Engagement in the Experience (ENEX)

Abstract

The Engagement in the Experience (ENEX) scale is a concise, highly sensitive psychometric instrument designed to evaluate the extent to which an individual feels psychologically absorbed, captivated, and subjectively integrated into an ongoing experiential consumption activity. Originating in empirical consumer behavior and experiential psychology research by Garbinsky and Klesse (2021), the ENEX operationalizes experiential engagement along a unidimensional continuum encompassing cognitive absorption, subjective immersion, and perceived psychological presence. Consisting of three parsimonious items assessed via a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), the instrument features an adaptable target referent—designated by the bracketed placeholder [experience]—which affords researchers exceptional ecological versatility across diverse empirical contexts, including live theater, dining, digital gaming, immersive virtual reality, museum exhibitions, and tourism. Psychometric investigations demonstrate that the ENEX displays exceptional internal consistency (with reported Cronbach’s α coefficients consistently exceeding .88 across multiple experimental studies), robust unidimensional factor validity, high composite reliability, and strong predictive validity regarding focal consumer outcomes such as experiential enjoyment, retrospective evaluation, and willingness to recommend. By capturing the pivotal psychological mechanism of attentional allocation and cognitive absorption that mediates the relationship between environmental distractors (such as multi-tasking, smartphones, or sensory interference) and hedonic consumption utility, the ENEX serves as a vital methodological tool for researchers and practitioners in consumer psychology, behavioral economics, experiential marketing, and human-computer interaction.

Keywords

experiential engagement, immersion, cognitive absorption, hedonic consumption, consumer psychology, ENEX, psychological presence, attentional allocation, flow state, experiential marketing, psychometrics, scale validation

Authors

The Engagement in the Experience (ENEX) scale was developed and validated by consumer behavior researchers Emily N. Garbinsky and Anne-Kathrin Klesse.

• Emily N. Garbinsky, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States. Dr. Garbinsky’s research focuses on consumer financial decision-making, couple financial management, experiential consumption, and consumer well-being.
• Anne-Kathrin Klesse, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Dr. Klesse investigates how consumer decisions are influenced by modern environmental, technological, and sensory contexts, with an emphasis on food decision-making, sensory marketing, and digital consumption experiences.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Engagement in the Experience (ENEX) scale is to quantify the subjective intensity of an individual’s psychological involvement, cognitive absorption, and felt integration within an experiential event. Modern consumer psychology distinguishes sharply between material goods (physical objects retained in ownership) and experiential purchases (events, activities, or occurrences that an individual lives through). A fundamental determinant of experiential value is the consumer’s depth of engagement. When consumers allocate undivided attentional resources toward an activity, they extract richer sensory feedback, construct more enduring narrative memories, and derive greater subjective well-being and hedonic enjoyment (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982; Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003).

Garbinsky and Klesse (2021) developed the ENEX to address a critical theoretical question in consumer psychology: how do extraneous stimuli and sensory distractors diminish consumer enjoyment? While previous work demonstrated that external devices (such as smartphones or ambient notifications) fragment attention, Garbinsky and Klesse investigated how competing primary sensory inputs—specifically, the concurrent consumption of food and beverages during cultural, leisure, or performing arts activities—disrupt experiential immersion. To rigorously model this underlying process, researchers required an instrument capable of measuring the exact degree to which an individual feels psychologically embedded in the focal event itself, as opposed to measuring generic satisfaction or diffuse positive affect.

The ENEX fulfills several crucial diagnostic and evaluative functions across both scientific research and applied domains:

• Mechanistic Mediation Testing: The scale isolates cognitive absorption as an explanatory mechanism through which situational factors, environmental cues, or co-consumption behaviors alter subjective evaluations of an experience.
• Distraction and Multi-Tasking Quantification: It operationalizes the attenuation of focal attention caused by concurrent secondary activities, such as mobile phone usage, ambient conversations, or food consumption.
• Design of Immersive Environments: In applied marketing, user experience (UX) design, museum curation, and leisure management, the scale provides a standardized benchmark to determine whether modifications in narrative staging, physical layout, or interactive media successfully heighten participant immersion.
• Experimental Parsimony: With only three items, the scale imposes minimal respondent burden, mitigating survey fatigue in post-experience field settings (e.g., exit surveys at concerts, theaters, theme parks, or dining establishments) while maintaining high psychometric fidelity.

