Four semantic differential adjective pairs assess the extent to which a person is perceived as honest, ethical, genuine, and trustworthy. The scale captures a core dimension of source credibility -- moral integrity and benevolence -- rather than expertise or attractiveness. Although the items can in principle be applied to non-human sources such as organisations or anthropomorphised products, the scale is best suited for evaluating human communicators or spokespeople.
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Items were taken directly from the trustworthiness subscale of McCroskey and Teven's (1999) goodwill and trustworthiness measure from the communication literature. Touré-Tillery and McGill (2015) used the scale to assess whether human versus anthropomorphised messengers were perceived as differentially trustworthy. The instructions used in the original study were not reported; participants appear to have used the items to evaluate the credibility of a messenger in a print ad. No formal validity analysis was reported by Touré-Tillery and McGill (2015). The scale is general enough to apply across a range of source types, but the authors caution it is most appropriate for human or human-like sources.
Touré-Tillery, M., & McGill, A. L. (2015). Who or what to believe: Trust and the differential persuasiveness of human and anthropomorphized messengers. Journal of Marketing, 79(4), 94-110.
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