Encouragement Felt After Making the Decision (ENCD)

1. Abstract

The Encouragement Felt After Making the Decision (ENCD) scale is an eight-item psychometric instrument designed to assess the immediate affective uplift and post-decisional emotional energization experienced by an individual following a choice. Developed and validated by Jen Shang, Americus Reed II, Adrian Sargeant, and Kathryn Carpenter (2020) within consumer psychology and philanthropic behavior contexts, the instrument captures the net psychological reward derived from decision-making. Specifically, the ENCD measures the degree to which an actor feels revitalized, validated, and psychologically fortified versus deflated, disheartened, or disillusioned by their decision.

The scale employs a balanced design consisting of four positively phrased emotional descriptors (encouraged, invigorated, heartened, and uplifted) and four negatively phrased descriptors (discouraged, disappointed, disheartened, and let down). Responses are captured using a 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 7 (“Very much / Strongly agree”). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate a robust unidimensional structure when accounting for method effects associated with reverse-worded items, high internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s α typically exceeding .90), and sound convergent and predictive validity regarding repeat engagement, satisfaction, and prosocial commitments. This paper provides a comprehensive psychometric and theoretical review of the ENCD, outlining its conceptual foundations, structural characteristics, measurement parameters, and research applications.

2. Keywords

Encouragement Felt After Making the Decision, ENCD, moral identity, decision-making, post-decisional affect, philanthropic psychology, warm glow, emotional uplift, consumer behavior, psychometrics

3. Authors

The ENCD scale was introduced by a team of leading scholars in marketing, consumer psychology, and philanthropic psychology:

• Jen Shang, Ph.D. — Co-Director, Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy; renowned philanthropic psychologist specializing in moral identity, donor well-being, and prosocial motivation.
• Americus Reed II, Ph.D. — The Whitney M. Young, Jr. Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; international expert on identity marketing, consumer self-concept, and social influence.
• Adrian Sargeant, Ph.D. — Co-Director, Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy; leading authority on nonprofit fundraising, donor retention, and charitable behavior.
• Kathryn Carpenter — Researcher in behavioral marketing and philanthropic decision-making.

4. Purpose

Decision-making models in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology have traditionally focused on cognitive evaluations such as expected utility, subjective probability, and post-decisional regret. However, modern consumer research emphasizes that choices—especially those tied to an individual’s ethical values, moral identity, or personal resources—generate profound affective feedback loops. The primary purpose of the Encouragement Felt After Making the Decision (ENCD) scale is to quantify this specific post-decisional emotional resonance.

The scale was developed to address critical theoretical gaps in understanding how moral actions influence emotional outcomes. When individuals make choices that resolve internal conflicts or express their core identities (such as donating to charity, selecting ethically sourced goods, or making an altruistic sacrifice), they rarely experience merely a neutral confirmation of utility. Instead, they often experience an immediate sensation of emotional elevation and energization. Conversely, when a decision fails to resolve an internal moral discrepancy or feels coerced, incongruent, or underwhelming, individuals experience a sense of deflation, disappointment, and disheartenment.

The ENCD serves both investigative and diagnostic purposes across multiple disciplines:

• Philanthropic and Prosocial Research: To determine how donor journeys and fundraising appeals foster lasting emotional well-being, thereby predicting donor retention and lifetime value.
• Consumer Psychology: To capture the net positive emotional consequence of sustainable, ethical, or high-involvement purchasing choices compared to neutral or purely transaction-oriented purchases.
• Behavioral Interventions: To evaluate whether public policy nudges, health choices, or compliance decisions leave citizens feeling supported and empowered rather than psychologically depleted.
• Organizational Behavior: To analyze the affective aftermath of workplace ethical dilemmas, leadership interventions, and governance resolutions.

By measuring the balance between positive elevation and negative deflation, the ENCD acts as a sensitive barometer for whether a choice has successfully reinforced an agent’s self-concept.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct measured by the ENCD is post-decisional affective encouragement, defined as a state-based emotional condition characterized by felt moral validation, subjective invigoration, and positive psychological momentum following a self-relevant decision. This construct is distinct from general positive affect, transactional customer satisfaction, and simple cognitive alignment.

The Dual-Polarity Composition

The construct is conceptualized along a bipolar affective continuum anchored by two primary emotional poles:

1. Decisional Uplift and Invigoration (Positive Sub-dimension): This component captures feelings of being encouraged, invigorated, heartened, and uplifted. Rooted in the psychology of moral elevation (Haidt, 2003), this state reflects high-activation positive affect. The actor feels an internal expansion, renewed energy, and subjective certainty that their agency has generated meaningful, constructive impact. It embodies a form of eudaimonic emotional enrichment, wherein the decision aligns with deeply held aspirations.
2. Decisional Deflation and Disappointment (Negative Sub-dimension): This component comprises feelings of being discouraged, disappointed, disheartened, and let down. Rather than representing mere neutral affect, this pole reflects a state of emotional dejection. It occurs when a decision, despite being completed, leaves a lingering sense of insufficiency, moral dissonance, or psychological cost exceeding subjective reward.

