When and Why Temporal Distance Matters: the Role of Elaboration and Confidence

EXTENDED ABSTRACT - The Construal Level Theory posits that temporal distance systematically changes the way people construe future events, thereby influencing their evaluations and decisions regarding those events (Liberman and Trope 1998; Trope and Liberman 2000; Liberman et al. 2002). Specifically, the theory postulates that people use more high-level construals to represent distant future events whereas they depend more on low-level construals to represent near future events. High-level construals include more abstract, schematic, and goal-relevant representation of events, whereas low-level construals include more concrete, non-schematic, incidental, and goal-irrelevant representation of events. As such, in goal-directed activities, the Construal Level Theory hypothesizes that goal-relevant features are more influential for distant future events than goal-irrelevant features and that goal irrelevant features are more influential for near future events than goal-relevant features. The Construal Level Theory, however, is silent regarding the boundary conditions under which its explanation works. In this paper, we investigate the question of when the effects predicted by the theory occur. We also intend to investigate psychological process that underlies the effects of temporal distance.



Citation:

Kiwan Park and Joseph R. Priester (2005) ,"When and Why Temporal Distance Matters: the Role of Elaboration and Confidence", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 32, eds. Geeta Menon and Akshay R. Rao, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 524-524.

Authors

Kiwan Park, Sungkyunkwan University
Joseph R. Priester, UCLA



Volume

NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 32 | 2005



Share Proceeding

Featured papers

See More

Featured

L2. Wish List Thinking: The Role of Psychological Ownership in Consumer Likelihood to Purchase or Remove a Product from an Online Wish List

Christopher Groening, Kent State University, USA
Jennifer Wiggins, Kent State University, USA
Iman Raoofpanah, Kent State University, USA

Read More

Featured

H7. Too Risky to Be Luxurious: Stigmatized Luxury Product Attributes Can Weaken or Increase Social Risk to Determine Conspicuous Consumption

Jerry Lewis Grimes, Grenoble Ecole de Management
Yan Meng, Grenoble Ecole de Management

Read More

Featured

The psychological impact of annuities: Can pension payout choice influence health behavior?

Anja Schanbacher, London Business School, UK
David Faro, London Business School, UK
Simona Botti, London Business School, UK
Shlomo Benartzi, University of California Los Angeles, USA

Read More

Engage with Us

Becoming an Association for Consumer Research member is simple. Membership in ACR is relatively inexpensive, but brings significant benefits to its members.