The research behind Construal Level Theory
It is relatively easy to imagine what you want your life to look like three years from now. You might want to be healthier, doing more meaningful work, living somewhere you love or spending your time differently. From that distance, the important things can seem surprisingly clear.
Tomorrow is more complicated. Going to the gym means getting up earlier. Changing careers means finishing an application after work. Saving money means deciding not to buy something you want today. The closer a goal gets to the present, the more practical details begin to appear.
Psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman have spent decades studying this relationship between psychological distance and the way we think. Their work contributed to Construal Level Theory, which proposes that distant events tend to be represented more abstractly while psychologically close events tend to be represented in greater concrete detail.
This shift affects more than how we imagine the future. It can influence how we think about places, people, probabilities, decisions and even our own behavior.
THE RESEARCH
Some of the early research behind Construal Level Theory examined how people's thinking changed depending on how far into the future an event would occur.
In a series of studies published in the late 1990s, Liberman and Trope asked participants to imagine activities taking place either in the near future or the distant future. They were interested in whether temporal distance changed which features of an activity people considered most important.
One distinction was between the desirability of an outcome and the feasibility of achieving it. Desirability concerns why you would want something and the value of the outcome. Feasibility concerns the practical details of making it happen.
Imagine being offered the opportunity to attend an interesting event. The desirability question is whether the event itself appeals to you. The feasibility questions involve how far away it is, how much it costs, whether you have time and how difficult it will be to get there.
The researchers found that when events were further in the future, participants gave relatively greater weight to desirability. When those same kinds of events were closer in time, feasibility became more influential.
Other experiments examined the way people mentally represented actions themselves. An activity can usually be described at different levels. "Making a list," for example, can be described concretely as writing things on paper or more abstractly as getting organized. "Locking a door" can be represented as turning a key or as securing a house.
Across this research, greater psychological distance was associated with higher-level representations that captured the broader purpose or meaning of an action. Greater proximity brought attention towards the specific mechanics involved in carrying it out.
The activity had not changed. The mental representation of it had.
THE FINDING
This research suggests that distance changes which information becomes most prominent when we think about something.
From far away, we tend to focus more on the central meaning of an event. We see the larger goal, the reason for pursuing it and its most important characteristics. Smaller contextual details receive less attention.
As the event approaches, those details become harder to ignore. Practical constraints, inconveniences and competing demands become more visible.
Consider the idea of moving abroad. Two years before the move, you may think primarily about the experience you want: learning another language, living in a different culture, changing your career or seeing more of the world. These are high-level representations of the decision.
Two weeks before moving, your attention is likely to contain considerably more detail. Which documents do you need? What happens to your furniture? How do you open a bank account? What time is the flight? How many suitcases can you take?
Neither way of thinking is more accurate. They answer different questions.
One tells you why the move matters.
The other tells you how the move is actually going to happen.
THE THEORY
Construal Level Theory eventually expanded beyond time. Trope and Liberman proposed that several forms of psychological distance are related to the same underlying pattern of thought.
Temporal distance is one. Something can happen tomorrow or ten years from now.
Spatial distance is another. Something can happen here or on the other side of the world.
Social distance concerns how psychologically close another person feels to us. We can think about ourselves, a close friend, a stranger or someone whose life is very different from our own.
Hypotheticality concerns how likely something is to occur. An event that is almost certain feels psychologically closer than one that is merely possible.
Across these dimensions, greater psychological distance tends to encourage higher-level construals: more abstract representations that emphasize the essential features of something. Psychological proximity tends to encourage lower-level construals, which contain more contextual and practical detail.
This helps explain why it can sometimes be easier to see the larger pattern in someone else's situation than in your own. Their problem is psychologically further away. You can see the important relationship, trade-off or decision without simultaneously experiencing every inconvenience and emotion surrounding it.
Your own situation arrives with all the details included.
NOT THE SAME THING
Abstract thinking is not better thinking
It would be easy to interpret this research as an argument that we should step back from everything and focus on the big picture.
That would miss half the theory.
Abstract thinking is useful when you need to understand meaning, priorities and direction. Concrete thinking is useful when something actually needs to happen.
If you are deciding whether becoming a doctor is a life you want, thinking about purpose, interests and long-term values is useful. If your medical school application is due tomorrow, thinking about the meaning of medicine isn't going to upload the required documents.
Problems can occur when the level of thinking doesn't match the task.
A goal can remain attractive indefinitely at an abstract level because the person never gets close enough to confront what it requires. "I want to write a book" can remain a compelling identity for years. Writing 800 words before work on Thursday morning is a different proposition.
The opposite problem can happen too. Someone can become so absorbed in logistics, obstacles and immediate frustrations that they lose sight of why they chose the goal in the first place.
Both levels contain useful information.
WHY IT MATTERS
Construal Level Theory helps explain a common experience with long-term plans: the future can look coherent because distance removes detail.
When you imagine yourself several years from now, you don't mentally simulate every ordinary day required to get there. You see a compressed version containing the features that seem most important. You imagine the business, not the hundreds of administrative tasks. You imagine being fluent in another language, not the individual evenings spent studying vocabulary. You imagine the finished home, not every contractor problem involved in renovating it.
This isn't necessarily a flaw in planning. High-level thinking allows us to establish direction without becoming overwhelmed by every step required before we have even begun.
The problem appears when we mistake a clear vision for a clear plan.
Knowing that you want meaningful work is different from knowing what you will do next Monday to move towards it. Knowing that you want close friendships is different from deciding when you will actually make time to see people. Knowing that you want to become financially secure is different from determining what happens to the money arriving in your account this month.
The reverse is also worth remembering. When the immediate details of a goal become irritating, difficult or boring, stepping back can restore information that proximity has pushed out of view. The tedious task in front of you may make more sense when it is reconnected to the larger reason you chose it.
Good planning therefore requires moving between levels rather than permanently occupying one of them. You need enough distance to know why something matters and enough proximity to understand what it requires.
TRY THIS
Choose a goal you have been thinking about for a while and describe it at two different distances.
First, move outward. Imagine the goal has already been achieved and ask what it represents. Why do you want it? What would it change about your life? Which value or priority does it serve? This gives you the higher-level representation.
Then move much closer. Ask what pursuing that goal looks like within the next seven days. Where will you be? What will you actually do? How long will it take? What practical obstacle is most likely to interfere?
If you can answer the first set of questions but not the second, you may have a clear direction without a workable plan. If you can answer the second but have forgotten the first, you may be executing a plan whose purpose has become difficult to see.
Distance changes what becomes visible. Sometimes the useful move is to step back.
Sometimes it is to get considerably closer.
References
Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (1998). The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future decisions: A test of temporal construal theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 5-18.
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110(3), 403-421.
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440-463.