The Relationship Between Representation Of Interpersonal Evaluative Information And Psychological Distance: A Cross-cultural Study

Evaluation is an important expression of interpersonal communication. Individuals not only constantly evaluate others' behaviors and their own behaviors, they also evaluate the feedback from others to obtain the reconstruction of self-concept.Researches (Fiedler, Semin, Finkenauer, & Berkel, 1995; Jones, 1979; Jones & Nisbett, 1972; Robins, Spranca, & Mendelsohn, 1996)based on traditional attribution theory proposes that individuals attribute their own behaviors mainly to situational causes but the behavior of others mainly to personal (dispositional) personality causes, which is called actor-observer effect. Construal level theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003; Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007; Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope & Liberman, 2010) proposes that Psychological distance is an important variable for human cognition and behavior, people use high level construal to represent objects or events pertaining to psychological distant, while use low level construal to represent objects or events pertaining to psychological near.Recently, researchers have explored the relationship between psychological distance and the representation of oneself and others within the framework of CLT and found that individuals tend to use higher levels of construal to represent themselves and others in distant versus proximal condition. However, the relationship between the way how individual represent the evaluative information from others and psychological distance has not aroused the concern of researchers.Thus, this study aimed to explore relationship between the way how individual represent the evaluative information from others and psychological distance in cross-cultural(Chinese and Swedish) context.The present study contains eight experiments, of which study 1-3(experiment 1-6) aims to systematically explore the influence of different psychological distance (temporal,space and social distance) on the interpersonal evaluative information in the context of Chinese culture and study 4 aims to examine the results got in study 1-3(experiment 7-8) in cross-cultural (Chinese and Swedish) context . The main conclusions are as follows:(1)In the context of Chinese and Western cultures, the operation of psychological distance had no significant effect on the way individuals represent interpersonal evaluative information(positive and negative) from others.(2)In the context of Chinese and Western cultures, individuals constructed more abstract representations of interpersonal evaluative information, which has reached consistency in the representation of positive and negative evaluative information, and it illustrated that individuals perceive stable trait evaluation from others more easily.(3)Chinese perceived more negative evaluation from others than Swedish in the representation of negative behavioral evaluation, which reveals that Chinese prone to be more sensitive in perception on negative representations from others.