Construal Level Theory

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Construal Level Theory (CLT) is a theory from social psychology that describes the connection between psychological distance and mental abstraction (“mental constructive”). A high psychological distance goes hand in hand with a high degree of mental abstraction and vice versa.

Psychological distance is understood to mean the distance to an object on a temporal, spatial, social or hypothetical dimension. The term hypothetical distance means the improbable or the unrealistic (psychologically distant) or the probable and real (psychologically close).

Mental abstraction, in turn, describes the extent to which a person thinks abstractly or concretely. On a low level of abstraction (engl. "Low-level construal") objects are concretely, unstructured and contextualized represented . A high level of abstraction ("high-level construal") goes hand in hand with an abstract, schematic and decontextualized representation .

Psychological distance and mental abstraction mutually influence one another. This means that people think more abstractly about more distant objects and, conversely, abstract mental representations lead to thinking about more distant objects - the same applies to nearby objects and concrete mental representations.

At its core, the Constructal Level Theory gives an answer to the question of how people overcome mental psychological distances. Although only the here and now can be directly experienced, people can imagine the future or the past, think of distant places, take other people's perspectives and imagine alternative realities. This ability to transcend current perception tends to go hand in hand with more abstract processing, because less information is available about what is distant than about what is close. In human ontogenesis , this leads to an over-generalized association between distance and abstractness, which is consistently expressed in a multitude of situations.

In a study that exemplifies the central mechanism of the Construal Level Theory, Liberman, Sagristano and Trope (2002) examine the assignment of objects that are either close in time or distant in time to categories. Among other things, the participants in the study should imagine a camping trip that will take place in a year (temporally distant) or next weekend (temporally close). Then they were presented with various objects (e.g. toothbrush, tent, camera) which they should assign to self-generated categories. In accordance with the predictions of the Construal Level Theory, people who should imagine the camping trip in one year created fewer and thus broader categories; the greater temporal distance consequently increases the level of abstraction and aggregation in object categorization.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117 (2), 440-463.
  2. ^ Bar-Anan, Y., Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2006). The association between psychological distance and structural level: evidence from an implicit association test. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135 (4), 609-622.
  3. ^ Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322 (5905), 1201-1205.
  4. ^ Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322 (5905), 1201-1205.
  5. ^ Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322 (5905), 1201-1205.
  6. ↑ Liberman, N., Sagristano, MD, & Trope, Y. (2002). The effect of temporal distance on the level of mental construction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38 (6), 523-534.