Prosocial Consumption – Distant-Others Scale (PROSCDT)

Abstract

The Prosocial Consumption – Distant-Others Scale (PROSCDT) is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate an individual's behavioral intentions to engage in consumer actions intended to benefit geographically, socially, or culturally distant recipients. Developed and validated by Lisa A. Cavanaugh, James R. Bettman, and Mary Frances Luce (2015) within the context of emotion research and consumer psychology, the PROSCDT operationalizes how affective states—specifically feeling love versus other positive emotions such as hope, pride, or compassion—systematically alter prosocial allocations across varying degrees of psychological distance. The scale consists of 6 self-report items evaluated on a 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree / Not at all likely) to 7 (Strongly Agree / Very likely). Psychometrically, the instrument captures a unidimensional construct encompassing fair trade purchasing, ethical consumer boycotting, international charity support, cause-related marketing engagement, and avoidance of overseas labor and environmental exploitation. The scale demonstrates robust internal consistency, with reported Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically exceeding α = .88 across experimental and correlational samples. Factor analytic investigations confirm a clean single-factor structure with substantial factor loadings ranging between .72 and .88, displaying robust convergent validity with global social responsibility and discriminant validity against prosocial consumption directed toward close others or local communities. This article provides an exhaustive examination of the PROSCDT's theoretical foundations, structural properties, psychometric validation data, and practical applications in behavioral economics, ethical consumption research, and marketing ethics.

Keywords

prosocial consumption, distant others, ethical consumerism, psychological distance, Cavanaugh, fair trade, cause-related marketing, consumer psychology, boycotting, psychometrics

Authors

The Prosocial Consumption – Distant-Others Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by:

• Lisa A. Cavanaugh, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her research investigates consumer decision-making, interpersonal relationships, emotional appraisal, and prosocial behavior.
• James R. Bettman, Ph.D. — Burlington Industries Professor of Business Administration Emeritus, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States. A pioneering scholar in consumer information processing, choice architecture, and behavioral decision theory.
• Mary Frances Luce, Ph.D. — Robert A. Ingram Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States. Her scholarship focuses on emotion, medical decision-making, trade-off difficulty, and consumer welfare.

Purpose

The Prosocial Consumption – Distant-Others Scale was developed to address a critical empirical and theoretical gap in the study of prosocial behavior: the differential motivation to assist beneficiaries based on their psychological distance from the actor. Although extensive literature in consumer research and social psychology had documented the determinants of charitable donations and ethical purchasing in general, relatively little empirical research isolated the specific psychological mechanisms that motivate individuals to expend personal resources on behalf of beneficiaries who are geographically, nationally, or socially remote.

People naturally exhibit strong evolutionary, social, and emotional biases toward assisting in-group members, kin, and proximate neighbors—a tendency known as parochial altruism or in-group favoritism. When an individual confronts appeals for distant beneficiaries (e.g., workers in developing nations, victims of overseas natural catastrophes, international environmental refugees), social distance often inhibits empathic concern, reducing the likelihood of altruistic intervention. Cavanaugh, Bettman, and Luce (2015) designed the PROSCDT to measure an individual's self-expressed likelihood of executing specific marketplace actions aimed explicitly at alleviating suffering, enhancing human rights, or fostering sustainable community development for individuals residing in foreign countries.

In research contexts, the scale serves as an outcome measure in experimental designs evaluating the boundaries of altruistic motivation, framing effects, emotional priming, and ideological affiliations. Clinically and socially, it provides organizations such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), transnational social enterprises, and international relief agencies with a standardized diagnostic tool to measure consumer inclinations toward global ethical stewardship. By isolating "distant" prosociality from general prosocial tendencies, the scale enables researchers to assess interventions specifically intended to expand the consumer's moral circle across geographic boundaries.

