Where does construal level collide?

Trope and Liberman's 2010 synthesis is the referent the rest of this map is read against, and it is where the theory gets its combined name, the construal-level theory of psychological distance. The claim is a causal one: as an event grows more psychologically distant, in time, in space, in social terms, or in how hypothetical it is, people represent it at a higher level, meaning more abstract, more about why than how, and organized around central rather than incidental features. Near things are construed at a low level, concrete and about how. This is the paper that puts two labels on one axis, with psychological distance as the cause and level of construal as the effect. The four distance dimensions are treated as one family that moves construal the same way.[1]

Unit

A person's level of abstraction in representing an event, from concrete to abstract

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Manipulate one dimension of psychological distance and record the abstraction of how people represent or describe the event

Liberman and Trope's 1998 study is where the theory begins: distance in time changes what people attend to when they think about an event. For the distant future, they found, people weigh desirability, the value of an outcome and the reasons for wanting it; for the near future they weigh feasibility, whether and how the outcome can actually be reached. The same act is represented more abstractly when it is far off and more concretely when it is close at hand. The original name was temporal construal theory, and time was the only distance in view. Everything later in this map generalizes that first finding to other kinds of distance.[2]

Unit

A person's representation of an event set in the near or the distant future

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Vary how far off an event is in time and record whether people weigh feasibility or desirability, or how abstractly they describe it

Fujita, Trope, Liberman, and Levin-Sagi's 2006 paper carries the theory into self-control and intertemporal choice. Inducing a high-level, abstract way of construing a situation, by asking people why they act rather than how, made them more willing to wait for a larger later reward, hold a handgrip longer, and rate temptations less favourably. The reading is that self-control is easier when the immediate, concrete pull of a situation is set inside a more abstract representation of what matters. This connects construal level to the discounting of delayed outcomes that decision research studies under its own names. The dependent measures here are preferences and behaviour, not descriptions, which is a shift worth noting.[3]

Unit

A person's construal level as it bears on a choice between a nearer and a later reward

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Induce a high or low construal, then record delay-of-reward choices, task persistence, or ratings of temptations

Fujita, Henderson, Eng, Trope, and Liberman's 2006 Psychological Science report tests a different distance: space. Told that a social event happened far away rather than nearby, people described it in more abstract terms and identified the actions in it at a higher level. Nothing about time was manipulated, yet construal moved in the same direction that temporal distance moves it. The authors read this as support for the theory's claim that the distance dimensions share a common meaning and act on construal alike. Whether spatial, temporal, and social distance are genuinely one construct or merely parallel ones is the assumption this study helps to prop up.[4]

Unit

A person's representation of a socially or spatially near versus distant event

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Describe an event as spatially near or far and code the abstractness of language and the level of action identification