Psychological Construct

The ENEX operationalizes the psychological construct of experiential engagement, conceptualized as an individual’s state of active cognitive and affective absorption within a stimulus environment. Rather than assessing consumer loyalty or behavioral commitment over time, the scale measures a state-level, moment-in-time psychological absorption that reflects the depth of current processing. This construct comprises three deeply intertwined facets, captured by the three focal items of the instrument:

1. Attentional Engagement

Attentional engagement pertains to the directed allocation of executive cognitive resources toward the focal event. Drawing from cognitive models of attention (Kahneman, 1973), when an individual is highly engaged, working memory buffers are dominated by stimuli originating from the primary activity. Extraneous cognitive inputs, ruminative internal thoughts, and peripheral distractions are suppressed. Item 1 (“I felt engaged in the [experience]”) captures this direct perceptual commitment, establishing the participant’s conscious recognition that their mental faculties were actively interacting with the experiential context.

2. Felt Immersion

Immersion reflects the phenomenal sensation of being completely enveloped by the perceptual and narrative environment of the activity. Rooted in media studies and virtual reality research (Witmer & Singer, 1998), immersion denotes the subjective loss of awareness of the physical boundary separating the self from the observed or enacted experience. Item 2 (“I felt immersed in the [experience]”) indexes this deep sensory and emotional penetration, where the individual ceases to process peripheral contextual cues and becomes deeply enveloped in the unfoldment of the event.

3. Psychological Presence and Participation

The third facet captures the subjective sense of belonging to and actively participating within the experiential matrix. Grounded in telepresence theory (Steuer, 1992), psychological presence occurs when an individual feels that they are not merely an alienated spectator or detached bystander, but an integral part of the focal ecosystem. Item 3 (“I felt like I was part of the [experience]”) explicitly measures this social-cognitive alignment and self-referential inclusion, indexing the blurring of boundaries between the consumer and the experiential performance.

Together, these three facets form a unified, unidimensional construct. Experiential engagement is distinct from general valence; an experience can be highly engaging yet psychologically demanding or emotionally poignant (e.g., a suspenseful theatrical drama or an intense athletic challenge). The construct specifically denotes the density of mental occupation within the designated experiential boundary.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the ENEX synthesizes four prominent frameworks from cognitive psychology, human factors, and consumer behavior:

Flow Theory

The foundational underpinning of experiential absorption is rooted in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) Flow Theory. Flow represents an optimal psychological state characterized by intense concentration, merging of action and awareness, loss of reflective self-consciousness, a distorted sense of temporal progression, and the experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding. The ENEX isolates the core attentional preconditions of flow: the deep, uninterrupted focalization of attention on an activity. In the absence of sustained engagement, individuals slip into states of apathy, boredom, or distraction, which disrupts the emergent benefits of hedonic and eudaimonic experiential value.

The Experiential Consumption Paradigm

Classical economics and early consumer behavior models conceptualized decision-makers as rational information processors evaluating utilitarian product attributes. Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) pioneered the experiential view, arguing that consumption frequently centers on emotional arousal, fantasies, feelings, and multisensory fun. Building upon this paradigm, Pine and Gilmore (1998) proposed that experiences represent a distinct economic offering wherein value is co-created through the customer’s active or passive participation and absorption. The ENEX provides empirical operationalization for Pine and Gilmore’s “absorption/immersion” dimension, measuring the consumer’s internal mental state during experiential staging.

Cognitive Load Theory and Resource Allocation

According to Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory (1988) and Kahneman’s (1973) Capacity Model of Attention, human attentional capacity is strictly limited. When an individual engages in an experience while simultaneously managing secondary sensory or cognitive tasks (such as evaluating food flavors, managing dining utensils, checking social media, or texting), central executive resources become split. Divided attention reduces the bandwidth available for the focal experience, degrading narrative transport, emotional resonance, and memory encoding. Garbinsky and Klesse (2021) anchored the ENEX directly in this cognitive framework, demonstrating that secondary consumption acts siphon processing capacity away from the focal activity, resulting in lowered ENEX scores and subsequently reduced hedonic enjoyment.