Psychological Construct

The PROSCDT operationalizes prosocial consumption toward distant others as a multi-action, unidimensional behavioral intention construct. In psychometric terms, prosocial consumption encompasses actions in which consumers voluntarily commit economic resources, adjust personal consumption patterns, or incur transactional search costs to produce positive outcomes or prevent harm for third parties. The specific "distant others" dimension is defined by several interlinked behavioral expressions:

• Fair Trade Adoption: The willingness to purchase certified fair trade commodities (e.g., coffee, cocoa, textiles) that guarantee equitable price floors, humane working conditions, and social premiums for agriculturalists and laborers in developing economies.
• Ethical Boycotting and Selective Sourcing: The deliberate abstention from purchasing goods from transnational corporations that engage in labor exploitation, sweatshop employment, human rights violations, or ecological degradation in foreign production zones.
• Cause-Related Purchasing: The strategic selection of commercial products that tie an individual transaction to automated financial contributions supporting charitable or humanitarian initiatives operating across foreign territories.
• Direct Cross-Border Philanthropy: Intentions to donate disposable income or assets directly to transnational non-profits and international relief consortia addressing global poverty, conservation, and health emergencies.
• Ethical Market Vigilance: A proactive consumer posture wherein foreign environmental footprints and international human rights records are treated as core evaluative product attributes rather than secondary external factors.

A crucial theoretical element of this construct is the asymmetry of psychological distance. Classic moral philosophy and cognitive psychology establish that psychological distance comprises spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical dimensions. The PROSCDT explicitly accentuates spatial (different parts of the world, foreign nations, across the globe) and social distance (overseas laborers, foreign communities, workers in developing countries). By focusing exclusively on targets residing outside the respondent's domestic or immediate social network, the scale captures an extended boundary of moral concern, distinct from communal or localized mutual-aid intentions.

Theoretical Framework

The PROSCDT is anchored primarily in Appraisal Theories of Emotion and Construal Level Theory (CLT), integrated with the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis.

Appraisal Theory and Positive Emotions

Cavanaugh et al. (2015) challenged the prevailing assumption that all positive emotions indiscriminately increase prosocial action. Drawing on appraisal theory (e.g., Smith & Ellsworth, 1985; Lerner & Keltner, 2000), specific discrete positive emotions possess unique cognitive appraisal themes that channel subsequent behavior in markedly different directions. While emotions such as pride (focused on self-achievement) and hope (focused on uncertain future outcomes) may fail to extend attention outward, Cavanaugh and colleagues demonstrated that discrete feelings of love are uniquely characterized by broad communal focus, social connection, and other-regard that is not circumscribed by relational proximity.

When individuals experience love, their appraisal of human interconnectedness broadens to encompass distant, unrelated strangers. Consequently, under conditions of induced love, intentions to help distant others rise significantly, matching or approaching the baseline inclination to assist close others. The PROSCDT was formulated to serve as the sensitive psychometric probe capable of detecting these shifts in motivational allocation across social and spatial boundaries.

Construal Level Theory (CLT)

According to Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), entities that are psychologically distant are represented in abstract, high-level, superordinate terms, whereas proximate entities are represented in concrete, contextualized, low-level details. Distant beneficiaries typically evoke abstract ethical principles (e.g., universal human rights, global justice), but often lack the immediate emotional vividness required to trigger concrete action. Consumers frequently experience the "identifiable victim effect" (Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007) for local, identifiable actors, while distant, statistical targets fail to elicit equivalent generosity. The PROSCDT captures the behavioral bridge over this construal divide, measuring whether an individual's abstract values translate into concrete marketplace commitments despite substantial geographic distance.

Validity

The validity of the PROSCDT has been established across several empirical investigations through rigorous experimental and psychometric protocols:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated by Cavanaugh et al. (2015) across multiple experiments manipulating discrete emotional states. When participants were exposed to emotional primes inducing love, their scores on the PROSCDT increased significantly compared to those exposed to other positive emotions (such as pride, hope, and compassion) or neutral control states ($F > 8.50, p < .005$).

Convergent validity has been established by observing statistically significant positive correlations between PROSCDT scores and validated scales measuring related internationalist constructs, including:

• Global Identity / Identification with All Humanity (IWAH) ($r = .54, p < .001$)
• Universalism values from the Schwartz Value Survey ($r = .49, p < .001$)
• Ethical Consumerism Disposition ($r = .62, p < .001$)

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity is particularly salient when distinguishing between prosocial consumption directed toward close others versus distant others. Cavanaugh et al. (2015) paired the PROSCDT with a complementary "Prosocial Consumption – Close-Others Scale" (PROSCCN), featuring parallel items referencing local organizations, domestic charities, and neighborhood causes. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that a two-factor model distinguishing distant from close targets exhibited significantly superior fit compared to a single collapsed factor model ($\Delta\chi^2(1) > 115.0, p < .0001$). Furthermore, while compassion primes selectively increased prosocial consumption for close others, they failed to produce equivalent increases for distant others, providing robust experimental discriminant validation.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The scale has demonstrated behavioral predictive validity in laboratory and field-simulation settings. Higher scores on the PROSCDT reliably predict actual consequential choices, such as participants allocating real monetary compensation or experimental endowments to international aid organizations (e.g., Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Rainforest Alliance) versus retaining the payout or donating to strictly domestic programs ($b = 0.38, t = 4.12, p < .001$).

