Genom att använda reflex kan gångtrafikanten i mörkret upptäckas 100 meter tidigare av bilisten. Ändå används de inte. CLT rör hur mentala konstruktioner formas och hur individen rör sig mellan psykologiska distanser på abstrakta eller konkreta nivåer. Kognitiv dissonans innebär att beteenden ligger i konflikt vilket leder till obehag som behöver reduceras. En enkätundersökning med 120 deltagare genomfördes med syftet att se om individer inomhus i dagsljus förklarade sin frånvaro av reflexer abstrakt medan individer utomhus i mörker förklarade konkret. Resultatet visade inget stöd för detta men däremot att män hade en tendens att förklara sig mer abstrakt än kvinnor samtidigt som de använde reflexer mer sällan och ansåg dem vara mindre viktiga för säkerheten. Resultatdiskussionen gällde om frågorna i indelningarna av abstrakt och konkret är alltför olika. Dessutom diskuteras om den psykologiska distansen var för liten eller om kön avgör mer för typ av förklaring än miljön.

Psychological closure is the feeling that a life experience is complete and a part of the past (Beike, Adams, and Wirth-Beaumont 2007). While research on psychological closure primarily deals with traumatic or highly aversive life experiences, psychological closure is frequently experienced and sought after in more typical consumption settings. My dissertation extends our current knowledge about the role of psychological closure by exploring emotional, cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral implications of psychological closure across a broad range of consumer experiences. The first essay aims to demonstrate that closure makes events seem distant in time and probability through emotion. It also explores resulting consumer decisions such as warranty purchase intentions. The second essay proposes and tests how psychological closure of a consumer learning experience can lead to an abstract representation of that learning experience, and consequently a heightened sense of subjective knowledge. / text

Past research on construal level theory (CLT) has shown that adopting a temporally distant (vs. temporally close) orientation facilitates a more abstract, “bigger picture” representation of events. Furthermore, research on other forms of psychological distance (e.g., self-distance) has linked abstract representations of past interpersonal negative events to positive psychological benefits, such as reduced negative affect. Despite this connection, little work has been done looking at how temporal distance, a form of psychological distance, may also result in positive psychological outcomes. Moreover, few have explored the effects of temporal distance on reasoning within an interpersonal context. Provided the past literature on psychological distance, I hypothesize that a distant temporal orientation when reasoning over a recent romantic relationship conflict will result in greater abstract representations of the past conflict. Given that the context is in an interpersonal domain, I predict that the abstract representation will manifest itself through a more inclusive reasoning strategy, which will lead to beneficial reasoning strategies for the relationship. I test these hypotheses by randomly assigning participants to a present-oriented mindset, or a future-oriented mindset when reflecting on their past conflict. Results from two experiments (Study 1: College students; Study 2: Age-heterogeneous community sample) indicate that taking a future-orientation leads to an inclusive reasoning strategy (i.e., greater non-self centered word use) and also leads to reasoning that is considered conducive to positive relationship outcomes (e.g., lower partner blame and greater expression of growth). Implications for research on psychological distance and reasoning are discussed.

Participative budgeting plays an important role for information communication among hierarchies in organizations. In this study, I use a lab experiment to examine three research questions and investigate the role of supervisors in influencing subordinate honesty. First, I predict and find support that supervisory behavioral integrity, i.e. the alignment between a superior’s communication of a value of honesty and the superior’s behavioral honesty, is an effective informal control mechanism to influence employee honesty. However, the effectiveness of supervisory behavioral integrity in influencing employee honesty depends on the presence of shared financial interests between the superior and the subordinates, such that high supervisory behavioral integrity may promote employee honesty only in the presence of shared financial interests. In the absence of shared financial interests, supervisory behavioral integrity is no longer effective in influencing employee honesty. Finally, I investigate whether supervisory behavioral integrity, compared to supervisory behavioral honesty, has incremental effect on subordinate honesty. The results suggest that, compared to supervisory behavioral honesty, supervisory behavioral integrity has a stronger influence on subordinate honesty. Furthermore, high supervisory behavioral honesty is shown to have a demotion effect on subordinate honesty, i.e. subordinate honesty is lower when superior’s honesty is high than when it is low. Supplemental analysis provides potential explanations for the demotion effect. The implications of the findings for management accounting research and practice are discussed.

Past research on construal level theory (CLT) has shown that adopting a temporally distant (vs. temporally close) orientation facilitates a more abstract, “bigger picture” representation of events. Furthermore, research on other forms of psychological distance (e.g., self-distance) has linked abstract representations of past interpersonal negative events to positive psychological benefits, such as reduced negative affect. Despite this connection, little work has been done looking at how temporal distance, a form of psychological distance, may also result in positive psychological outcomes. Moreover, few have explored the effects of temporal distance on reasoning within an interpersonal context. Provided the past literature on psychological distance, I hypothesize that a distant temporal orientation when reasoning over a recent romantic relationship conflict will result in greater abstract representations of the past conflict. Given that the context is in an interpersonal domain, I predict that the abstract representation will manifest itself through a more inclusive reasoning strategy, which will lead to beneficial reasoning strategies for the relationship. I test these hypotheses by randomly assigning participants to a present-oriented mindset, or a future-oriented mindset when reflecting on their past conflict. Results from two experiments (Study 1: College students; Study 2: Age-heterogeneous community sample) indicate that taking a future-orientation leads to an inclusive reasoning strategy (i.e., greater non-self centered word use) and also leads to reasoning that is considered conducive to positive relationship outcomes (e.g., lower partner blame and greater expression of growth). Implications for research on psychological distance and reasoning are discussed.

