《Morality and Psychological Distance A Construal Level Theory Perspective》.pdf

Morality and Psychological Distance: A Construal Level Theory Perspective Tal Eyal Ben Gurion University Nira Liberman Tel Aviv University People often think in terms of moral principles, values, and ideologies. For example, a woman might characterize herself as someone who values loyalty, social power, or environmental issues. Another person might think of donating money to the poor in terms of promoting social justice or fighting inequality. Moral principles and values often guide peoples actions, judgments and predictions. Once a moral rule is invoked, an action is likely to be judged positively when it follows a moral rule and negatively when it violates such a rule. Clearly, however, moral principles and values are not always invoked, and they often fail to guide peoples choices and judgments. Individuals often fail to see the relevance of values to a particular situation and hence act in ways that reflect situational constraints, local pressures, self interest, and other considerations that have nothing to do with moral value systems. In this chapter, we propose one answer to the question of when values and moral principles play a central role in peoples judgments and plans. We explore the possibility that values and moral principles are more prominent in judgments and predictions regarding psychologically more distant events. This perspective is based on construal level theory 1 (CLT; Liberman Trope, 2008; Liberman, Trope, Stephan, 2007; Trope Liberman, in press), according to which the construal o