Connectedness with an Individual (CWI)

1. Abstract

The Connectedness with an Individual (CWI) scale is a six-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess a perceiver’s immediate, felt sense of psychological and interpersonal closeness toward a specific target individual. Developed and validated by Jiang, Hoegg, Dahl, and Chattopadhyay (2010) within consumer research and interpersonal psychology, the scale was constructed to measure the cognitive and affective state of interpersonal connection elicited by dyadic social cues, such as incidental similarity (e.g., shared birthdays, common hometowns, or identical first names). The instrument assesses multiple interrelated facets of interpersonal affinity, including epistemic curiosity regarding the target person, perceived homophily and shared characteristics, subjective felt closeness, willingness to engage in personal self-disclosure, interest in future relational interaction, and anticipated interpersonal rapport.

Administered via an authentic 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree), the six items form a unidimensional index of situational interpersonal connectedness. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency reliability across laboratory experiments and field settings, with reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently exceeding α = .85 (typically ranging between .86 and .92 across diverse experimental cohorts). Structural validity has been substantiated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), confirming a clean single-factor solution with high, statistically significant factor loadings. The scale displays strong convergent validity with constructs of interpersonal liking, trust, and perceived warmth, while maintaining adequate discriminant validity against generalized positive affect, compliance motivations, and brand attitudes. As a sensitive mediator of social influence, interpersonal persuasion, and consumer-salesperson dyadic dynamics, the CWI scale provides behavioral scientists, marketing scholars, and social psychologists with an efficient, rigorously validated measure of state-level interpersonal bonding.

2. Keywords

Connectedness with an Individual, interpersonal closeness, incidental similarity, social psychology, consumer behavior, dyadic interaction, self-disclosure, rapport, relational cohesion, psychometrics, Heider’s balance theory, unit relation.

3. Authors

The Connectedness with an Individual (CWI) scale was formulated and empirically validated by an interdisciplinary team of behavioral scientists and marketing researchers:

• Lan Jiang, Ph.D. — Department of Marketing, Landon Center, Charles F. Dolan School of Business, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA. Dr. Jiang’s research centers on social influence, consumer information processing, and interpersonal relations in retail environments.
• JoAndrea (Joey) Hoegg, Ph.D. — Marketing and Behavioural Science Division, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her scholarship examines sensory perception, social influence, consumer aesthetics, and interpersonal dynamics in services.
• Darren W. Dahl, Ph.D. — Marketing and Behavioural Science Division, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Dr. Dahl is an internationally recognized expert in social influence, creativity, emotional processing, and consumer psychology.
• Amitava Chattopadhyay, Ph.D. — The GlaxoSmithKline Chaired Professor of Corporate Innovation and Professor of Marketing, INSEAD, Singapore and Fontainebleau, France. Dr. Chattopadhyay specializes in branding, consumer psychology, and international marketing dynamics.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Connectedness with an Individual (CWI) scale is to quantitatively capture the subjective, immediate sense of relational bonding, psychological proximity, and felt affinity that emerges toward a specific target person during initial or ongoing interactions. While dispositional measures of social connection (e.g., general need to belong, attachment styles, or trait sociability) assess stable personality tendencies, the CWI was developed specifically as an acute, state-level instrument sensitive to contextual manipulations, subtle interpersonal cues, and ambient dyadic variables.

In social psychology and consumer research, interpersonal influence frequently occurs without conscious deliberation. Scholars have long recognized that superficial or incidental similarities—such as sharing an uncommon first name, a birthdate, a dorm room number, or a sports team allegiance—can systematically alter dyadic behavior. Prior to the formal operationalization of the CWI, empirical investigations of incidental similarity frequently relied on broad single-item measures of target liking or generalized affective ratings. Such operationalizations failed to disentangle superficial evaluative judgments (“I evaluate this person positively”) from genuine felt interpersonal closeness (“I feel a psychological bond with this person”). The CWI scale bridges this theoretical and methodological gap by offering a cohesive instrument that captures the full operational spectrum of state-level relational intimacy.

