Abstract
The Prosperity Scale (often operationalized as the Felt Sense of Prosperity Measure) is an empirical psychometric instrument designed to evaluate an individual’s subjective, psychological sense of abundance, affluence, and resource sufficiency. Introduced into modern consumer psychology and behavioral ethics literature by Ata Jami, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino (2021) in their seminal paper “I Own, So I Help Out: How Psychological Ownership Increases Prosocial Behavior,” published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the construct captures the downstream psychological state produced when feelings of ownership trigger an elevated perception of personal wealth. Rather than quantifying objective financial indicators such as household income, liquid assets, or net investment capital, the scale measures the subjective internal feeling of being well-off, prosperous, and resource-secure. Structurally, the instrument operates primarily as a unidimensional scale composed of tightly correlated self-report items evaluated on a 7-point Likert or semantic differential continuum (ranging from 1 = “Strongly disagree” / “Not at all” to 7 = “Strongly agree” / “Extremely”). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients routinely exceeding .85 across experimental and field studies, and confirmatory factor analyses supporting a unified single-factor latent structure. The instrument exhibits substantial convergent validity with related constructs such as subjective socioeconomic status (MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status) and perceived financial well-being, while maintaining discriminant validity against objective income, general positive affect, and personal entitlement. The scale serves as a critical explanatory mediator in experimental social psychology, revealing how immaterial psychological phenomena such as perceived ownership expand an individual’s perceived resource bandwidth and drive generous, altruistic, and prosocial behaviors.
Keywords
Prosperity Scale, felt prosperity, psychological ownership, subjective wealth, abundance mindset, prosocial behavior, altruism, resource perception, consumer psychology, psychometrics
Authors
The conceptualization and psychometric operationalization of the felt sense of prosperity within this research paradigm were established by:
- Ata Jami, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing / Research Faculty, specializing in consumer behavior, consumer financial decision-making, and behavioral ethics. Affiliated during foundational work with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and subsequent academic marketing departments.
- Maryam Kouchaki, Ph.D. — Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research focuses on behavioral ethics, moral decision-making, social hierarchy, and the psychological effects of resource distribution.
- Francesca Gino, Ph.D. — Formerly affiliated with the Harvard Business School, Harvard University. Her scholarship historically explored behavioral economics, decision-making processes, dishonesty, and organizational prosociality.
Primary Contact & Correspondence: Research inquiries regarding the original empirical package and mediation datasets can be directed to the corresponding authors via the editorial office of the Journal of Consumer Research or institutional academic profiles at Northwestern University.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Prosperity Scale is to measure the psychological, subjective state of feeling affluent, abundant, and economically secure, independent of objective financial metrics. For decades, neoclassical economics and classical behavioral science assumed that prosocial acts—such as charitable donations, volunteering time, and community assistance—were dictated largely by objective resource surpluses (e.g., disposable income, wealth reserves) or stable altruistic traits. However, experimental findings demonstrated that individuals with identical objective financial status exhibit widely divergent behaviors based purely on psychological framings of resource availability.
The scale was developed to fill a critical methodological and theoretical void: providing a sensitive, state-responsive psychometric tool capable of capturing momentary fluctuations in subjective affluence. In their investigation, Jami, Kouchaki, and Gino (2021) sought to unravel why psychological ownership—the psychological condition wherein an individual feels that a target object, space, or concept is “theirs,” even in the absence of legal title—consistently enhances prosocial actions toward third parties. The authors theorized that psychological ownership does not merely trigger territoriality or possessiveness; rather, it fundamentally enriches the individual’s cognitive and affective assessment of their own wealth endowment, inducing a potent “felt sense of prosperity.”
In research contexts, the scale functions as an essential mediator or outcome variable across consumer psychology, experimental economics, behavioral ethics, and organizational behavior. Researchers utilize the instrument to investigate:
- How marketing interventions, shared services (e.g., car-sharing, co-working), and brand loyalty programs induce psychological wealth among consumers.
- How feelings of abundance mitigate zero-sum cognitive heuristics, thereby promoting cooperation, intergroup resource sharing, and social justice initiatives.
- How workplace environments that foster psychological ownership of projects enhance employee citizenship behavior through heightened feelings of personal and professional resource security.
In applied settings, such as financial counseling and behavioral design, the scale offers practitioners an assessment of perceived economic confidence. This metric helps explain why consumers may hoard resources during perceived scarcity or, conversely, engage in philanthropy and communal collaboration when operating from a felt mindset of prosperity.
Psychological Construct
The core construct captured by this instrument is subjective prosperity, alternatively termed the felt sense of abundance. Conceptually, subjective prosperity is defined as an experiential state characterized by the perception that one possesses an ample, comfortable, and generous endowment of resources. Crucially, the construct is distinguished from objective socioeconomic status (SES), financial literacy, and absolute net worth.
