Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) (ATAB)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) (ATAB) scale is a six-item psychometric instrument designed to assess consumers’ cognitive evaluations regarding the veracity, credibility, and fairness of advertising claims. Originating in consumer psychology and empirical marketing literature—prominently applied by Chingching Chang (2011) within the framework of environmental and sustainable marketing communications—the scale addresses the critical cognitive dimension of consumer attitudes toward persuasive messages. While traditional measures of attitude toward the ad ($A_{ad}$) have predominantly focused on global affective evaluations (e.g., pleasant/unpleasant, likeable/dislikeable), the ATAB operationalizes the diagnostic appraisal of advertising integrity, measuring constructs such as truthfulness, balance, reasonableness, persuasiveness, and lack of bias.

The instrument is administered using a seven-point semantic differential scale (ranging from 1 to 7) anchored by six bi-polar adjective pairs: Unbelievable / Believable, Untruthful / Truthful, Biased / Unbiased, Unreasonable / Reasonable, Not credible / Credible, and Not convincing / Convincing. Psychometric investigations consistently indicate that the ATAB is a unidimensional construct characterized by robust internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients frequently exceeding .88, and demonstrated convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validities across diverse experimental and field settings. The scale has gained exceptional prominence in the investigation of greenwashing, consumer skepticism, corporate social responsibility (CSR) messaging, and deceptive advertising, functioning as a vital diagnostic tool for psychometricians, behavioral scientists, and marketing communications researchers.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Ad, Ad Believability, Advertising Credibility, Consumer Skepticism, Green Advertising, Persuasion Knowledge Model, Semantic Differential, Psychometrics, Cognitive Appraisal, Marketing Psychology

3. Authors

The specific six-item operationalization of the Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) (ATAB) scale synthesized for marketing research was compiled and validated by:

• Chingching Chang, Ph.D. — Distinguished Professor at the Department of Advertising, College of Communication, National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan. Her seminal scholarship examines consumer psychology, environmental advertising, health communication, cognitive responses to media framing, and the dynamics of consumer ambivalence in response to persuasive discourse.

The foundational linguistic markers and structural items of ad believability draw upon classic psychometric traditions in advertising research pioneered by Scott B. MacKenzie and Richard J. Lutz (1989), as well as Carl Obermiller and Eric R. Spangenberg (1998), subsequently adapted into a focused six-item semantic differential paradigm by Chang (2011) to study consumer skepticism toward environmental and commercial assertions.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) scale is to isolate and quantify the cognitive evaluation of claim credibility within persuasive communications. In modern media environments saturated with hyperbole, unsubstantiated commercial promises, and sophisticated corporate messaging, consumers rarely accept claims at face value. Instead, they activate defensive cognitive schemas, evaluating whether an advertisement is honest, balanced, and plausible. The ATAB provides an empirical framework to quantify this psychological processing.

Research Applications

In academic research, the ATAB serves several crucial functions:

• Environmental and Green Marketing Analysis: The scale was validated to gauge how consumers navigate ambiguous ecological claims. As corporate “greenwashing” has proliferated, researchers use the ATAB to determine whether environmental credentials evoke trust or prompt defensive skepticism and consumer ambivalence (Chang, 2011).
• Testing the Persuasion Knowledge Model: It enables researchers to quantify the activation of consumer persuasion knowledge. When consumers suspect manipulative intent, ATAB scores drop, demonstrating how persuasion coping tactics impair message reception.
• Media and Message Framing Experiments: Scholars employ the scale as a mediator or dependent variable in experimental designs that manipulate message framing (e.g., gain vs. loss frames, abstract vs. concrete claims, puffery vs. verified factual evidence) to evaluate how message morphology influences perceived truthfulness.
• Health and Public Policy Campaigns: Beyond commercial goods, the ATAB is utilized to evaluate public service announcements (PSAs), nutritional claims, and cessation campaigns, verifying whether audience members perceive health warnings as reasonable and authoritative or exaggerated and unconvincing.

Applied and Commercial Applications

In applied marketing communications and copy-testing:

• Pre-Testing Advertising Copy: Marketing research agencies utilize the ATAB in pre-market copy-testing to identify whether consumer segments view claims as realistic. If a campaign scores poorly on the “Biased / Unbiased” or “Untruthful / Truthful” dimensions, creative executions can be revised prior to expensive media expenditures.
• Regulatory and Ethical Compliance: Organizations monitoring fair advertising standards employ ad believability metrics to assess potential deception, benchmarking whether ordinary consumers perceive specific claims as misleading.