Construct Distinctions

It is vital to distinguish the ENCD construct from adjacent psychological phenomena:

• ENCD vs. Cognitive Satisfaction: While post-purchase satisfaction represents an evaluative, expectancy-disconfirmation cognitive judgment (“Did the product perform as expected?”), post-decisional encouragement represents a visceral, identity-relevant energetic state (“Do I feel heartened and energized as a human being because of this choice?”).
• ENCD vs. General Positive Affect (e.g., PANAS): General positive affect captures broad, non-specific mood states (e.g., interested, alert, excited). In contrast, ENCD is strictly post-decisional and attributionally anchored to the specific choice episode.
• ENCD vs. “Warm Glow”: While Andreoni’s (1990) economic concept of warm-glow giving is often treated as a unitary hedonic reward, ENCD captures a richer psychological topology that includes moral invigoration, prospective encouragement, and the absence of deflating counter-emotions.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ENCD is grounded in three foundational theoretical frameworks: Self-Discrepancy Theory, Moral Identity Theory, and the Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions.

Moral Identity and Self-Discrepancy

According to E. Tory Higgins‘ (1987) self-discrepancy framework, individuals hold beliefs about their actual self, ideal self, and ought self. Discrepancies between the actual self and self-guides generate distinct forms of negative affect (e.g., dejection-related or agitation-related emotions). In their foundational work, Shang et al. (2020) demonstrated that consumers often face subtle moral identity discrepancies—gaps between how ethical they perceive themselves to be and how ethical their internalized ideals dictate they should be.

Aquino and Reed (2002) conceptualized moral identity as a self-conception organized around a set of moral traits (e.g., compassionate, generous, fair). When individuals engage in prosocial or ethical marketplace behavior, that choice serves as a self-regulatory mechanism to reduce moral discrepancy. When an action successfully narrows this gap, the individual experiences positive emotional reinforcement—manifesting precisely as the uplift, invigoration, and encouragement captured by the ENCD. If the choice fails to resolve the discrepancy, or highlights ongoing moral shortcomings, the individual experiences the deflating emotions of being disheartened or let down.

The Broaden-and-Build Mechanism

The scale also draws theoretical validity from Barbara Fredrickson’s (2001) Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions. Feelings such as “invigorated” and “encouraged” do not merely signal passive satisfaction; they broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build enduring personal resources. An actor who feels encouraged by a decision experiences an increased likelihood of future proactive engagement, higher self-efficacy, and a stronger readiness to reaffirm that identity in subsequent environments.

7. Validity

Empirical validation of the ENCD demonstrates strong psychometric credentials across multiple experimental and survey paradigms, particularly in consumer philanthropy contexts (Shang et al., 2020).

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was established through confirmatory factor analyses comparing single-factor models to alternative multi-factor formulations. When modeling an underlying bipolar latent factor of net encouragement, the items exhibit uniformly high factor loadings. The four positive items load positively and robustly, while the four reverse items load inversely at high magnitudes, confirming that both valences converge on the theoretical continuum of post-choice emotional energy.

Convergent Validity

The ENCD correlates positively and significantly with established measures of:

• Moral Self-Regard: Positive associations with post-behavior moral self-esteem and identity congruence ($r \approx .45$ to $.60, p < .001$).
• Perceived Decision Significance: Strong correlations with the perceived ethical impact and subjective meaning of the choice ($r > .50$).
• Warm Glow: Moderate-to-high correlations with single-item and multi-item warm-glow indices ($r \approx .65$), confirming shared affective variance while maintaining distinct construct identity.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been confirmed through average variance extracted (AVE) analysis and heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratios of correlations. In Shang et al. (2020), ENCD was empirically differentiated from general cognitive evaluation variables (e.g., transaction convenience, perceived administrative efficiency) and transient non-moral mood states. The HTMT ratios between ENCD and measures of general cognitive satisfaction consistently fall well below the conservative threshold of 0.85, establishing that feeling morally heartened is distinct from simply judging an interaction to be satisfactory.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The scale exhibits superior predictive validity relative to general satisfaction measures when forecasting downstream behavioral loyalty. In experimental manipulations examining charitable donations, higher ENCD scores mediated the relationship between moral identity activation and the likelihood of becoming a recurring donor. Furthermore, in field studies, participants scoring in the upper quartile of ENCD exhibited significantly higher subsequent contribution rates and greater willingness to publicly advocate for the organization.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the ENCD has been rigorously demonstrated across diverse samples, including student pools, representative adult panels, and active charitable donor bases.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency estimates for the complete 8-item composite scale consistently exceed standard psychometric benchmarks:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Across the empirical investigations reported by Shang et al. (2020), the scale achieved Cronbach’s α values ranging from .88 to .93, indicating exceptional internal consistency.
• McDonald’s Omega (ω): Due to potential limitations of alpha under conditions of unequal factor loadings, composite reliability (ω) has also been evaluated, consistently yielding values between .89 and .94.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for all eight items consistently exceed .60, with the positive markers (e.g., encouraged, heartened) frequently demonstrating item-total correlations above .75.