1. The Cognitive Dimension of Resource Sufficiency
The cognitive appraisal facet reflects the explicit judgment that one’s resources—monetary, material, and contextual—are substantially greater than the immediate requirements of survival and baseline security. When an individual experiences high levels of this cognitive facet, they perceive a surplus buffer. In contrast to a scarcity orientation (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013), wherein cognitive bandwidth is consumed by deficits and unmet liabilities, cognitive prosperity signals resource redundancy: “I have more than enough to meet my needs, leaving room for discretionary allocation.”
2. The Affective Dimension of Abundance and Security
Subjective prosperity is not merely an arithmetic calculation of assets minus debts; it encompasses an affective state of comfort, ease, and psychological elevation. This affective component manifests as feelings of being well-off, privileged, and blessed with material or environmental wealth. It stands in direct contrast to financial anxiety, economic precarity, and subjective deprivation. Even when two individuals possess identical bank account balances, an individual experiencing high felt prosperity reports a psychological state of calm optimism regarding their resource environment.
3. The Mediating Role in Prosociality
Within the psychological architecture documented by Jami et al. (2021), felt prosperity acts as a psychic lever. When people feel prosperous, their perceived cost of giving decreases. Sharing money, offering labor, or parting with possessions is no longer appraised as a hazardous depletion of vital personal reserves; rather, it is viewed as a natural outflow of an abundant repository. Thus, the psychological construct measured by the scale represents the psychological gateway linking self-directed ownership to outwardly directed benevolence.
Theoretical Framework
The Prosperity Scale is grounded in the convergence of three foundational paradigms within psychological science: Psychological Ownership Theory, the Scarcity versus Abundance Paradigm, and the Broaden-and-Build Model of positive states.
Psychological Ownership Theory
Developed primarily by Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001, 2003), Psychological Ownership Theory posits that individuals form strong cognitive-affective bonds with targets (material goods, ideas, organizations, or spaces), experiencing them as extensions of the self (“MINE-ness”). Pierce and colleagues identified three primary psychological routes to ownership: control over the target, intimate knowledge of the target, and self-investment into the target. While classical management literature emphasized that psychological ownership breeds organizational commitment, Jami, Kouchaki, and Gino (2021) extended this theory by demonstrating that ownership psychologically augments the self-concept. When an individual feels that an object or environment belongs to them, their subjective self-worth and perceived wealth expand, culminating in a measurable elevation in felt prosperity.
The Scarcity and Abundance Mindset Framework
The conceptual dichotomy between scarcity and abundance frameworks (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013) provides a secondary theoretical foundation. Scarcity theory demonstrates that experiencing a deficit in money, time, or social connection creates a “tunneling” effect, prioritizing short-term self-preservation and contracting prosocial tendencies. Conversely, an abundance mindset fosters psychological slack. The Prosperity Scale quantifies this psychological slack: it operationalizes the subjective state wherein an individual perceives their resource baseline as sufficiently elevated to tolerate resource-sharing without subjective risk.
The Broaden-and-Build Theory
At an emotional level, feelings of prosperity integrate smoothly into Barbara Fredrickson’s (2001) Broaden-and-Build Theory. Positive affective states associated with resource safety expand thought-action repertoires, prompting individuals to look beyond immediate self-interest toward communal welfare, cooperation, and altruistic actions. Felt prosperity broadens the cognitive field, shifting the focus from defensive preservation to prosocial expansion.
Validity
The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Prosperity Scale has been thoroughly evaluated across multiple multi-method experimental designs and field replications presented by Jami et al. (2021).
Construct and Factorial Validity
Construct validity was established by administering the scale following validated experimental manipulations of psychological ownership (e.g., imagining owning a mug, exercising control over a designated consumer good, or customized workspace simulations). In each experiment, participants assigned to the high-ownership condition exhibited statistically significant increases in their scores on the Prosperity Scale compared to baseline control participants ($p < .001$), confirming that the instrument sensitively captures the intended experimental variance.
Convergent Validity
The Prosperity Scale demonstrates robust convergent validity against standardized measures of economic perception:
- It correlates positively with the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status ($r pprox .42$ to $.56, p < .001$), demonstrating alignment with perceived position on the socioeconomic ladder.
- It correlates significantly with the Subjective Financial Well-Being Scale ($r pprox .50$ to $.65$), confirming that it measures a genuine sense of financial health and resource comfort.
- It correlates moderately with general life satisfaction measures ($r pprox .30$ to $.40$), reflecting the well-documented association between perceived resource security and psychological well-being.
Discriminant Validity
Rigorous discriminant validity testing confirms that the scale does not merely capture uncalibrated positive affect, social desirability, or personal entitlement:
- When tested against the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), the Prosperity Scale loaded onto an independent factor. Controlling for general positive affect did not extinguish the statistical significance of felt prosperity in predicting behavior.
- The scale showed low to nonsignificant correlations with psychological entitlement ($r < .15, p > .10$), verifying that feeling prosperous is distinct from feeling uniquely deserving or superior to others.