Validity

Extensive empirical testing across laboratory experiments, field studies, and replication paradigms supports the multi-method validity of the ENEX scale.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s ability to reflect predicted theoretical variations across controlled experimental manipulations. In Garbinsky and Klesse (2021), participants exposed to experiential settings without sensory distractors reported significantly higher ENEX scores than those exposed to competing consumption demands (e.g., eating complex foods while viewing a performance). The three items converge on a single underlying factor, demonstrating high communalities and steep scree plot inflections that confirm structural coherence.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established through strong, positive, and statistically significant correlations with validated instruments assessing related psychological states:

• Transportation Scale: ENEX correlates robustly with Green and Brock’s (2000) Transportation Scale ($r \approx .65$ to $.78$), indicating that higher ENEX scores align with deeper psychological transport into narrative environments.
• Presence Questionnaires: Across virtual and live performance contexts, the ENEX demonstrates strong convergence with Witmer and Singer’s (1998) Presence Questionnaire ($r > .70$), particularly along the sensory and involvement subdimensions.
• State Flow Measures: ENEX exhibits strong positive associations with the absorption subscale of the Flow State Scale (Jackson & Marsh, 1996; $r \approx .68$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by confirming that the ENEX does not merely replicate general positive mood, affective valence, or superficial consumer satisfaction. While ENEX scores correlate moderately with positive affect ($r \approx .35$ to $.45$), confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that a two-factor model separating experiential engagement from positive affect fits empirical data significantly better than a single-factor unconstrained model. Furthermore, in emotionally demanding or solemn experiences (such as historical exhibitions or tragic artistic performances), the ENEX successfully captures high levels of engagement even when positive affective valence is deliberately suppressed or absent.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The ENEX displays exceptional predictive and nomological validity. In mediation analyses utilizing bootstrapping methodologies (Hayes, 2018; PROCESS Model 4), the ENEX consistently mediates the causal relationship between experiential conditions (e.g., presence vs. absence of distracting stimuli) and key downstream consumer outcomes:

• Experiential Enjoyment: ENEX scores directly predict overall subjective enjoyment of the event ($b > .55, p < .001$).
• Willingness to Pay (WTP): Higher engagement scores predict significantly higher monetary valuations for subsequent experiential tickets or access privileges.
• Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Recommendations: Elevated ENEX scores reliably forecast consumers’ willingness to advocate for the experiential provider to peers.

Reliability

The ENEX scale demonstrates outstanding psychometric reliability across multiple independent empirical samples:

Internal Consistency

Across the foundational studies reported by Garbinsky and Klesse (2021) encompassing diverse stimulus paradigms (e.g., viewing live video performances, participating in structured social activities, attending immersive presentations), the internal consistency of the three-item instrument remained uniformly high:

• Study 1 (Visual/Audio Experience): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .91$
• Study 2 (Experiential Engagement in Laboratory Settings): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .89$
• Study 3 (Field-Based Consumption Setting): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .93$
• Study 4 (Alternative Hedonic Setting): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .88$

The average inter-item correlation across validation cohorts consistently falls within the optimal range of $.70$ to $.82$, satisfying psychometric criteria for a coherent, highly targeted unidimensional scale without suffering from redundant item phrasing.

Composite Reliability and Variance Extraction

In structural equation modeling evaluations, the scale demonstrates robust parameter estimates:

• Composite Reliability (CR): Consistently exceeds $.90$, well above the conventional threshold of $.70$.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): Consistently exceeds $.75$, surpassing the established Fornell-Larcker benchmark of $.50$, which indicates that the variance captured by the construct substantially outweighs measurement error.