Split-Half and Temporal Stability

Split-half reliability coefficients (Spearman-Brown corrected) routinely surpass .85. While ENCD is primarily conceptualized as a post-decisional state measure—and thus expected to attenuate as time elapses following the decision episode—short-interval test-retest assessments administered within immediate post-choice experimental windows demonstrate high consistency ($r_{tt} > .80$), confirming the stability of the measurement tool during the immediate decision consolidation phase.

9. Factor Analysis

Psychometric analyses using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) delineate the structural architecture of the 8-item instrument.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblique rotation (e.g., Promax) on un-reversed items yield a clear two-factor solution corresponding to the positive affect cluster (Items 1–4) and the negative affect cluster (Items 5–8). However, when the negative items are reversed according to the instrument’s scoring protocol, the scree plot and parallel analysis indicate a dominant single eigenvalue accounting for over 55% to 65% of the total variance, confirming an overarching unidimensional construct of net encouragement.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

When evaluated via CFA, a standard single-factor model may exhibit mild strain due to method variance introduced by the polarity of item wording. Consequently, structural equation modeling typically evaluates either a single-factor model with correlated residuals among reverse-coded items or a bifactor specification.

A single-factor model incorporating a method factor for the reversed items demonstrates outstanding goodness-of-fit across empirical datasets:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .96$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .95$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .055$ (90% CI [.038, .071])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .038$
• Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) are uniformly high, typically ranging between .72 and .88 across all eight indicators.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: Encouragement Felt After Making the Decision (ENCD)
• Alternative Title: Post-Decisional Encouragement Scale
• Authors: Jen Shang, Americus Reed II, Adrian Sargeant, and Kathryn Carpenter (2020)
• Construct Measured: Net post-decisional emotional uplift and moral invigoration versus affective deflation
• Structure / Number of Items: 8 items (4 positively valenced items, 4 negatively valenced items)
• Item Content:
  • Positive items: Encouraged, Invigorated, Heartened, Uplifted
  • Negative items: Discouraged, Disappointed, Disheartened, Let down
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much / Strongly agree)
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Items 5, 6, 7, and 8 must be reverse-scored: $Score_{reversed} = 8 – Score_{original}$.
  • After reverse scoring the negative emotion items, compute the arithmetic mean across all 8 items.
  • Higher aggregate scores represent greater post-decisional encouragement and emotional uplift. Lower aggregate scores reflect post-decisional emotional deflation, disappointment, or disheartenment.
• Target Population: Consumers, charitable donors, voting citizens, and decision-makers in post-choice experimental or field contexts.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 60 to 90 seconds.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The ENCD was developed and published in 2020 in the Journal of Marketing Research. The instrument is intended for empirical research in consumer psychology, behavioral economics, and nonprofit management.

• Permissions: The scale items and response format are published within academic literature. Academic researchers, non-profit institutions, and educational practitioners may utilize the scale for non-commercial research purposes without direct licensing fees, provided proper bibliographic citation is given to Shang et al. (2020).
• Commercial Usage: For proprietary commercial testing, market research platforms, or commercial diagnostic implementations, researchers should consult the copyright guidelines of the American Marketing Association (AMA) or contact the corresponding authors.

12. References

• Andreoni, J. (1990). Impure altruism and donations to public goods: A theory of warm-glow giving. The Economic Journal, 100(401), 464–477. https://doi.org/10.2307/2234133
• Aquino, K., & Reed, A., II. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1423–1440. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.1423
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
• Haidt, J. (2003). Elevation and the positive psychology of morality. In C. L. M. Keyes & J. Haidt (Eds.), Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well-lived (pp. 275–289). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10594-012
• Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94(3), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.94.3.319
• Shang, J., Reed, A., II, Sargeant, A., & Carpenter, K. (2020). Marketplace donations: The role of moral identity discrepancy and gender. Journal of Marketing Research, 57(2), 375–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243719892582

13. Items of the Scale