5. Psychological Construct

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) construct represents a cognitive sub-dimension of the broader, multidimensional Attitude Toward the Ad ($A_{ad}$) construct. Within classical psychometric consumer psychology, $A_{ad}$ was initially treated as a unidimensional affective construct reflecting general positive or negative feelings toward an advertisement. However, subsequent structural models established that $A_{ad}$ comprises distinct cognitive and affective components. The cognitive component involves deliberate evaluations of message attributes, central among which is ad believability.

Deconstructing the Facets of Ad Believability

Ad believability is defined as the extent to which an individual consumer perceives the claims made in an advertisement to be truthful, credible, acceptable, and reflective of objective reality. The ATAB operationalizes this construct across several interrelated cognitive facets:

• Veracity and Factual Truthfulness (Untruthful / Truthful): This facet taps into the perceived factual accuracy of the message. The respondent evaluates whether the explicit assertions correspond to empirical reality or represent false representations. In cognitive processing, this involves matching ad claims against the consumer’s semantic knowledge base.
• Plausibility and Epistemic Credibility (Unbelievable / Believable & Not credible / Credible): Believability and credibility assess the likelihood that the claims could reasonably occur as described. While truthfulness addresses objective fact, credibility reflects the perceived authority, competence, and reliability of the message. It gauges whether the consumer considers the source trustworthy enough to accept the assertions without demanding independent empirical verification.
• Perceived Objectivity and Lack of Distortion (Biased / Unbiased): A critical differentiator of the ATAB is its inclusion of bias evaluation. Consumers recognize that advertising is inherently self-interested. However, an advertisement can present claims in a relatively balanced, fair manner, or it can present extreme, one-sided arguments. Perceiving an ad as “unbiased” signifies that the consumer does not detect manipulative concealment of counter-evidence.
• Logical Coherence (Unreasonable / Reasonable): This dimension evaluates the logical soundness of the arguments presented. It assesses whether the premises lead cogently to the conclusions drawn (e.g., whether adopting a specific product actually leads to the advertised environmental or personal benefit).
• Persuasive Efficacy (Not convincing / Convincing): This facet reflects the cognitive strength of the argument. An ad may be perceived as moderately truthful yet remain unconvincing if the evidentiary weight of the claim is trivial. Convincingness captures the perceived validity and weight of the arguments presented.

Believability versus General Skepticism

Psychometrically, it is vital to distinguish ad believability from consumer skepticism. Skepticism—as measured by scales such as the SKEP scale (Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998)—is conceptualized as a stable, cross-situational individual difference trait reflecting a generalized tendency toward disbelief of marketing communications. Conversely, ad believability, as operationalized by the ATAB, is a state-level, stimulus-specific cognitive response. While high dispositional skepticism tends to negatively predict ATAB scores, the ATAB reflects the situated cognitive evaluation of a specific, concrete advertisement.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) scale is rooted in three foundational theoretical frameworks: the Persuasion Knowledge Model, Dual-Process Models of Persuasion, and Source Credibility Theory.

The Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM)

Developed by Marian Friestad and Peter A. Wright (1994), the Persuasion Knowledge Model posits that consumers accumulate everyday knowledge about the motives, tactics, and psychological mechanisms that marketers employ to influence them. When an advertisement triggers suspicion—for instance, through exaggerated green marketing claims or obvious rhetorical manipulation—consumers activate their persuasion knowledge as a defensive coping mechanism.

Within this model, the ATAB functions as a direct metric of the outcome of persuasion coping processes. If a consumer’s persuasion knowledge indicates that the advertiser’s tactics are deceptive or disproportionate, the cognitive evaluation shifts toward the lower anchors of the ATAB (e.g., Biased, Untruthful, Not convincing). When persuasion tactics are judged transparent, legitimate, and fair, persuasion knowledge remains unprovoked, resulting in elevated believability scores.

Dual-Process Models of Persuasion (ELM and HSM)

The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) and the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM; Chaiken, 1980) provide theoretical explanations for how believability judgments are generated:

• Central / Systematic Route Processing: When consumers possess both the motivation and ability to scrutinize an ad (such as high personal involvement or deep concern regarding environmental degradation), they engage in effortful message elaboration. Under these conditions, ATAB responses are generated by systematically dissecting claim specificity, logical coherence, and evidential backing. The items Reasonable, Truthful, and Convincing reflect this detailed cognitive scrutiny.
• Peripheral / Heuristic Route Processing: When motivation or cognitive capacity is constrained, believability judgments are derived from heuristic cues, such as brand reputation, third-party certification logos, or the visual execution of the ad. Under heuristic processing, the ATAB reflects the consumer’s rapid, intuitive appraisal of whether the message “feels” credible and unbiased based on surface characteristics.

