According to construal level theory (N. Liberman, Y. Trope, & E. Stephan, in press; Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003), people use a more abstract, high construal level when judging, perceiving, and predicting more psychologically distal targets, and they judge more abstract targets as being more psychologically distal. The present research demonstrated that associations between more distance and hi...

Prior research has shown that people have a tendency to be overly optimistic about future events (i.e., optimism bias) in a variety of settings. In this study, we suggest that optimism bias has significant implications for IT project risk management, as it may cause people to become overly optimistic that they can easily manage project risks. Drawing upon construal level theory (CLT), we invest...

We investigated how psychological distance influences goal contagion (the extent to which people automatically adopt another person's goals). On the basis of construal-level theory, we predicted people would be more prone to goal contagion when primed with psychological distance (vs. closeness) because they would construe the other person's behavior in terms of its underlying goal. Alternativel...

Handling Editor: Kevin Lowe How should leaders construct and communicate theirmessages tomost effectivelymotivate their employees? We offer an integrative framework to address the diverging and complementary nature of two established approaches to employee motivation: Vision communication and goal setting. Specifically, while vision communication involves formulating relatively abstract, farrea...

Summary Research in social and cognitive sciences has used the construal-level theory (CLT) of psychological distance as a framework for understanding environmental challenges, such climate change. This primer explains how construal level can help to understand responses from perceptions construction issues distant abstract, implications decision making action toward long-term targets....

The aim was to examine how people mentally represent alleged future actions-their true and false intentions. In two experiments, participants were asked to either tell the truth (i.e., express true intentions) or lie (i.e., express false intentions) about performing future tasks. Drawing on Construal Level Theory, which proposes that psychologically distant events are more abstractly construed ...

Growing evidence points to a bidirectional relationship between spatial distance and level of mental representation, whereby distant (vs. near) events are represented by a higher level of representation, and higher levels of representations increase perceptions of distance. In the current article, we review research that establishes this association and explores its implications. We begin by br...

Myrdal (1944) described the "American dilemma" as the conflict between abstract national values ("liberty and justice for all") and more concrete, everyday prejudices. We leveraged construal-level theory to empirically test Myrdal's proposition that construal level (abstract vs. concrete) can influence prejudice. We measured individual differences in construal level (Study 1) and manipulated co...

Construal-level theory proposes that increasing the reported spatial distance of events leads individuals to represent the events by their central, abstract, global features (high-level construal) rather than by their peripheral, concrete, local features (low-level construal). Results of two experiments indicated that participants preferred to identify actions as ends rather than as means to a ...