Orderliness/Disorderliness Is Mentally Associated With Construal Level and Psychological Distance

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Kaiyun Li¹  Tianze Wang¹  Jiayi Wu¹  Zhenxing Zhang¹  Xinrui Li¹  Ruikang Han¹  Fengxun Lin¹ 

[1] School of Education and Psychology, University of Jinan

关键词: orderliness;    disorderliness;    construal level;    psychological distance;    IAT;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02521

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

People are innately capable of exploring and detecting orderliness and of attempting to make the world in which they live more orderly rather than more disorderly. Construal level theory asserts that the same stimuli can be represented abstractly or concretely and that psychological distance can affect the construal level. No research, however, has examined whether perceived orderliness/disorderliness is mentally associated with construal level and psychological distance. In this study, by using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), we conducted 10 studies to examine this possibility. The results of studies 1A–1B showed that people tended to associate high-level construal concepts with orderliness concepts and low-level construal concepts with disorderliness concepts. By contrast, the results of studies 2A–5B revealed that people associated psychologically proximal concepts with orderliness concepts and psychologically distal concepts with disorderliness concepts. These studies demonstrated that orderliness/disorderliness is associated with both construal level and psychological distance, but in opposite directions, suggesting that construal level and psychological distance may have distinct natures.

【 授权许可】

CC BY