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This dissertation examines the relationship between two social psychological theories: Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954) and Construal Level Theory (Liberman & Trope, 1998). More specifically, this research assesses how a person's level of mental abstraction (i.e., construal level) might influence the way social comparison information from individuals or aggregates is used to form self-evaluations. Typically, comparison information from individuals (versus information about aggregates) is given disproportionate weight when forming self-evaluations; in other words, there is a "local" (i.e., individual) dominance effect in the utilization of social comparison information (e.g., Zell & Alicke, 2010). It is predicted that with greater mental abstraction (i.e., higher construal level), this tendency will be reversed, and instead comparison information from aggregates will be relied upon more when evaluating the self. In other words, abstract mindsets (versus concrete mindsets) should result in a "global" (i.e., aggregate) dominance effect in the weighting of social comparison information. Six studies examine the influence of construal level on the use of aggregate versus individual social comparison information. Two pilot studies provide initial evidence that abstract mindsets lead to a global dominance effect. The generalizability of these effects is tested by providing comparison feedback on different tasks (Study 1 and Study 4), testing the influence of different construal mindset manipulations (Study 2), as well as manipulating the psychological distance (an antecedent of construal level; e.g., Trope and Liberman, 2003) of social comparison targets (Studies 3 - 4). Additionally, the relative weighting of individual versus aggregate comparison targets is directly tested by comparing self-evaluations with only aggregate comparison information, and with both aggregate and individual comparison information (Study 2 and Study 4). Results across all studies indicate that while social comparisons with better off or worse off targets typically result in robust effects, evidence of local dominance and effects of construal manipulations are much more subtle. Theoretical implications for Social Comparison Theory and Construal Level Theory and practical implications are discussed.

This dissertation examines the potential for two forms of corporate philanthropy, donations of time and money, to have differential effects on consumers' response to corporate giving. Drawing upon indirect-reciprocity theory I show that corporate donations of time compared to money elicit a greater desire to reciprocate on the part of consumers. It is found that the influence of corporate donations on consumers' desire to reciprocate occurs through serial mediation, whereby donations of time are perceived as being more effortful than monetary donations. This in turn leads to more altruistic motive attributions, and ultimately greater admiration towards the firm and a stronger desire to reciprocate on the part of consumers. I find that consumers' desire to reciprocate is strengthened when the relative cost to the firm for making a donation is higher. Additionally, this research advances the emotion gratitude as a mechanism through which corporate giving leads to a desire to reciprocate and more broadly, a catalyst through which indirect reciprocity occurs. Finally, the influence of consumers' personality traits on their response to corporate philanthropy is examined. Corporate donations of time and money lead to stronger feelings of gratitude and a greater approval of a company's philanthropic actions when consumers possess higher levels of empathetic concern. Conversely, consumers who embody narcissistic traits are significantly less inclined to experience feelings of gratitude or approve of a company's philanthropy.

To the vast majority of people, the terms “sustainability” and “sustainable development” are unfamiliar, and, when they are recognized, there is still a great deal of interpretability as to their significance. Since no consensus exists regarding these terms, communication efforts to promote action and awareness among citizens must invariably “frame” the issue of sustainable development in one way or another. By and large, most communication strategies promote small private-sphere actions relevant to patterns of consumption. While these small actions are helpful, participatory, collective, public-sphere activism towards sustainability is much more potent and desirable. In attempting to engage this type of participatory action, communicators must understand the psychological barriers that are likely to confront their efforts. Communication professionals recognize that one such barrier, that of perceived, or, psychological distance, from issues of non-sustainability is especially pernicious. This paper attempts to apply Construal Level Theory (CLT), which provides “an account of how psychological distance influences individuals’ thoughts and behavior” (Trope et al. 2007) to the design of communication strategies for participatory sustainable development. After providing a thorough review of CLT, the authors examine the many ways that the theory can contribute to the design of communication strategies for participatory sustainable development.

abstract: Social discounting underlies individual altruistic decision-making, and it is frequently measured as the amount of hypothetical money one is willing to forgo for another person as a function of social distance. In the classic social discounting task, individual participants are asked to imagine their friends along a continuum of social distance, that is then used to estimate participant’s social discounting rate. While an ever-growing proportion of social interactions takes place over social media, no research has yet characterized social discounting in that context. Moreover, no research has estimated social discounting rate using real persons’ social distance, instead of the hypothetical continuum described above. Using existing social media indicators of social distance, it is now possible to estimate social discounting rate based on real people, which may lead to more accurate social discounting measurements and may expand the discounting model to real-life situations. Specifically, using computer algorithms to estimate the social distance from social media data makes it possible to assess the utility of numeric social distance indicators and the most appropriate ways to represent them. The proposed study examined the extent to which a hyperbolic model for social discounting fits social distance information retrieved from Facebook pages; and assessed whether there were differences in discounting rate when real or hypothetical social distance is used; also to further investigate whether discounting rates based on real persons are in fact based on perceived social distance by the participant, or on the imaginary social distance scale (i.e., an experimental artifact.) It was found that the social discounting model can be applied in the social media context, even when real Facebook friends’ profiles were used as substitutes of numeric social distance indicators. Additionally, people showed similar altruistic tendencies in both the numeric and profile social discounting tests on the Facebook environment. These findings were qualified, however, by a high rate of nonsystematic data for the profile group; a rate much higher than traditional numeric paradigm. This discrepancy suggested that the allocation rates between numeric and profile approaches need further investigation to determine the factors affecting individuals’ generosity as a function of social distance indicators. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2018