Psychological Distance and Subjective Experience: How Distancing Reduces the Feeling of Difficulty<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1" ptype="f663772" citart="citart1" /><xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn2" ptype="f663772" citart="citart1" />

versus Concrete Mind-Sets. It has been shown that abstract construal can increase psychological distance. For example, Fujita at al. (2006) showed that when people are primed to think of abstract categories of objects (e.g., “beverage” as a more abstract representation of “soda”), they are more likely to focus on distant goals. On the other hand, when people are primed to consider concrete exemplars of the same objects (e.g., “Coke” as an example of “soda”), they focus on the immediate goal. In a similar vein, thinking about a task abstractly (e.g., making a list is getting organized) can lead to self-distancing from the task, and thinking about the same task concretely (e.g., making a list is writing things down) can increase psychological proximity to the task (Trope and Liberman 2010). This stream of the literature posits that the activation of an abstract mind-set will increase psychological distance from the task. Bodily Distance. Building on the emerging literature on embodied cognition (Barsalou 2010; Niedenthal 2007), we identify a novel and more direct antecedent of psychological distance: bodily distance from a task. The literature on embodied cognition has shown that high-level cognitive processes such as thought and judgment are influenced by sensory, motor, and affective systems (Barsalou 2010; Niedenthal 2007). Based on this literature, we propose that altering bodily distance from the judgment target by leaning forward or leaning backward from the task will also alter the psychological distance from the task. In particular, we hypothesize that physically leaning away from the judgment target will increase psychological distance from it and reduce the feeling of difficulty. The preceding discussion leads us to the following two formal hypotheses: H1a: Activating an abstract mind-set will increase psychological distance and reduce the feeling of difficulty that consumers experience when they perform subsequent, unrelated complex tasks. H1b: Assuming a bodily posture that increases bodily distance from judgment tasks will increase psychological distance and have the same effect on task difficulty as described in hypothesis 1a. Alternative Account and Moderators It is possible that the proposed effect of psychological distance is due to a scaling effect. Maglio and Trope (2010) have shown that construal level can change the mental scale that people use to measure and report the length or size of target objects. Applying this finding to the context of the feeling of difficulty, one may argue that psychological distance might induce people to use larger measuring units, thereby reducing their rating of difficulty. This scaling account predicts that there will be a main effect of psychological distance: all tasks would be rated as less difficult from a distant perspective. We rule out the scaling account by identifying two moderators of the proposed effect that are consistent with our distancing account but not with the scaling account. These moderators are task complexity and task anxiety. Task Complexity. If the proposed effect of psychological distance is caused by changes in the mental scale used to measure difficulty, then the effect should manifest for simple tasks as well as complex ones. In contrast, our account posits that psychological distance will matter for complex tasks but not for simple ones. Unlike complex tasks, simple tasks do not elicit a feeling of difficulty. As a result, psychological 000 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH distance will not affect assessments of difficulty for simple tasks. To illustrate the moderating effect of task complexity, we invite readers to try to read aloud the following two strings of letters, carefully attending to the feeling of difficulty elicited by each stimulus: hension and meunstah. The second stimulus has more syllables and a more complex syllable structure. Therefore, the second stimulus generally requires greater cognitive effort and feels more difficult to pronounce than the first stimulus does. We posit that psychological distance from the task will reduce this feeling of difficulty. In contrast, the first stimulus is much simpler and is less likely to elicit a feeling of difficulty. Consequently, whether one is psychologically distant or proximal to the task would not change the feeling of difficulty. More formally: H2: Psychological distance will reduce the feeling of difficulty experienced during a cognitive task when the task is complex but not when the task is simple. Task Anxiety. Some people may feel anxious when they have to choose which computer or which camera to buy, while others do not break into a sweat. An individual’s dispositional anxiety toward a task can also affect the feeling of difficulty. Since anxious individuals experience stronger negative feelings (Beck, Emery, and Greenberg 2005), task anxiety can increase the feeling of difficulty. For example, a person who is chronically anxious about his linguistic skills should experience intense negative feelings when asked to read complex strings of letters aloud. A person who is chronically anxious about her technology skills should experience intense negative feelings when asked to choose between two computers. (Note that we consider task anxiety to be a chronic individual difference measure that is task specific. A person who is anxious about her technology skills might not be anxious about her linguistic skills.) Our conceptualization predicts that the mitigating effect of psychological distance is more likely to manifest in people with higher task-specific anxiety. However, thinking abstractly or merely leaning away from the task can mitigate the feeling of difficulty caused by task anxiety. We therefore hypothesize as follows: H3a: Chronic task anxiety will increase the feeling of difficulty caused by complex tasks. H3b: Psychological distance (caused by bodily distancing or abstract mind-set) will reduce the effect of task anxiety on the feeling of difficulty. We report on four studies designed to test our hypotheses. Since we focus on the experiential component of difficulty, we begin by demonstrating the effect of psychological distance on metacognitive experiences (studies 1A and 1B) and then examine an important downstream consequence: whether psychological distance reduces choice difficulty and thus reduces choice deferral (studies 2 and 3). OVERVIEW OF STUDIES 1A AND 1B To obtain evidence for the role of metacognitive experiences, in studies 1A and 1B we used a standard experimental paradigm for investigating metacognitive experiences—pronouncing fluent and disfluent strings of letters (Whittlesea, Jacoby, and Girard 1990; Whittlesea and Williams 2000). We asked participants to pronounce meaningless strings of letters that varied in their pronunciation complexity. This task is relevant to consumer decision making because prior research has shown that the ease/difficulty with which brands or company names can be pronounced systematically influences, for example, the perceived risk and perceived quality of the products (Song and Schwarz 2009) and predictions about stock performance (Alter and Oppenheimer 2006). Furthermore, in these studies we use meaningless strings of letters as stimuli to demonstrate that the postulated effect is caused by psychological distance rather than by potential differential weighting of desirability and feasibility of attributes. We predicted that even in such an elemental task that does not involve any trade-off between desirability and feasibility of attributes, psychological distance would reduce the feeling of difficulty that participants experience when they pronounce complex stimuli. STUDY 1A: ABSTRACT MIND-SET REDUCES DIFFICULTY To test hypothesis 1a we manipulated psychological distance by priming abstract and concrete mind-sets using the wordgeneration procedure popularized by Fujita at al. (2006). Drawing on extant research that shows that construal level operates at the level of mind-set (Trope and Liberman 2010; Tsai and McGill 2011; Tsai and Thomas 2011), we assume that an abstract construal mind-set when activated in one situation can influence assessment of task difficulty in a subsequent, unrelated context. We also tested hypothesis 2 by manipulating stimulus complexity. Additionally, we tested hypotheses 3a and 3b by measuring individual differences in task anxiety (i.e., the anxiety about the pronouncing task) and treating it as a third independent variable in our analyses. We predicted that task complexity and task anxiety would interactively increase pronunciation difficulty and that psychological distancing would mitigate this effect. Finally, we ruled out effort as an alternative explanation by measuring response time. One could argue that the proposed difficulty mitigation effect is caused by lower effort put forth during judgment when judgment tasks feel distant. If this is the case, the activation of an abstract mind-set should reduce the time spent on performing the task. If the activation of construal mind-set does not alter effort, however, then we should observe no difference in response time.