BACKGROUND Patients are often confronted with diverse medical decisions. Often lacking relevant medical knowledge, patients fail to independently make medical decisions and instead generally rely on the advice of doctors. OBJECTIVE This study investigated the characteristics of and differences in doctor-patient medical decision making on the basis of construal level theory. METHODS A total ...

0092-6566/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2009.05.006 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A The present work tested whether increases in level of action construal would relate to perceiving greater concordance among one’s ongoing goals, thereby facilitating positive affect. In two studies, construing action abstractly was found to re...

Warnings that a promoted product can have adverse side effects (e.g., smoking cigarettes can cause cancer) should dampen the product's allure. We predicted that with temporal distance (e.g., when an ad relates to future consumption or was viewed some time earlier), this common type of warning can have a worrisome alternative consequence: It can ironically boost the product's appeal. Building on...

When people anticipate that future temptations may undermine valued goals, they use a number of prospective self-control strategies (or “precommitment devices”) to increase the likelihood of future self-control success. Little is known, however, about the conditions under which people are more or less likely to use them. Drawing from construal level theory (e.g., Trope & Liberman, 2003), we arg...

The present studies demonstrated the moderation of self-construal orientation on mimicry. Recent research has indicated that an interdependent self-construal is associated with assimilation of the other to the self whereas an independent self-construal is associated with minimizing the influence of others on the self (H. R. Markus & S. Kitayama, 1991; D. Stapel & W. Koomen, 2001). Therefore, th...

Our study sought to: (1) tie the relational self-construal to the nomological net of the interpersonal circumplex and (2) show that prior self-construal research confounded consistent with desirable descriptions of self and others. Undergraduates (nD 233) completed measures of relational self-construal, Machiavellianism, the interpersonal circumplex, self-consistency, and self-friend consistenc...

Time is experienced as passing more quickly the more changes happen in a situation. The present research tested the idea that time perception depends on the level of construal of the situation. Building on previous research showing that concrete rather than abstract mental construal causes people to perceive more variations in a given situation, we found in 3 studies that participants in a conc...

This study investigated the impact of self-construal levels on people's tendency to blame innocent victims for the victims' fates. The authors hypothesized that when the belief in a just world is threatened, social self-construal is associated with more victim blaming than individual self-construal is. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were primed with either the individual self (with the wo...

Self-construal has been identified as a potential means to explain cultural differences in social anxiety. Yet, research findings suggest that self-construal is an individual difference as much as a cultural difference. We tested for mediation and moderation regarding self-construal, social anxiety, and other primary individual difference constructs. Our results indicated that the relation of e...

Mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination remain effective ways to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Yet, many hesitate enact some or all these preventive behaviors. We created three persuasive messages—framed promote benefits either (1) oneself, (2) close-others, (3) distant-others—to determine whether effectiveness messages varied based on personality differences (specifically independe...