Reliability

The PROSCDT exhibits high internal consistency across diverse adult and student populations. In the foundational validation studies reported by Cavanaugh, Bettman, and Luce (2015):

• Study 1: The 6-item scale demonstrated a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of α = .91 ($N = 224$).
• Study 2: In a distinct experimental cohort evaluating positive emotional inductions, internal consistency was observed at α = .89 ($N = 312$).
• Study 3: Across a diverse online panel (Amazon Mechanical Turk), the composite reliability yielded an alpha of α = .92 ($N = 415$).

Subsequent investigations utilizing the instrument in cross-cultural and ethical marketing domains have consistently reported Cronbach's alpha values ranging between .87 and .94, well above the conventional academic benchmark of .70 for psychometric reliability. The composite reliability (CR) typically exceeds .90, and the average variance extracted (AVE) routinely surpasses the .60 threshold, confirming that random measurement error is minimal.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the PROSCDT has been validated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components and maximum likelihood factor extractions reveal an unambiguous, unidimensional factor structure. Scree plots consistently indicate a steep drop after the first initial eigenvalue (eigenvalue 1 > 4.10), with the second eigenvalue remaining substantially below 1.0 (eigenvalue 2 < 0.65). The single factor accounts for approximately 68% to 75% of the total variance across study samples.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural equation modeling (SEM) and CFA assessments, the single-factor measurement model exhibits excellent fit statistics:

• Standardized Factor Loadings (λ): Loadings for all six items range from .72 to .88 ($p < .001$), demonstrating high indicator reliability.
• Chi-Square Ratio ($\chi^2 / ext{df}$): Values typically range between 1.45 and 2.10, indicating minimal residual discrepancy.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Routinely exceeds .98.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Routinely exceeds .97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Ranges between .038 and .055 (90% CI [.018, .074]).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Remains below .030.

When evaluated in multi-group CFA models, the scale demonstrates metric and scalar invariance across biological sex and age strata, confirming that the measurement parameters are stable across demographic sub-groups.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Construct Measured: Prosocial consumption intentions toward distant, international, and cross-border beneficiaries.
• Target Population: Adult consumers (general public, university populations, online research panels).
• Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey.
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes.
• Number of Items: 6 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree / Not at all likely) to 7 (Strongly Agree / Very likely).
• Scoring Procedure: All six items are positively phrased. No reverse scoring is required. The overall scale score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of all 6 items. Higher composite scores signify greater intention to engage in prosocial consumption benefiting distant others.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Prosocial Consumption – Distant-Others Scale was published in 2015 by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in the Journal of Marketing Research. The instrument is accessible for non-commercial academic, psychological, and pedagogical research under standard scholarly fair use conventions, provided that proper formal citation is attributed to the original authors (Cavanaugh, Bettman, & Luce, 2015). Researchers intending to deploy the scale for commercial consumer audits, proprietary market analyses, or programmatic consulting engagements should seek formal authorization through the copyright clearance infrastructure of the American Marketing Association or directly contact the lead author, Dr. Lisa A. Cavanaugh.

References

• Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Cavanaugh, L. A., Bettman, J. R., & Luce, M. F. (2015). Feeling love and doing more for distant others: Specific positive emotions differentially affect prosocial consumption. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(5), 657-673. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0486
• Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. Cognition & Emotion, 14(4), 473-493. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999300402763
• Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., & Slovic, P. (2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 143-153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005
• Smith, C. A., & Ellsworth, P. C. (1985). Patterns of cognitive appraisal in emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(4), 813-838. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.4.813
• Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440-463. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963
• White, K., & Peloza, J. (2009). Self-benefit versus other-benefit marketing appeals: Their effectiveness in generating charitable support. Journal of Marketing, 73(4), 109-124. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.73.4.109

Items of the Scale