Source Credibility Theory and Cognitive Dissonance

Rooted in early social psychological inquiries by Carl Hovland, Irving Janis, and Harold Kelley (1953), Source Credibility Theory maintains that message acceptance depends upon perceived source trustworthiness and source expertise. The ATAB translates these source characteristics into message characteristics. Furthermore, as demonstrated by Chang (2011), when consumers hold ambivalent attitudes toward an issue (such as environmentalism, where pro-environmental values conflict with the convenience or expense of sustainable behavior), processing conflicting ad claims induces cognitive dissonance. The ATAB serves as a diagnostic tool reflecting how cognitive ambivalence undermines the perceived reasonableness and believability of persuasive messages.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATAB has been empirically corroborated through multiple forms of construct validation, including convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related predictive validity paradigms across international samples and diverse product categories.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by substantial, statistically significant correlations between the ATAB and alternative measures of advertising processing. Empirical validation studies reveal that ATAB scores correlate positively and strongly with:

• Global Attitude Toward the Ad ($A_{ad}$): Correlation coefficients typically range between $r = .65$ and $r = .82$ ($p < .001$), supporting the conceptualization of believability as a core cognitive antecedent of global ad liking.
• Attitude Toward the Brand ($A_b$): Significant positive correlations ($r = .45$ to $r = .68$) establish that higher perceived claim believability systematically transfers positive cognitive appraisals to the sponsoring brand.
• Source Trustworthiness: Strong convergence ($r > .70$) with established source credibility and corporate reputation inventories confirms that the scale accurately captures the epistemic credibility of communication sources.

Discriminant Validity

To demonstrate that the ATAB is psychometrically distinct from general affective reactions and dispositional traits, researchers have applied the Fornell-Larcker criterion and heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations:

• Separation from Affective $A_{ad}$: When modeled alongside affective dimensions of ad attitude (e.g., Irritating / Pleasing, Boring / Entertaining), confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that a two-factor model (Cognitive Believability vs. Affective Liking) fits empirical data significantly better than a unidimensional model, with HTMT values reliably falling below the strict .85 threshold.
• Separation from Trait Skepticism: While dispositional skepticism (measured via the SKEP scale) correlates negatively with ATAB scores (typically $r = -.30$ to $r = -.48$), the magnitude confirms that the ATAB does not simply re-measure dispositional traits, but captures variance attributable to the specific ad execution and message properties.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The ATAB exhibits high predictive utility in structural equation modeling (SEM) and experimental designs:

• Purchase and Behavioral Intentions: In path analyses, ATAB scores significantly predict consumer behavioral intentions ($r = .40$ to $r = .58$), with this relationship frequently mediated through attitude toward the brand.
• Detection of Greenwashing Manipulations: In experimental studies manipulating the verifiability of environmental claims (e.g., vague environmental platitudes versus third-party certified life-cycle data), the ATAB accurately discriminates between groups, demonstrating significant differences across experimental conditions ($F$-values frequently exceeding $p < .001$), confirming its experimental sensitivity.

8. Reliability

Across empirical investigations in advertising and consumer psychology, the six-item ATAB scale consistently demonstrates exceptional internal consistency reliability and measurement stability.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Standard psychometric benchmarks require an internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s $\alpha$) of at least .70 for exploratory work and .80 or higher for established instruments. The ATAB reliably exceeds these thresholds:

• In Chang’s (2011) foundational study on green advertising and consumer ambivalence, the scale achieved an initial Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .91$, demonstrating high internal consistency.
• Subsequent replications across consumer psychology research exploring diverse product sectors (e.g., consumer packaged goods, technological hardware, carbon-neutral services) have documented internal consistency coefficients ranging reliably from $\alpha = .88$ to $\alpha = .94$.
• Analyses evaluating composite reliability (CR) within structural equation modeling paradigms demonstrate values consistently surpassing $\text{CR} = .89$, well above the accepted threshold of .70, verifying that the six items share substantial common variance.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values routinely exceed .60 to .72, surpassing the standard .50 psychometric benchmark and confirming that the majority of item variance is captured by the latent believability construct rather than measurement error.

