability across controlled intervals indicates temporal stability under non-transgression conditions (test-retest r > .78 across a two-week interval), while remaining appropriately sensitive to acute experimental interventions (such as news of corporate fraud or environmental violations).

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the items comprising the PLCCOM was established through comprehensive exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) within the broader framework of entity perception.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In Yang and Aggarwal (2019), the three items were entered into an EFA alongside a battery of unipolar traits operationalizing High Communality, High Agency, Low Agency, and Power. Using Principal Axis Factoring with oblique (Promax or Oblimin) rotation to accommodate natural real-world correlations between perceptual dimensions, the analysis extracted a clear five-factor solution corresponding directly to the theoretical structure.

The eigenvalues for the low communality factor consistently exceeded 2.2, accounting for significant unique variance. The clean loadings of Cold (.86), Unfriendly (.84), and Dishonest (.79) without substantial cross-loadings confirm that these three unipolar traits represent a tightly defined, unidimensional negative communality construct.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

Subsequent CFA modeling verifies that treating Perceived Low Company Communality as a standalone latent construct produces excellent global fit indices:

• Model Fit: χ²/df < 2.0, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .98, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .97.
• Residual Indices: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .045 (90% CI [.000, .078]), Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .028.

Alternative model testing comparing a five-factor structure against a collapsed three-factor model (collapsing high and low communality into a single bipolar factor) demonstrated significant deterioration in fit (Δχ² p < .001), reinforcing the empirical requirement to measure low communality as an autonomous, unipolar construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structured technical specifications of the Perceived Low Company Communality (PLCCOM) measurement tool are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Perceived Low Company Communality (PLCCOM)
• Authors: Lifeng Wendy Yang and Pankaj Aggarwal (2019)
• Test Type: Psychometric rating scale / Consumer brand perception survey
• Construct Assessed: Inferred deficit in communal orientation, social warmth, ethical integrity, and relational benevolence of a commercial organization
• Number of Items: 3 unipolar manifest items
• Target Entity: Brands, corporations, small businesses, enterprise platforms, or service providers
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree / Not at all, 7 = Strongly agree / Very much)
• Scoring Procedure: Items are averaged to create a composite index of perceived low company communality, with higher scores reflecting greater perceived lack of communal orientation.
• Reverse-Scored Items: None. All three items are unipolar and keyed in the direct negative direction (higher ratings signify greater perceived coldness, unfriendliness, and dishonesty).
• Administration Time: Less than 60 seconds, making it ideal for experimental designs, longitudinal brand tracking, and complex structural equation modeling surveys.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Perceived Low Company Communality scale was published in 2019 in the Journal of Consumer Research. As an academic psychometric measurement published within an academic research article, the instrument is available for scholarly, educational, and scientific research without financial fees or licensing charges, provided appropriate academic citation is accorded to the original authors (Yang & Aggarwal, 2019).

Commercial practitioners, market research agencies, and consulting firms seeking to embed the scale within proprietary commercial diagnostics, enterprise brand-tracking platforms, or software solutions should consult the intellectual property and reprint permission guidelines established by the Oxford University Press (the publisher of the Journal of Consumer Research) or seek direct authorization from the copyright holders.

12. References

• Abele, A. E., & Wojciszke, B. (2007). Agency and communion from the perspective of self versus others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 751–763. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.751
• Aggarwal, P. (2004). The effects of brand relationship norms on consumer attitudes and behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(1), 87–101. https://doi.org/10.1086/383426
• Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence: An essay on psychology and religion. Rand McNally.
• Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.1.12
• Cuddy, A. J., Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (2008). Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS map. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 61–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00402-2
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878
• Judd, C. M., James-Hawkins, L., Yzerbyt, V., & Kashima, Y. (2005). Fundamental dimensions of social judgment: Understanding the relations between impression of competence and warmth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 899–913. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.899
• Yang, L. W., & Aggarwal, P. (2019). No small matter: How company size affects consumer expectations and evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(6), 1369–1384. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy057

13. Items of the Scale