《The eVect of level of construal on the temporal distance of activity enactment 》.pdf

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43 (2007) 143–149 /locate/jesp The eVect of level of construal on the temporal distance of activity enactment Nira Liberman a,¤, Yaacov Trope b, Sean M. McCrea c, Steven J. Sherman d a Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel b Department of Psychology, 6 Washington Place, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA c Fachbereich Psychologie, Fach D-39, Universität Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany d Department of Psychology, 1101 East Tenth Street Bloomington, IN 47405, USA Received 19 June 2005; revised 18 December 2005 Available online 23 February 2006 Abstract A series of four studies demonstrates that, across diVerent operationalizations of level of construal, diVerent types of activities, and for both the self and another person as targets, construing activities in high-level terms fosters perception of the more distal future as appro- priate for their enactment. SpeciWcally, the studies show that thinking about superordinate “why” (rather than subordinate “how”) aspects of actions, about the implications of actions for one’s personality (rather than the objects that would be used in performing the action), and about abstract (rather than concrete) aspects of actions leads people to expect the actions to be performed in the more distant future. These results suggest that the association of level of construal and time perspective is bi-directional, in that time perspec