Item-Total Statistics and Inter-Item Correlations

Psychometric evaluations of individual items indicate that corrected item-total correlations across all six items remain robust, typically falling between $r = .65$ and $r = .85$. Deletion of any individual item does not lead to an increase in the global Cronbach’s alpha, demonstrating that every item contributes meaningfully to the overall reliability of the index.

9. Factor Analysis

Both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across independent consumer cohorts have examined the underlying structural dimensionality of the ATAB scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When the six items are subjected to EFA using principal axis factoring or principal components analysis with varimax or oblimin rotation:

• A single dominant factor reliably emerges, supported by Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues greater than 1.0) and scree plot inspections. The primary factor typically accounts for 65% to 78% of the total item variance.
• Initial eigenvalues for the first factor consistently exceed 3.80, whereas the second factor exhibits eigenvalues well below 0.60, confirming unidimensionality.
• Factor loadings for all six items are uniformly high, consistently exceeding .70, with primary items such as Unbelievable / Believable and Not credible / Credible demonstrating loadings between .82 and .91.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

CFA has been conducted to verify whether the single-factor structural representation demonstrates acceptable goodness-of-fit with observed empirical data. The table below presents representative CFA fit indices and typical standardized factor loadings reported across psychometric advertising research.

Table 1: Confirmatory Factor Analysis Model Fit and Standardized Loadings

Standardized Parameter Loadings ($lambda$)

• Item 1 (Unbelievable / Believable): $lambda = .86$
• Item 2 (Untruthful / Truthful): $lambda = .84$
• Item 3 (Biased / Unbiased): $lambda = .72$
• Item 4 (Unreasonable / Reasonable): $lambda = .79$
• Item 5 (Not credible / Credible): $lambda = .88$
• Item 6 (Not convincing / Convincing): $lambda = .81$

While Item 3 (Biased / Unbiased) occasionally displays slightly lower loadings relative to direct synonyms of credibility, its factor loading remains well above the .50 cutoff, confirming that freedom from perceived bias forms an integral part of the believability latent variable.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) (ATAB)
• Construct Measured: Perceived truthfulness, cognitive credibility, reasonableness, persuasiveness, and lack of bias in an advertisement.
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale using a semantic differential format.
• Number of Items: 6 items (bi-polar adjective pairs).
• Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (1 to 7).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted, or online web survey administration.
• Target Population: Adult consumers, student participant pools, and general public samples capable of processing advertising communications.
• Estimated Completion Time: 1 to 2 minutes following message exposure.
• Scoring Rules:
  • Each item is scored from 1 (reflecting the negative anchor; e.g., Unbelievable, Untruthful, Biased) to 7 (reflecting the positive anchor; e.g., Believable, Truthful, Unbiased).
  • If the physical or digital survey randomizes anchor poles to minimize response set bias, inverted items must be reverse-scored prior to composite aggregation.
  • An overall ad believability index is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all six items.
  • Composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00, where higher numerical values reflect greater perceived believability, integrity, and message credibility.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Believability) scale was published by Chingching Chang in 2011 in the Journal of Advertising (Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 19–32). The scale items are based on classic advertising believability metrics synthesized for empirical consumer research.

• Academic Research Usage: Under fair use conventions for academic scholarship and educational applications, researchers may use and reproduce the six-item semantic differential scale in non-commercial, empirical investigations without requiring individual permission fees, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is extended to Chang (2011) and foundational ad credibility scholars.
• Commercial Copy-Testing Usage: Commercial testing, commercial software deployment, or proprietary testing frameworks should review publisher copyright policies (Taylor & Francis / American Academy of Advertising) regarding reproducing full published journal text.
• Fee: Free for academic, educational, and non-commercial scientific research.

12. References

• Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 752–766. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.752
• Chang, C. (2011). Feeling ambivalent about going green. Journal of Advertising, 40(4), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.2753/JOA0091-3367400402
• Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (1994). The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How people cope with persuasion attempts. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/209380
• Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion: Psychological studies of opinion change. Yale University Press.
• MacKenzie, S. B., & Lutz, R. J. (1989). An empirical examination of the structural antecedents of attitude toward the ad in an advertising pretesting context. Journal of Marketing, 53(2), 48–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298905300204
• Obermiller, C., & Spangenberg, E. R. (1998). Development of a scale to measure consumer skepticism toward advertising. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 7(2), 159–186. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp0702_03
• Ohanian, R. (1990). Construction and validation of a scale to measure celebrity endorsers’ perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Journal of Advertising, 19(3), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1990.10673191
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2

13. Items of the Scale