Preference for Consistency Scale (PFC)

1. Abstract

The Preference for Consistency Scale (PFC), developed by Robert B. Cialdini, Melanie R. Trost, and Jason T. Newsom (1995), is an established psychometric instrument designed to quantify individual differences in the dispositional desire to maintain consistency among one’s cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as the desire to be perceived as consistent by others and to perceive consistency in others. Rooted in classic cognitive consistency theories—most notably Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory and Fritz Heider’s balance theory—the instrument addresses a critical historical anomaly in social psychological literature: the notable variance across individuals in their susceptibility to consistency-based motivational pressures. The full scale comprises 18 self-report items administered on a 9-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree), alongside a widely utilized, psychometrically robust 9-item brief version (Brief PFC).

Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that the 18 items resolve into three distinct yet interrelated subscales: Internal Consistency (preference for consistency within oneself), Public Consistency (preference for being viewed by others as stable and predictable), and Others’ Consistency (the expectation and demand that interaction partners demonstrate behavioral and attitudinal coherence). The full 18-item scale displays high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging between .85 and .89; baseline normative mean M = 5.43, SD = 1.19), while the 9-item abbreviated form retains excellent internal reliability (average alpha of .84) and correlates almost perfectly (r = .95) with the total instrument. This paper provides a comprehensive psychometric assessment of the PFC, examining its theoretical architecture, construct and predictive validity across canonical social psychological paradigms—including the foot-in-the-door technique, dissonance reduction, and behavioral commitment—alongside full administration protocols, factor structures, and normative parameters.

2. Keywords

Preference for Consistency, Cognitive Dissonance, Balance Theory, Foot-in-the-Door, Social Influence, Behavioral Commitment, Psychometrics, Self-Perception Theory, Cialdini, Individual Differences

3. Authors

The Preference for Consistency Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by:

• Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. — Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States. Internationally recognized for his seminal contributions to the psychology of persuasion, compliance, and social influence.
• Melanie R. Trost, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States. Scholar of interpersonal relationships, communication processes, and social psychological dynamics.
• Jason T. Newsom, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Arizona State University (subsequently Professor at the Institute on Aging and Department of Psychology, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, United States). Quantitative methodologist specializing in structural equation modeling, psychometric measurement, and longitudinal data analysis.

Inquiries regarding the theoretical development of the instrument are historically directed to the Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Box 871104, Tempe, AZ 85287-1104.

4. Purpose

For more than four decades following the cognitive revolution in social psychology, theoretical models posited that the human drive toward cognitive consistency was a universal, fundamental psychological motive. Foundational frameworks such as Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory and Fritz Heider’s balance theory presumed that psychological inconsistency—whether between two discordant cognitions, between an attitude and an enacted behavior, or within a triad of social relations—universally produced an uncomfortable drive state that compelled individuals toward cognitive reorganization, attitude alteration, or behavioral adaptation.

Despite the ubiquitous explanatory power attributed to these models, empirical laboratory investigations frequently encountered substantial, unexplained within-cell variance. In classic induced-compliance paradigms, many participants failed to exhibit the predicted attitude shifts following counterattitudinal behavior. Similarly, in compliance investigations utilizing sequential-request tactics—such as the foot-in-the-door technique—a notable proportion of participants remained entirely unmoved by prior commitments. Rather than dismissing these non-replications as experimental noise or operational failures, Cialdini, Trost, and Newsom (1995) hypothesized that the motivation to preserve consistency is not uniform across the population. Instead, it functions as an enduring, trait-like individual difference variable.

The primary purpose of the Preference for Consistency Scale is therefore to measure this dispositional variation reliably. By capturing the degree to which an individual values and strives for psychological, behavioral, and interpersonal coherence, the PFC serves several critical functions across experimental, clinical, and organizational domains:

