Many goals that people pursue are distal in that they cannot be attained in the here and now but rather must be achieved through action across varied social contexts over time. Self-control requires people to make decisions consistent with distal goals when tempted by more immediate rewards. Inspired by construal-level theory, we propose and review evidence that the way in which people subjecti...

Conceptualizing probability as psychological distance, the authors draw on construal level theory (Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003) to propose that decreasing an event's probability leads individuals to represent the event by its central, abstract, general features (high-level construal) rather than by its peripheral, concrete, specific features (low-level construal). Results indicated that when r...

Can psychological distance affect how much perceivers form spontaneous trait inferences (STI) from others' behaviors? On the basis of construal level theory (CLT) which posits that distant (vs. near) entities are represented more in terms of their abstract, global, and decontextualized features, we predicted that perceived distance would increase the tendency for perceivers to draw spontaneous ...

Two important theories in intertemporal choice are choice bracketing and construal level theory (CLT), but their relationship to each other is unexplored. Broad bracketing (considering many choices in a sequence) may induce a more holistic approach to decisions, suggesting overlap between choice bracketing and CLT. We attempt to integrate the theories and distinguish their effects on risk-takin...

This study investigates user acceptance of a new e-learning system when users can choose between the old and the new systems. Drawing upon construal level theory and technology acceptance model, this study proposes that users’ construal level of an e-learning system interacts with their perceptions of the system (i.e., PEoU and PU) and affects their adoption intention. Data collected from 131 p...

In two preliminary control checks it was shown that affective attitudes presented greater abstraction than cognitive attitudes. Three further studies explored how construal level moderated the role of affective and cognitive attitudes in predicting one health-promoting behaviour (exercising) and two risk behaviours (sleep debt and binge drinking). There was a stronger influence of affective att...

Current conceptualizations of psychological distance (e.g., construal-level theory) refer to the degree of overlap between the self and some other person, place, or point in time. We propose a complementary view in which perceptual and motor representations of physical distance influence people's thoughts and feelings without reference to the self, extending research and theory on the effects o...