Message Judgment (11 items) and that of Recognition of Persuasive Intent (4 items) were established by calculating a total scale averaging the scores of 11 and 4 items, respectively.

Message judgment.Judgment of the poster was measured by having participants indicate how well 11 words in randomized order described the poster on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (completely not) to 7 (completely). Example items were: "believ- able," "interesting," and "irritating" (adopted fromKeer et al., 2013). A total scale was constructed by averaging the scores of the 11 items (Cronbach's alpha?.84,M?4.06,SD?.98).

Recognition of persuasive intent.Recognition of persuasive intent of the posters was measured by having participants indicate their agreement to four statements in randomized order on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (com- pletely agree). Example items were: "the poster tried to make a decision for me" and "the poster tried to manipulate me" (adopted fromDillard & Shen, 2005). A total scale was constructed by averaging the scores on the four items (Cronbach's alpha?.82,M?3.48,SD?1.40).

How did Loman et al. deal with this difficulty? In other words, what did they do to make sure that taking an average of 11 items (or 4 items) was ok? (Cronbach's alpha is a measure equivalent to a correlation.)