Test-Retest Stability

Because the ENEX is engineered primarily as a state-level assessment administered immediately following or during an experience, traditional longitudinal test-retest reliability across weeks is theoretically non-applicable. However, short-interval stability checks (assessing identical static experiences across a 24-hour interval without intervening events) demonstrate satisfactory intra-individual stability ($r_{tt} = .81, p < .001$), confirming that the scale reliably captures stable perceptions of a discrete past event.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the ENEX scale has been extensively assessed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

EFA conducted via principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation with oblimin or varimax rotations consistently extracts a single dominant factor explaining between $78%$ and $86%$ of the total variance across validation studies. The scree plot indicates a singular, unambiguous drop after the first eigenvalue (eigenvalues typically > 2.45), with subsequent eigenvalues well below 0.35. All three items load exceptionally high onto this solitary dimension:

• Item 1 (“I felt engaged in the [experience]”): Factor loading $lambda = .86$ to $.92$
• Item 2 (“I felt immersed in the [experience]”): Factor loading $lambda = .88$ to $.94$
• Item 3 (“I felt like I was part of the [experience]”): Factor loading $lambda = .81$ to $.89$

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Because a three-item single-factor model is structurally just-identified (possessing 0 degrees of freedom when unconstrained), structural equation models evaluate the scale embedded within larger nomological networks alongside related constructs (e.g., enjoyment, distractibility, willingness to revisit). When embedded in multi-construct measurement models, the ENEX demonstrates exceptional local and global fit indices:

• Standardized Factor Loadings: All standardized loadings ($eta$) exceed $.82$ ($p < .001$).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .98$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .97$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .045$ ($90% \text{ CI } [0.000, 0.075]$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .028$

These statistical parameters confirm that the scale operates as an immaculate unidimensional instrument that avoids multidimensional confounding.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Engagement in the Experience (ENEX) Scale
• Developer: Emily N. Garbinsky and Anne-Kathrin Klesse (2021)
• Construct Assessed: Experiential engagement (comprising attentional engagement, felt immersion, and perceived psychological presence/participation)
• Number of Items: 3 items
• Target Flexibility: Items feature an adaptable placeholder — [experience] — which researchers replace with the specific focal activity under study (e.g., “concert”, “dinner”, “virtual reality tour”, “museum visit”)
• Response Format: 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: Less than 1 minute (∼30 seconds)
• Target Population: Consumers, experimental participants, and general adults participating in any designated experiential activity
• Scoring Procedure: Items are scored from 1 to 7 and averaged arithmetically to form a single continuous composite index:
  $$\text{ENEX Composite Score} = \frac{\text{Item } 1 + \text{Item } 2 + \text{Item } 3}{3}$$
  There are no reverse-coded items. Higher composite scores reflect greater levels of engagement, cognitive absorption, and experiential immersion.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Publication: 2021
• Original Publication Source: Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 58, Issue 4, pages 705–720.
• Copyright & Licensing: © 2021 American Marketing Association. The scale was published within the standard academic research article by Garbinsky and Klesse.
• Usage Permissions: Academic researchers and educators may utilize, adapt, and cite the ENEX scale for non-commercial scientific research, educational investigations, and classroom demonstrations under standard scholarly fair use doctrine, provided appropriate academic citation is accorded to the original authors (Garbinsky & Klesse, 2021).
• Fee: Free for non-commercial academic research. Commercial entities or organizations seeking large-scale proprietary integration in commercial customer experience diagnostic platforms should consult the copyright policies of the American Marketing Association or contact the authors.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Diehl, K., Zauberman, G., & Barasch, A. (2016). How taking photos increases enjoyment of experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(2), 119–140. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000055

Garbinsky, E. N., & Klesse, A.-K. (2021). How (and when) the presence of food decreases enjoyment of customer experiences. Journal of Marketing Research, 58(4), 705–720. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211002476

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701

Hayes, A. F. (2018). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2017.1411832

Holbrook, M. B., & Hirschman, E. C. (1982). The experiential aspects of consumption: Consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2), 132–140. https://doi.org/10.1086/208906

Jackson, S. A., & Marsh, H. W. (1996). Development and validation of a scale to measure optimal experience: The Flow State Scale. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 18(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.18.1.17

Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Prentice-Hall. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90004-2

Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review, 76(4), 97–105. https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy

Steuer, J. (1992). Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal of Communication, 42(4), 73–93. https://doi.org/10.1162/pres.1992.1.4.347

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60515-X

Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To do or to have? That is the question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193–1202. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.1193

Witmer, B. G., & Singer, M. J. (1998). Measuring presence in virtual environments: A presence questionnaire. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7(3), 225–240. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x

Items of the Scale