Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) suggests that construal level—or the degree of abstractness of mental representations—increases with temporal, spatial, or sensory distance. Three experiments show that the mere presence of a set of target brands at the time a choice is made encourages consumers to represent the brands in memory in terms of concrete lower-level construals. Consequ...

This paper introduces ‘The Self Aware Image’, a creative research project that is part of the Virtual Laboratory for Envisioning Connections (vLEC) consortium. The paper will outline the rationale of the project and locate it within wider debates about the relationship between art, consciousness and technology. The notion of the ‘self-aware image’ is touched on as an art historical trope, and t...

Properties and facts play a central role within metaphysics, yet there is no widely accepted account of what constitutes a property or a fact. Traditional conceptions of these metaphysical notions raise serious philosophical puzzles, making the existence of each seem dubious. Drawing on the minimalist theory of truth, I argue in favor of a minimalist conception of properties and facts. A minima...

Feminist scholars have criticized the misogyny of folk/fairy tales that recount how "willful" princesses who refuse to marry are reformed or punished. As a result, contemporary authors fairy-tale picturebooks tend alter not incorporate forced marriage theme when engaging with these tales. Yet, trope princess whose will is "straightened" still operative in recent fairy Through multimodal analysi...

When people anticipate that future temptations may undermine valued goals, they use a number of prospective self-control strategies (or “precommitment devices”) to increase the likelihood of future self-control success. Little is known, however, about the conditions under which people are more or less likely to use them. Drawing from construal level theory (e.g., Trope & Liberman, 2003), we arg...

Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the ‘new’ operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the ‘affiliative object’ to describe the relational dynamics of a...

During the course of this paper I explore the Jaynesian notion of bicameral consciousness (1976, 1990) in relation to notions of relational ordering and the re‐constitution of persons within post‐individual technological practices of s(elf). The paper considers notions of bi‐cameralism as expressed through the interpretation of ancient artefacts and texts an...

The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct that helps explaining human behavior—traits (e.g., Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Trope, 1986; Winter & Uleman, 1984). The dispositional roots of behavior, however, go beyond relatively stable constructs such as traits to include more transient causes such as one s intentions and goals. Evidence fro...

Even in a country with super-low fertility rates, at least one-quarter of all babies are unplanned. The finding puzzles policymakers. This article uses Italy's "curious case" as a jumping-off point to expose assumptions about rationality. It offers a model to dismantle the "conceit" of rationality, drawing on Max Weber's classic critique and Emily Martin's contemporary appraisal. It asks: (1) H...

In this paper we present TroFi (Trope Finder), a system for automatically classifying literal and nonliteral usages of verbs through nearly unsupervised word-sense disambiguation and clustering techniques. TroFi uses sentential context instead of selectional constraint violations or paths in semantic hierarchies. It also uses literal and nonliteral seed sets acquired and cleaned without human s...