The Influence Of Construal Level And Situational Changes On Time Estimation

People usually estimate different tasks to plan their schedule. Individual may make different time estimation to the same situation. One’s estimation influenced by subjective and objective aspects. Subjectively, Trope and Liberman( 2003) use construal level theory to explain the phenomenon. Construal Level Theory(CLT)believes that high level representation is more abstract, decontextualized while low level representation is more concrete, contextualized. Studies demostrated high level construal led participants to overestimate the time and low construal led to underestimation. Moreover, mental distance---the distance from the task to here and now---also influence individuals’ mental representation. A large amount of studies show that participants priming distant future use high level contrual, priming near future lead to low level construal( Henderson, Fujita, Trope, & Liberman, 2006;Nussbaum, Trope, & Liberman, 2003; C. J. Wakslak, Trope, Liberman, & Alony,2006).In turn, participants judge the distance between the task and here and now more distant if they are primed with high level construal. Thus, present study try to prime participants’ mental distance with imaging the life situation of the future,consequently generate their abstract or concrete representation. According to the Attention Gate Model, people tend to underestimate when they believe stimulates are rich,diversely. It means participants’ subjective expain to the same change will lead different estimation.Present study follows the experimental paradigm of Hansen and Trope(2012),in order to discuss when operate participants’ mental distance, whether time estimation will change as a result of situation changes. Study 1 required participants imagine the living situation of near future or distant future to boot their low level or high level construal, and then estimate the time of a series of words presented on the screen;study 2 asked participants to complete the same booting task, and then estimate the time of a series of Navon words presented on the screen, each comprising a single large letter made up of small letters. High level changes were manipulated by presenting the shapes of the large letters in a random order across trials while keepingthe small letters constant. Low-level changes were manipulated by changing the small letters in each trial in a random order while keeping the large letters constant. Study 3separated the changes in perception level or conception level to discuss whether the construal-change level matching effect exists in both changing levels. Results as follows:Study 1:Mental distance influence the estimation of experimental task,participants with booting distant mental made higher time estimation than near mental distance. But differences are not significant betweenStudy 2: There is a matching effect between mental distance and changing level of task, which means booting distant/near mental distance, participants’ estimation will be the shorter when changes in task are correspondingly high/low level. When they didn’t match, estimation would be longer.Study 3:The matching effect with mental distance and changing level of task exists only on perception level, but not on conception level.