Influence Of Psychology Distance On The Sampling Of Information Before Making A Decision

No matter where and when people are in any situation,it is hard to avoid facing various decisions.Therefore,the decision-making issue has always been a common concern in many fields including economics,sociology and psychology.Decision-making is essentially the decision maker's evaluation and selection of many different alternatives.Therefore,the decision-making usually involves many attributes,such as time,place,people,probability,amount of information and income size,which affect people's decision.Construal Level Theory thinks people's reaction to an event depends on how people characterize the event,and the reaction varies from different level of ion of mental representation(level of construal level).And this level of interpretation depends on people's perceived psychological distance(temporal distance,spatial distance,probability distance,social distance).Therefore,the psychological distance is an important research perspective on various decision-making issues.People learn from experience.When facing a choice,they look for relevant information to guide their choice.But how much information would they choose to consider before making a decision?When we have more information,we can make judgments more accurate(requirements),but the information is costly(viable).According to the Construal Level Theory,the level of interpretation affects people's trade-off between demand and feasibility.Therefore,the present study assumes that the psychological distance of decision-making will cause subjects to search for more information when making decisions.This paper studies whether the psychological distance affects the size of sample information before decision-making,and tests the similarity of decision-making with different psychological distance dimensions.The results show that both in the temporal dimension(Experiment 1),social dimension(Experiment 2),spatial dimension(Experiment 3),hypothetical dimension(Experiment 4),and in the real situation(Experiment 5),the farther psychological distance,subject are more inclined to choose a larger sample size.These results support predictions in different decision situations,including four distance dimensions,as well as in imagination and real context.