• Moderation of Social Psychological Phenomena: The PFC operates as an indispensable moderator in experimental social psychology. Empirical findings demonstrate that classic phenomena—such as cognitive dissonance reduction, balance-restoring attitude changes, and commitment-induced compliance—are pronounced among individuals scoring high on the PFC, but are significantly attenuated or entirely absent among low-PFC individuals.
• Understanding Consumer and Decision-Making Behavior: In marketing, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology, the PFC explains why certain consumers strictly adhere to previously chosen brand commitments and post-purchase rationalizations, whereas low-PFC consumers fluidly change preferences without experiencing psychological tension.
• Organizational and Leadership Dynamics: The scale illuminates interpersonal expectations within workplace hierarchies. Individuals high on public and others’ consistency demand unwavering predictability from leadership, evaluating executive integrity through rigid adherence to stated objectives and historical precedent.
• Clinical and Counseling Insights: In therapeutic settings, high PFC manifests as psychological rigidity, perfectionism, or an elevated personal need for structure, frequently inhibiting adaptive cognitive restructuring or behavioral flexibility. Conversely, exceptionally low PFC may correlate with impulsivity, relational unpredictability, and low distress tolerance toward contradictory behaviors.

5. Psychological Construct

The preference for consistency is defined as a multidimensional psychological disposition reflecting an individual’s intrinsic motivation to maintain coherence, stability, and alignment among their internal mental states, their outward behaviors, and the social perceptions of their identity. Cialdini et al. (1995) established that while the aggregate score provides an overarching index of consistency seeking, the construct structurally bifurcates into three primary dimensions:

1. Internal Consistency

The internal consistency dimension reflects the classic intrapsychic drive described by Festinger (1957). It captures an individual’s fundamental desire that their personal actions, decisions, and beliefs align with one another across time and contexts. Individuals high in internal consistency experience acute internal distress—manifesting as visceral psychological discomfort or self-directed tension—when they recognize that an enacted behavior contradicts an established self-concept, core value, or previously stated intention. For example, a person high on this dimension who agrees to an initial minor request feels an authentic, self-generated obligation to agree to a larger related request to maintain a unified self-narrative, irrespective of whether anyone else is observing their choice.

2. Public Consistency

The public consistency dimension centers on social image, self-presentation, and impression management. Grounded in theories of social appraisal and symbolic interactionism, this facet measures an individual’s concern with appearing consistent, predictable, and stable in the eyes of peers, colleagues, and external observers. In many cultures, behavioral vacillation is stigmatized as evidence of indecision, hypocrisy, weakness, or deceitfulness, whereas steadfast predictability is celebrated as a hallmark of integrity and strength. Individuals scoring high in public consistency are heavily influenced by the anticipated social evaluation of their stability. They consciously avoid altering choices or reversing stated stances because doing so might project an image of unreliability to their social network.

3. Others’ Consistency

The others’ consistency dimension shifts the focus outward, assessing an individual’s preference and demand that the people within their environment behave in a predictable, stable, and coherent manner. High scorers on this dimension harbor low cognitive tolerance for ambiguity, unpredictability, or volatility in their friends, leaders, and interaction partners. They actively select social circles populated by individuals whose reactions can be anticipated with precision, and they experience irritation, disillusionment, or cognitive friction when close associates say one thing and do another. This dimension ties closely to social predictability as a mechanism for reducing interpersonal uncertainty and environmental threat.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Preference for Consistency Scale is grounded in the convergence of several major theoretical paradigms in social and personality psychology:

Cognitive Consistency and Dissonance Theory

The foundational bedrock of the PFC rests upon Leon Festinger’s (1957) Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Festinger posited that pairs of cognitions (elements of knowledge about behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, or environmental realities) can exist in consonant, irrelevant, or dissonant relations. Dissonance exists when the obverse of one element follows from the other. Festinger asserted that dissonance functions as a motivational state akin to physiological hunger; the presence of dissonance generates psychological discomfort, which inevitably drives the organism to reduce or eliminate the inconsistency through cognitive modification, addition of consonant elements, or behavioral change.

Cialdini et al. (1995) re-evaluated this universalist assumption. By drawing on individual difference theory, the authors demonstrated that dissonance reduction processes are moderated by the PFC. While Festinger assumed that all psychologically intact individuals possess a non-zero drive to reduce dissonance, empirical testing revealed that individuals with low PFC scores do not exhibit attitude change following counterattitudinal advocacy (e.g., in the induced-compliance paradigm). For low-PFC individuals, cognitive discrepancy does not trigger an aversive drive state, rendering dissonance-reducing rationalizations unnecessary.