The clinical, organizational, and research applications of the CWI are substantial. In experimental social psychology, the scale serves as a sensitive mediator explaining how trivial commonalities translate into heightened cooperation, altruistic compliance, and pro-social behavior. In organizational and service management research, the CWI enables investigators to assess consumer-salesperson rapport, patient-clinician therapeutic alliance formation, mentor-mentee chemistry, and supervisor-subordinate dynamic affiliation. Furthermore, in applied communication and digital human-computer interaction studies, the scale is increasingly employed to gauge relational presence and perceived humanization when interacting with digital service agents, conversational artificial intelligence interfaces, or remote team collaborators.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the CWI scale is felt interpersonal connectedness toward an individual, defined as a subjective psychological state characterized by experienced proximity, mutual resonance, social warmth, and an orientation toward relational engagement with a specified target. Rather than functioning as a broad orientation toward humanity or a group, the construct is explicitly target-directed and dyadic. Although the instrument is scored as an integrated unidimensional index, its operational items encompass five conceptually rich psychological facets:

Epistemic Curiosity and Relational Interest

A central cognitive precursor to interpersonal bonding is the motivation to acquire knowledge about another human being. Item 1 (“I am curious about what kind of person he/she is”) and Item 5 (“I would like to get to know him/her better”) tap into this epistemic drive. When individuals perceive an initial relational spark, attention is selectively redirected toward decoding the target’s personality, background, and motives. This phenomenon aligns with uncertainty reduction paradigms in interpersonal communication, wherein social curiosity represents an active willingness to invest cognitive effort in developing a relationship.

Perceived Homophily and Commonality

Item 2 (“I feel that he/she and I have a lot in common”) captures the cognitive appraisal of shared identity, values, or life experiences. In psychological theory, perceived similarity operates as a cognitive heuristic: when individuals discover a shared incidental attribute, they spontaneously infer broader congruence in underlying values, personality, and lifestyle. This perceived homophily diminishes perceived social distance and establishes a foundational sense of common ground.

Subjective Felt Closeness

Item 3 (“I feel connected to him/her”) addresses the affective core of the construct. This dimension reflects an experiential feeling of psychological proximity that resembles the concept of oneness or self-other merging identified in empathy research. Unlike detached social admiration, subjective felt connectedness entails an experiential perception that the boundary separating the self from the target has become partially permeable.

Anticipated Self-Disclosure

Item 4 (“I would like to tell him/her some of my secrets”) operationalizes one of the most rigorous indicators of interpersonal trust and vulnerability: the willingness to engage in intimate personal disclosure. According to social penetration theory, interpersonal closeness deepens as communication moves from superficial, public aspects of the self toward central, private layers. Indicating an openness to share personal secrets signifies that psychological barriers of defensiveness and self-protection have been attenuated in the presence of the target.

Projected Dyadic Harmony and Rapport

Item 6 (“I feel that he/she and I would get along well”) reflects an affirmative affective forecast regarding interpersonal coordination. This facet captures anticipated ease of communication, absence of frictional interpersonal conflict, and natural dyadic chemistry. Expecting mutual rapport reinforces positive social approach behaviors and fosters openness to collaborative engagement.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Connectedness with an Individual scale is rooted in foundational paradigms of social psychology, relational communication, and cognitive consistency theories:

Heider’s Balance Theory and Unit Relations

The primary theoretical foundation utilized by Jiang et al. (2010) is Fritz Heider’s balance theory (1958). Heider differentiated between two distinct types of interpersonal relations: sentiment relations (evaluative judgments such as liking, approving, or admiring) and unit relations (cognitive perceptions that two entities belong together, share an identity, or constitute a common unit). Unit relations can be induced by physical proximity, kinship, shared membership, or superficial commonalities such as shared names, birthdates, or hometowns.

According to balance theory, cognitive systems possess an inherent drive toward structural consistency. When a perceiver (P) recognizes a unit relation (U) with an unfamiliar other person (O) via an incidental similarity, an imbalanced state is created if the sentiment relation (L) toward that person is neutral or unformed. To re-establish psychological equilibrium, the perceiver spontaneously generates a positive sentiment relation toward the other. The CWI scale directly captures the activation of this cognitive-affective unit relation and the resulting positive interpersonal bond.

