This scale measures how much a person believes the motivation behind an advertisement is community- and customer-oriented rather than self-interested and profit-driven. Bauer and Johnson (2023) used it in a study of cryptomnesia (inadvertent plagiarism) in advertising, where cultural distance between an ad’s creators was manipulated and consumer attitudes, cognitions, and behavioral intentions were the outcomes of interest.
7-point semantic differential
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
The scale was reliable (α = .84; Bauer and Johnson 2023, p. 305) among 246 undergraduate participants from two U.S. private universities. Formal validity testing was not reported. Note on provenance: this three-item set originated as an embedded manipulation check in Becker-Olsen, Cudmore, and Hill (2006, p. 49), verifying an experimentally assigned motivation condition (firm-serving vs. socially motivated). Bauer and Johnson (2023) reuse the items verbatim, but in a design where motivation is not itself experimentally manipulated — the manipulated variable is cultural distance between an ad’s original and “inadvertently plagiarizing” creators, with consumer attitudes, cognitions, and behavioral intentions as downstream outcomes. That shifts this item set from a manipulation-check role to a measured perceptual variable operating inside a substantive causal model, which is why it is presented here as a standalone scale. The measure's specific statistical role in the model (e.g., mediator or covariate) is not confirmed here; consult the original article.
Bauer, Brittney C. and Clark D. Johnson (2023), "‘I Thought My Idea to Use Your Idea Was a Great Idea’: Inadvertent Plagiarism in Marketing," Journal of Advertising, 52 (2), 300-309.
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