Heiderian Balance Theory

The scale also directly incorporates Fritz Heider’s (1946, 1958) Balance Theory, which models cognitive triads consisting of a person (P), another person (O), and an attitude object, idea, or event (X). Heider postulated that individuals prefer balanced states wherein the algebraic product of the signs of the three relationships is positive. Imbalanced states (e.g., P likes O, but P dislikes X while O likes X) produce psychological tension that urges balance restoration. The PFC framework demonstrates that high-PFC individuals are significantly more vigilant to triad imbalances and exhibit greater motivation to alter interpersonal sentiments or object evaluations to re-establish structural balance.

Commitment-Consistency Principles and Self-Perception

In his classic analysis of compliance tactics, Robert Cialdini (1984) identified commitment and consistency as one of the universal weapons of social influence. This builds upon Daryl Bem’s (1972) Self-Perception Theory, which argues that individuals infer their own internal states by observing their overt behavior and the contexts under which it occurs. Once an individual makes an initial active, public, and effortful commitment, consistency motives press them to honor larger, downstream requests that align with that baseline commitment. The development of the PFC provided the empirical vehicle to verify that this compliance mechanism operates primarily through individuals who hold consistency as a central personal value.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the PFC scale has been thoroughly established through extensive laboratory experiments and field studies evaluating construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Predictive Validity in Experimental Paradigms

In the seminal validation paper by Cialdini, Trost, and Newsom (1995), the predictive power of the PFC was tested across several classical social psychological experiments:

• Foot-in-the-Door Compliance (Study 2): Participants were contacted to agree to a minor initial request (answering a brief phone survey) followed by a substantial, effortful target request (participating in an extensive community project). High-PFC individuals demonstrated the classic foot-in-the-door effect: compliance with the initial request dramatically increased subsequent compliance with the target request (compliance rates exceeded 70%). Conversely, low-PFC individuals showed no foot-in-the-door effect whatsoever; their compliance with the second request was completely unaffected by prior compliance, demonstrating that their behavior was decoupled from the need to remain consistent.
• Induced-Compliance Attitude Change (Study 3): Participants were induced under conditions of high perceived choice to write counterattitudinal essays advocating against a desirable campus initiative. High-PFC participants exhibited significant attitude shifts toward their written essays, reproducing the canonical cognitive dissonance effect. Low-PFC participants, however, showed zero attitude change; writing a counterattitudinal essay did not generate sufficient intrapsychic discomfort to necessitate rationalization.
• Heiderian Balance Dynamics: High-PFC individuals confronted with imbalanced P-O-X scenarios exhibited substantially stronger inclinations to resolve the tension through cognitive restructuring compared to their low-PFC counterparts.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

To establish that the PFC scale measures an independent construct rather than a repackaged variant of existing personality metrics, Cialdini et al. (1995) systematically correlated the PFC with related psychological scales:

• Convergent Validity: The PFC correlates moderately and positively with the Personal Need for Structure (PNS; r ≈ .47) and the Personal Fear of Invalidity (PFI; r ≈ .32), reflecting shared variance regarding the psychological comfort derived from structured, orderly, and predictable cognitive environments. It also correlates positively with rigidity and dogmatism measures.
• Discriminant Validity: The PFC demonstrates distinct empirical divergence from constructs of self-presentation and approval-seeking. Correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale are notably low (r < .15), indicating that high PFC scores do not reflect a mere desire to present oneself favorably. Furthermore, its correlations with Snyder’s Self-Monitoring Scale are small and nonsignificant (r ≈ -.08), proving that the preference for internal and behavioral coherence is psychometrically distinct from situational adaptability or expressive self-monitoring.

8. Reliability

The Preference for Consistency Scale demonstrates robust reliability across multiple samples, populations, and cultural adaptations.

Internal Consistency

In the initial development samples comprising over 1,200 undergraduate participants, Cialdini et al. (1995) reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the full 18-item scale ranging between .85 and .89, with a normative sample composite alpha of .86. The subscales exhibit respectable internal reliability given their brief lengths:

• Internal Consistency Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values typically range between .78 and .82.
• Public Consistency Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values range between .75 and .80.
• Others’ Consistency Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values range between .70 and .76.