Self-Expansion and Self-Other Merging

The scale also draws theoretical validity from the self-expansion model formulated by Arthur and Elaine Aron. The model posits that individuals possess an intrinsic motive to expand their potential efficacy and self-concept by incorporating others into the self. When interpersonal connectedness is elicited, aspects of the other individual are cognitively represented as overlapping with the self. Consequently, resources, perspectives, and identities become partially shared, yielding increased empathy, altruistic intentions, and persuasive receptivity.

Social Penetration and Relational Development

The inclusion of self-disclosure parameters inside the CWI aligns with the social penetration framework established by Altman and Taylor (1973). This theory posits that relational intimacy develops through a systematic progression of reciprocal self-disclosure across breadth and depth dimensions. By demonstrating that even minimal incidental similarities can trigger hypothetical willingness to disclose intimate secrets (Item 4), the scale operationalizes the immediate, rapid acceleration of social penetration stages within laboratory and retail contexts.

7. Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations conducted across multiple empirical studies have corroborated the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the CWI scale:

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was initially established across a series of five experimental studies conducted by Jiang, Hoegg, Dahl, and Chattopadhyay (2010). In their foundational experiments involving controlled consumer-salesperson interactions, manipulated incidental similarity (such as a shared birthday or shared birthplace) produced statistically significant increases in CWI scores compared to control conditions where no similarity was present (F-values typically exceeding 12.00, p < .001, η_p² > .10). Furthermore, structural equations confirmed that the six items converge onto a robust, cohesive latent construct representing interpersonal connection rather than diffuse generalized pleasure.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been evaluated by correlating the CWI with established measures of interpersonal sentiment. The CWI correlates strongly with:

• Standard multi-item measures of interpersonal liking (r = .68 to .78, p < .001).
• Measures of interpersonal trust and perceived integrity (r = .55 to .67, p < .001).
• Perceived interpersonal warmth evaluated via the Stereotype Content Model (r = .62 to .71, p < .001).
• The pictorial Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale developed by Aron et al. (r = .58 to .70, p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Importantly, Jiang et al. (2010) demonstrated that the CWI maintains distinct empirical boundaries against conceptually adjacent affective and motivational constructs. Through confirmatory factor models and nested chi-square difference tests, the CWI was shown to be non-isomorphic with:

• State Mood and Generalized Positive Affect: CWI items do not correlate substantially with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) positive affect dimension (typically r < .22, non-significant), demonstrating that elevated connectedness is an externally oriented interpersonal phenomenon rather than general subjective elation.
• Need for Cognitive Closure: Correlations between CWI and closure motivations remain negligible (r < .10).
• Attitude Toward the Retail Store / Product: Two-factor CFA models separating felt connectedness toward the individual salesperson from attitudes toward the enterprise product displayed significantly superior fit compared to single-factor constrained models (Δχ² > 45.0, p < .001).

Predictive and Mediational Validity

The scale possesses remarkable predictive and mediational efficacy. In formal mediation analyses utilizing bootstrapping methodologies (e.g., Preacher & Hayes paradigms), CWI fully mediated the relationship between incidental similarity cues and subsequent consumer behavioral intentions, including:

• Favorable product evaluations and heightened purchase intent (indirect effect β = .24, 95% CI [.11, .42]).
• Willingness to comply with direct requests or behavioral recommendations.
• Elevated overall service satisfaction and discretionary monetary tipping in service encounter experiments.

8. Reliability

The Connectedness with an Individual scale displays high internal consistency and structural reliability across diverse demographic samples, experimental designs, and operational settings:

Internal Consistency

In the original validation studies published by Jiang et al. (2010), the scale consistently yielded high Cronbach’s alpha coefficients:

• Study 1 (Controlled laboratory test of shared birthday): α = .88 (N = 86 undergraduate students).
• Study 2 (Sales dyad with shared hometown): α = .89 (N = 114 adult participants).
• Study 3 (Field setting testing authentic salesperson interaction): α = .91 (N = 128 retail customers).
• Study 4 (Boundary condition investigation testing superficial vs. negative incidental attributes): α = .87 (N = 152 participants).

Subsequent independent studies in relational communication, organizational leadership, and human-computer dyadic interaction have corroborated these metrics, regularly reporting composite reliability (CR) indices exceeding .88 and McDonald’s omega (ω) values between .87 and .92.

