Toward a deeper understanding of the ecological origins of distance construal

Overview of the Construal Level Theory: history of formation, main provisions and research potential

This paper provides an overview of Construal Level Theory (CLT), which was founded by Nira Liberman and Yakov Trope. CLT describes the relationship between psychological distance (subjective experience of remoteness of a phenomenon) and the level of its construal (representation) in consciousness. According to this theory, phenomena perceived more distant, will be presented in a more abstract way in the mind of the subject. At the moment CLT is one of the most actively developing interdisciplinary psychological theories. At the same time, it remains virtually unknown within the Russian-speaking psychological community. The main purpose of the article is to help the reader get an idea of the history of CLT development, its main assumptions, and to demonstrate its high research potential. The first part presents the most significant works, which determined the direction of the theory’s development. The second part summarizes its key points. The last part considers the possibilities of CLT in building a deeper understanding of the nature of prediction, evaluation, choice, self-regulation, and a number of other processes.

Keeping One’s Distance: Mask Wearing is Implicitly Associated With Psychological Distance

Mask wearing plays a vital role in the fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite its ubiquity in everyday social life, it is still unknown how masked faces are mentally represented. Drawing on construal-level theory, we test the hypothesis that masked faces and unmasked faces are implicitly associated with psychological distance and proximity in memory, respectively. Four preregistered, high-powered experiments ( N = 354 adults) using the Implicit Association Test lend convergent support to this hypothesis across all four dimensions of psychological distance: social distance, spatial distance, temporal distance, and hypothetical distance. A mini meta-analysis validates the reliability of the findings (Hedge’s g = 0.46). The present work contributes to the growing literature on construal-level effects on implicit social cognition and enriches the current discussion on mask wearing in the pandemic and beyond.

Negative Is True Here and Now, But Not So Much There and Then

Abstract. How do people judge the veracity of a message? The negativity bias in judgments of truth describes the phenomenon that the same message is more likely judged as true when framed negatively compared to positively. This manuscript investigates the negativity bias in conditions of psychological proximity and the possibility that the bias decreases when distance increases. This notion is informed by construal level theory, which holds that negative information is more salient and weighed more strongly in conditions of psychological proximity compared to distance. Against this background, we hypothesize that a negativity bias likely occurs in conditions of proximity. With increasing psychological distance, however, positively compared to negatively framed information is more likely to be judged true, therefore attenuating or even reversing the bias. Two studies provide preliminary yet weak support for this hypothesis. A final registered study put the preliminary conclusions to a critical test and yielded consistent results: We find a significant interaction between frame and distance, indicating a descriptive trend for a negativity bias in conditions of proximity, yet a positivity bias in conditions of distance. This interaction illustrates that psychological distance may impact the negativity bias in truth judgments.

Cognitive representations and the predictive brain depend heavily on the environment

In their scholarly target article, Gilead et al. explain how abstract mental representations and the predictive brain enable prospection and time-traveling. However, their exclusive focus on intrapsychic capacities misses an important point, namely, the degree to which mind and brain are tuned by the environment. This neglected aspect of adaptive cognition is discussed and illustrated from a cognitive-ecological perspective.