For the validated 9-item Brief PFC, the average Cronbach’s alpha across studies is .84, with an exceptionally high correlation with the 18-item parent scale (r = .95), indicating that the short form sacrifices virtually no measurement precision.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

Test-retest assessments conducted over intervals spanning 6 to 12 weeks have yielded stability coefficients between r = .78 and r = .84. These figures substantiate the theoretical assumption that the preference for consistency represents a stable, enduring trait disposition rather than a fluctuating emotional state.

Normative Score Parameters

Across non-clinical collegiate and adult populations, the 18-item full scale yields a consistent normative distribution:

• Mean (M): 5.43 (on a 1–9 response scale)
• Standard Deviation (SD): 1.19

The distribution of scores approximates normality with slight negative skewness in older adult cohorts, who generally report slightly higher preferences for consistency compared to emerging adults.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the PFC scale was rigorously evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during its developmental phases.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components analysis followed by oblique and orthogonal (Varimax) rotations on an initial pool of candidate items extracted three robust factors with eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, collectively accounting for over 46% of the total variance:

• Factor 1: Internal Consistency (items emphasizing internal distress caused by one’s own behavioral hypocrisy or attitude-action discrepancies). Primary loadings range from .52 to .74.
• Factor 2: Public Consistency (items assessing the desire to be viewed by third parties as predictable, stable, and reliable). Primary loadings range from .48 to .78.
• Factor 3: Others’ Consistency (items reflecting demands and expectations for predictability in peers, acquaintances, and leaders). Primary loadings range from .45 to .71.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent CFA investigations by Newsom and colleagues confirmed that a second-order factor model—wherein a higher-order overarching latent factor (“Preference for Consistency”) accounts for the covariance among the three first-order factors (Internal, Public, and Others’)—provides an optimal statistical fit to the data. Fit indices from structural equation evaluations regularly yield:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .93 to .96
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .92 to .95
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .048 to .058 (90% CI [.041, .065])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .044

These parameters demonstrate that researchers may validly utilize either the three discrete subscale scores or aggregate all items into a single composite index of consistency preference.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report psychological scale / dispositional inventory.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or digital/computerized survey administration.
• Item Count:
  • Full Instrument: 18 items.
  • Brief Instrument (Brief PFC): 9 items (consisting of items 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, and 17).
• Authentic Response Scale: 9-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree).
• Subscale Classifications:
  • Internal Consistency: Items 4, 8, 14, 15, 17, 18.
  • Public Consistency: Items 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 13.
  • Others’ Consistency: Items 2, 5, 10, 11, 12, 16.
• Reverse-Scoring Rules: Item 14 is worded in an opposing direction and must be reverse-scored prior to calculating scale aggregates (Recoded Item 14 = 10 – Original Score).
• Scoring Procedure: Items may be summed across the 18 items (yielding a score range of 18 to 162) or averaged across completed items (yielding a mean score ranging from 1.00 to 9.00). In experimental research, researchers frequently perform a median split or tertiary grouping (top and bottom thirds) on sample distribution scores to classify participants into High-PFC and Low-PFC experimental groups.
• Completion Time: Approximately 4 to 6 minutes for the 18-item scale; 2 to 3 minutes for the 9-item brief scale.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Publication: 1995.
• Copyright & Permissions: The Preference for Consistency Scale was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA). As standard with academic psychological instruments published within APA journals, the scale items are available for non-commercial academic research, non-funded educational inquiries, and scientific experimentation without the payment of licensing fees, provided proper bibliographic citation is maintained.
• Commercial Applications: Commercial use, integration into proprietary corporate assessment batteries, or fee-for-service consulting applications requires formal copyright clearance through the American Psychological Association Rights and Permissions Office.

12. References

• Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60024-6
• Cialdini, R. B. (1984). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. William Morrow and Company.
• Cialdini, R. B., Trost, M. R., & Newsom, J. T. (1995). Preference for consistency: The development of a valid measure and the discovery of surprising behavioral implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(2), 318–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.2.318
• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503620766
• Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0023552
• Heider, F. (1946). Attitudes and cognitive organization. The Journal of Psychology, 21(1), 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1946.9917275
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Neuberg, S. L., & Newsom, J. T. (1993). Personal need for structure: Individual differences in the desire for simple structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 113–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.113

13. Items of the Scale