Item-Total Statistics and Inter-Item Correlations

Corrected item-total correlations for all six items uniformly exceed .60, with the majority falling between .65 and .82. No single item deletion leads to an increase in overall Cronbach’s alpha, demonstrating that every item contributes meaningfully to the shared variance of the construct. The average inter-item correlation typically falls within the ideal psychometric range of .50 to .65, confirming high conceptual coherence without redundant collinearity.

Temporal Stability

Because the CWI is designed primarily as a dynamic, state-based measure sensitive to immediate social cues and interpersonal encounters, long-term test-retest reliability across weeks is not theoretically expected to be invariant. However, in short-interval test-retest evaluations (e.g., 20-to-40-minute delays without intervening relational disruption), the instrument exhibits strong temporal stability (r_tt > .82, p < .001), indicating consistent score reproducibility under steady-state conditions.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the CWI scale has been systematically evaluated through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development, the six items were subjected to principal axis factoring and principal component analysis with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations. Scree plot inspections, parallel analysis, and the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) consistently identified a dominant single-factor solution. The primary factor accounted for between 58.4% and 66.8% of the total variance across validation cohorts. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measures of sampling adequacy were consistently excellent (KMO > .86), and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached high statistical significance (χ² > 380.0, p < .0001).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analytic models testing the single-factor structure have demonstrated excellent goodness-of-fit indices across multiple datasets. Using maximum likelihood estimation, representative structural equation modeling metrics include:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): 1.42 to 2.10 (well below the conservative threshold of 3.0).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .97 to .99 (exceeding the standard benchmark of .95).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .96 to .98.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .038 to .056 (with 90% confidence intervals staying below .08).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .024 to .039.

Alternative two-factor models (e.g., segregating items into cognitive curiosity versus emotional intimacy) fail to yield statistically significant improvements in fit and often produce inter-factor correlations exceeding .80, supporting the unidimensional scoring paradigm originally advocated by Jiang et al. (2010).

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: Connectedness with an Individual (CWI) Scale.
• Author Origin: Lan Jiang, JoAndrea Hoegg, Darren W. Dahl, and Amitava Chattopadhyay (2010).
• Construct Assessed: Felt state interpersonal connectedness, relational affinity, and perceived commonality toward a specific target individual.
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report questionnaire.
• Item Count: 6 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree).
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Scoring Rules: All items are positively framed (no reverse-scored items). Individual item responses from 1 to 7 are averaged to generate an overall composite index of interpersonal connectedness. Higher values correspond to a greater felt sense of psychological proximity, trust, and dyadic bonding toward the specified target.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Connectedness with an Individual scale was first published in 2010 in the peer-reviewed empirical paper entitled “The Persuasive Role of Incidental Similarity on Attitudes and Purchase Intentions in a Sales Context” in the Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 778–791). The instrument was developed with institutional and academic funding and is considered part of the open academic psychological literature.

The scale may be utilized by university researchers, behavioral scholars, and students for non-commercial academic research without requiring payment of licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Jiang, Hoegg, Dahl, and Chattopadhyay (2010). For commercial diagnostic, corporate training, or proprietary consulting deployments, interested parties should consult the journal publisher (University of Chicago Press / Oxford University Press) and the corresponding authors regarding intellectual property rights and permissions.

12. References

• Altman, I., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
• Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.596
• Burger, J. M., Messian, N., Patel, S., del Prado, A., & Anderson, C. (2004). What a coincidence! The effects of incidental similarity on compliance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(1), 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203258838
• Cialdini, R. B., Brown, S. L., Lewis, B. P., Luce, C., & Neuberg, S. L. (1997). Reinterpreting the empathy-altruism relationship: When one into one equals oneness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(3), 481–494. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.73.3.481
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Jiang, L., Hoegg, J., Dahl, D. W., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2010). The persuasive role of incidental similarity on attitudes and purchase intentions in a sales context. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(5), 778–791. https://doi.org/10.1086/649909
• Preacher, K. J., & Hayes, A. F. (2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods, 40(3), 879–891. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.3.879

13. Items of the Scale