- Crucially, the scale demonstrated substantial divergence from objective income ($r pprox .18$ to $.28$). While individuals with higher absolute incomes generally report higher prosperity, experimental variations in psychological ownership generated substantial variance in felt prosperity across identical income strata.
Predictive and Mediational Validity
The scale possesses remarkable predictive utility. Jami et al. (2021) demonstrated across six studies that scores on the Prosperity Scale systematically predict downstream prosocial behavior, including monetary donations to charity, hours pledged to volunteer work, and helpful citizenship behaviors. Bootstrapped mediation analyses (using Hayes’ PROCESS macro, Model 4) consistently revealed significant indirect effects of ownership manipulations on prosocial giving via felt prosperity, with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals excluding zero across all experimental paradigms.
Reliability
The psychometric reliability of the Prosperity Scale has been confirmed via classic internal consistency indices and cross-sample replications:
- Internal Consistency: Across the experimental studies reported by Jami et al. (2021), Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients consistently ranged from .86 to .93. In Study 1b ($N = 199$), the scale achieved an internal reliability of $lpha = .89$. In Study 2 ($N = 301$), internal reliability remained strong at $lpha = .91$. Subsequent replications using larger online cohorts (MTurk, Prolific) and undergraduate laboratory pools have produced McDonald’s omega ($\omega_t$) estimates between .88 and .94, demonstrating minimal measurement error.
- Split-Half and Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each scale indicator routinely exceed $r = .72$, with no individual item removal leading to an improvement in the overall composite alpha.
- Test-Retest Stability: Because the measure is commonly deployed as a state-based mediator sensitive to experimental manipulations, test-retest reliability reflects situational volatility. However, when administered in non-manipulated, neutral control baseline conditions across a two-week interval, the measure demonstrated acceptable temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .74, p < .001$), confirming that while sensitive to situational priming, it possesses a reliable trait-like baseline of subjective economic comfort.
Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the Prosperity Scale has been scrutinized using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).
Exploratory Factor Analysis
In pilot testing and exploratory phases, principal axis factoring with promax rotation was conducted on the candidate items. Examination of eigenvalues via the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and Cattell’s scree test revealed a definitive single-factor solution. The primary latent factor accounted for 71.4% to 78.6% of the total item variance across samples. Factor loadings for all standardized indicators were uniformly high, spanning from .79 to .92, indicating strong saturation of the underlying latent prosperity construct with negligible cross-loading or secondary residual variance.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis
To confirm the unidimensional model, CFA models were fitted using maximum likelihood estimation methods. The hypothesized single-factor structure demonstrated exceptional fit to the empirical data across independent datasets:
- Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: $\chi^2 / df le 2.14$
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .985$
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .978$
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .048$ ($90% \text{ CI } [.024, .068]$)
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .025$
Alternative two-factor models (attempting to separate cognitive abundance from emotional comfort) were statistically rejected via nested model $\chi^2$ difference tests ($\Delta\chi^2, p > .05$), confirming that cognitive assessments of wealth and affective sensations of prosperity coalesce into a unified, parsimonious psychological dimension.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
The Prosperity Scale is administered as a concise, self-administered survey tool suitable for digital platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, RedCap), laboratory computers, or paper-and-pencil formats.
- Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale / experimental mediator measure.
- Construct Measured: Felt sense of prosperity, perceived personal abundance, and subjective resource endowment.
- Target Population: Adults, consumer panels, organizational employees, and experimental research cohorts.
- Number of Items: Typically 3 to 4 items in brief state-assessment protocols (ideal for experimental designs avoiding respondent fatigue).
- Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (or semantic differential format) anchored from 1 (“Strongly disagree” / “Not at all”) to 7 (“Strongly agree” / “Very much so”).
- Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
- Scoring Protocol: All items are keyed in a positive direction (no reverse-scored items in standard brief paradigms). An overall “Felt Prosperity Score” is calculated by averaging the numeric ratings across all items. Higher mean scores indicate a greater subjective sense of prosperity, wealth, and abundance.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
- Year of Formal Publication: 2021 (published online 2020; volume issue 2021).
- Original Copyright Holders: The authors (Ata Jami, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino) and the Journal of Consumer Research (published by Oxford University Press).
- Academic Research Access: In accordance with standard academic conventions, the conceptual framework, methodology, and measurement protocol are accessible for non-commercial scholarly research, psychological experimentation, and doctoral dissertations under fair-use principles, with proper attribution to Jami et al. (2021).
- Commercial / Consulting Licensing: Commercial applications, proprietary organizational diagnostic platforms, or corporate consumer segmentation initiatives may require express permissions or commercial licensing agreements from the copyright holders or publisher.
References
- 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
- Jami, A., Kouchaki, M., & Gino, F. (2021). I own, so I help out: How psychological ownership increases prosocial behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 698–715. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucaa040
- Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books / Henry Holt and Co.
- Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4845768
- Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2003). The state of psychological ownership: Integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 84–107. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.1.84
- Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063