Psychological distance in consumer psychology: Consequences and antecedents

Abstract

Wherever consumers envision faraway locations, remember the past, predict the future, consider the perspective of others, or entertain remote possibilities, their minds extrapolate beyond what lies in front of them to something psychologically distant.Conjuring and considering that which is psychologically distant thus lies at the heart of how most people spend a substantial portion of their lives. As integrated here, seeing something as psychologically distant causes people to think about and act on it in systematically different ways than the same thing seen as psychologically close. Recent advances in these consequences suggest that the effects of psychological distance on consumer decision-making continue to grow increasingly nuanced.Consumer outcomes thus at times benefit from seeing things as near and, at other times, benefit from seeing things as far. Accordingly, this review thereafter summarizes the antecedents that lead people to see things as psychologically distant or psychologically close. It closes in considering how future considerations might expand the conceptualization and application of psychological distance. K E Y W O R D Sprobability, psychological distance, social distance, space, time

An agenda for psychological distance apart from construal level

“…The dimensions of distance all, similarly, enable distancing from the immediate, egocentric here and now. As a result, they occupy conceptually similar spaces in the mind with similar implications for judgments and decisions (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007; Maglio, 2020; Maglio & Trope, 2019; Maglio, Trope, & Liberman, 2013a, 2013b, 2015; see also Van Boven & Caruso, 2015) and rely upon similar circuitry to navigate into faraway scenes (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; Parkinson, Liu, & Wheatley, 2014; Peer, Salomon, Goldberg, Blanke, & Arzy, 2015; Spreng, Mar, & Kim, 2009; Tamir & Mitchell, 2011). Further, people tend to infer that things said to be (or that simply feel) far in one dimension are far along all of the other dimensions (Fiedler, Jung, Wänke, & Alexopoulos, 2012; Fiedler, Jung, Wänke, Alexopoulos, & de Molière, 2015; Nook, Schleider, & Somerville, 2017).…”

Self‐control: Information, priorities, and resources

“…When people make a decision removed from what is in front of them in the here and now, they feel the decision as psychologically distant from them (Maglio, ). When they feel distant from a decision, they process information associated with the more abstract and high‐level aspects of a behavior, whereas when they feel close, they process the more concrete and low‐level aspects (Trope & Liberman, ).…”

Increasing resolution in the mechanisms of resolve

“…Swapping pictures for words can have just as strong an effect (Bryan & Hershfield, 2012;Chishima & Wilson, 2020) because both enhance emotional connections over time (Bartels & Rips, 2010;Ersner-Hershfield, Garton, Ballard, Samanez-Larkin, & Knutson, 2009). Uncertainty makes the future self feel not just socially remote but also as belonging to a future age (see Maglio & Kwok, 2016), as these different constructs conspire to push things farther and farther away (Maglio, 2020a(Maglio, , 2020bMaglio, Trope, & Liberman, 2013a). Although the intertemporal tradeoffs that impact cumulative future selves transpire over objective time (e.g., $20 today vs. $40 next week), people mentally convert from absolute time to a relative sense of closeness or distance in thinking across time (Hu & Maglio, 2018), including the making of choices between smaller payoffs sooner and larger payoffs later (Maglio, Trope, & Liberman, 2013b;Malkoc & Zauberman, 2019;Xu, González-Vallejo, & Vincent, 2020;Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettman, 2009).…”