Individual Differences in Travel Across Psychological Distances

Construal Level Theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003, 2010) proposes that how people cross psychological distances is functional for many things, such as making plans for the future and understanding other people. Although research (see Trope & Liberman, 2010) suggests that people generally use cognitive abstraction as a means of mental distance travel, no research to date has examined individual differences in this tendency to use abstraction. The present research investigated individual differences with two different approaches. First, I examine whether the individual differences could distinguish between a population of people who generally experience difficulty with psychological distance travel and those who do not. Second, I assess the stability and predictive ability of the individual differences.;CLT argues that when people continually use abstraction to cross psychological distance, an association between psychological distance and abstraction forms (Trope & Liberman, 2010). In all of the studies, an Implicit Association Test (IAT) designed by Bar-Anan and colleagues (2006) was used to measure individual differences in the associative pattern between psychological distance and abstraction. Studies 1 and 2 addressed the first goal of this research: to establish the existence of individual differences in how people cross psychological distances. Depressed individuals often experience difficulty crossing psychological distances such as temporal and social distance; thus, individual differences in depressive symptomatology may be associated with individual differences in the use of abstraction to cross psychological distances. In both studies participants completed a measure of depressive symptomatology during a mass screening session and then completed a temporal distance –abstraction IAT (study 1) or a social distance-abstraction IAT (study 2) during a laboratory session. Results revealed that depressive symptomatology scores were negatively correlated with the scores on both types of IAT, suggesting that increased depressive symptomatology is associated with a reduced use of abstraction to cross temporal or social distances, relative to participants with little depressive symptomatology.;Having found evidence of individual differences in the use of abstraction to cross psychological distance, study 3 addressed the second goal of this research: to measure the stability and predictive ability of these individual differences. This study used a repeated measures design in which participants completed two laboratory sessions, separated by at least a week. During each session, they completed the temporal distance-abstraction IAT and made time-dependent judgments about either the near or distant future. Analyses revealed that the measure of temporal distance-abstraction associations was moderately stable. Additionally, there was some evidence that individual differences in the use of abstraction to cross temporal distance predicted time-dependent judgments.