1. Jessie Briggs & Andrew Karpinski
Differences in Implicit and Explicit Judgments of Temporal Distance and Abstractness
Jessie Briggs & Andrew Karpinski
Temple University
Introduction
Implications
Methods
Construal Level Theory (CLT) posits that distal psychological distances are construed at more abstract levels than proximal distances (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Although CLT has not traditionally contrasted past and future points, findings such as the Temporal Doppler Effect (Caruso et al., 2013) indicate that the past feels more psychologically distant than an objectively equidistant future, suggesting that the past may be construed more abstractly than the future. However, to our knowledge, there have not been any studies that compare the levels at which people construe equal distances in the past and the future.
We sought to test the potential asymmetry in past and future levels of construal using both explicit measures and implicit measures, namely Implicit Association Tests (IATs) based closely on the methodology used by Bar-Anan, Liberman & Trope (2006).
Hypothesis1 – Implicit Measure: Response times will be faster when the past is paired with far and abstract, and the future is paired with near and concrete, than vice-versa. Hypothesis2 – Explicit Measure: Past-related words will be judged as referencing more distant and abstract points in time than future-related words.
Implicit Measures
Participants (n = 121) completed a Time-Distance IAT and a Time-Construal IAT. Participants were randomly assigned to see one of two sets of stimuli for the Time category (Distance and Construal stimuli were kept constant across conditions). In one condition, Time was represented by dates (e.g. 2010, 2020) which were selected to be objectively equidistant from the present, and in the other condition Time was represented by subjective words (e.g. prior, next).
Explicit Measures
1. Participants marked on a timeline the point of reference for three past-related words and three future-related words. A new timeline was provided for each word.
2. Participants rated the breadth of each word using a 7-point scale (1= extremely specific and 7= extremely broad).
To our knowledge, our study was the first to directly compare past and future levels of construal. In doing so, we found that people implicitly construe the past as more abstract than the future, but do not explicitly judge the past and future to differ in breadth. This is likely due to the fact that people are less likely to make explicit judgments about how abstract points in time are, but instead automatically use different levels of abstraction when thinking about them.
The reason we had expected the past to be more abstract than the future was due to previous findings that the past is more psychologically distant than the future. Interestingly, participants’ explicit judgments were consistent in showing that the past is more distant than the future, but this difference was not found in their implicit associations.
Our findings demonstrate that construal levels could be a new avenue for temporal asymmetry research. However, whereas much of the temporal asymmetry research focusing on psychological distance has utilized explicit ratings, implicit measures may be more effective in studying asymmetries in construal.
Results
Positive IAT D scores indicate hypothesis congruent associations (past more distant and abstract than future).
Greater mean explicit ratings indicate greater distance from the present, and higher abstraction respectively.
References
Bar-Anan, Y., Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2006). The association between psychological distance and construal level: Evidence from an implicit association test. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: General, 135(4), doi: /
Caruso, E. M., Van Boven, L., Chin, M., & Ward, A. (2013). The Temporal Doppler Effect: When the future feels closer than the past. Psychological Science, 24(4), doi: /
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), doi: /a
Hypothesis1 – Participants were quicker to respond when abstract was paired with past as opposed to future in both the dates condition (D=.36, SD= .35), t(59)=7.89, p<.001, d=2.06, and the words condition (D=.37, SD= .41), t(46)=6.10, p<.001, d=1.82. However, a bias towards associating distance with the past was not observed. This lack of effect was found with both dates (D= -.06, SD= .44), t(59)=-1.09, p=.28, d=.28, and words (D= -.05, SD= .64), t(45)=-.484, p=.631, d=.14.
Hypothesis2 – Based on the timeline markings, the past was explicitly judged as more distant than the future relative to the present, t(90)= 4.80, p<.001. However, a difference between breadth ratings was not observed t(90)= -1.46, p=.149.