Understanding self-control as a problem of regulatory scope.

Although the focus of research for decades, there is a surprising lack of consensus on what is (and what is not) self-control. We review some of the most prominent theoretical models of self-control, including those that highlight conflicts between smaller-sooner versus larger-later rewards, "hot" emotions versus "cool" cognitions, and efficient automatic versus resource-intensive controlled processes. After discussing some of their shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach based on tenets of construal level theory (Trope et al., 2021) that integrates these disparate models while also providing novel insights. Specifically, we model self-control as a problem of regulatory scope-the range of considerations one accounts for in any decision or behavior. Self-control conflicts occur when the pursuit of specific local opportunities threatens the ability to address motivational priorities that span a broader array of time, places, individuals, and possibilities. Whereas a more contractive consideration of relevant concerns may prompt indulgence in temptation, a more expansive consideration of concerns should not only help people identify the self-control conflict but also successfully resolve it. We review empirical evidence that supports this new framework and discuss implications and new directions. This regulatory framework not only clarifies what is and what is not self-control but also provides new insights that can be leveraged to enhance self-control in all its various forms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Beliefs about abstraction: Low-level and high-level construal signal different lay theories.

Construal level theory identifies abstraction as the key process that guides the pursuit of distant goals and expands the scope of regulation beyond the here and now (Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope et al., 2021). While low-level (concrete) construals are concrete representations that foster a narrow view on the immediate circumstances and allow people to focus on a small subset of concerns, high-level (abstract) construals enable people to consider variability and change by taking more distant targets into account. In the present research, we investigate how people associate construal level with lay theories and, in particular, how this association manifests in the inferences they draw about others. In line with predictions, results across eight experiments (N = 1,110) show that people associate high-level construal with growth theories and low-level construal with fixed theories. Moreover, Studies 4 and 5 demonstrate that construal level can selectively influence a candidate's employability, depending on the hiring company's organizational mindset. Overall, this research points out the importance of investigating people's beliefs about abstraction, as it highlights how low-level and high-level construals can communicate distinct traits, characteristics, or intentions to peers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological closeness and concrete construal may underlie high-fidelity social emulation.

We compare bifocal stance theory's (BST) approach to social learning to construal level theory's (CLT) - a social-cognitive theory positing that psychological closeness to a model influences action-representation and thus modulates how concretely or abstractly observers emulate models. Whereas BST argues that social motives produce higher fidelity emulation, CLT argues that psychological closeness impacts cognitive construal and produces more concrete emulation across diverse motivations for emulation.

Abstract thinking facilitates aggregation of information.

Many situations in life (such as considering which stock to invest in, or which people to befriend) require averaging across series of values. Here, we examined predictions derived from construal level theory, and tested whether abstract compared with concrete thinking facilitates the process of aggregating values into a unified summary representation. In four experiments, participants were induced to think more abstractly (vs. concretely) and performed different variations of an averaging task with numerical values (Experiments 1-2 and 4), and emotional faces (Experiment 3). We found that the induction of abstract, compared with concrete thinking, improved aggregation accuracy (Experiments 1-3), but did not improve memory for specific items (Experiment 4). In particular, in concrete thinking, averaging was characterized by increased regression toward the mean and lower signal-to-noise ratio, compared with abstract thinking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science.

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens' decisions and outcomes1. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals2. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. Here, to address this limitation and accelerate the pace of discovery, we introduce the megastudy-a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration. In a megastudy targeting physical exercise among 61,293 members of an American fitness chain, 30 scientists from 15 different US universities worked in small independent teams to design a total of 54 different four-week digital programmes (or interventions) encouraging exercise. We show that 45% of these interventions significantly increased weekly gym visits by 9% to 27%; the top-performing intervention offered microrewards for returning to the gym after a missed workout. Only 8% of interventions induced behaviour change that was significant and measurable after the four-week intervention. Conditioning on the 45% of interventions that increased exercise during the intervention, we detected carry-over effects that were proportionally similar to those measured in previous research3-6. Forecasts by impartial judges failed to predict which interventions would be most effective, underscoring the value of testing many ideas at once and, therefore, the potential for megastudies to improve the evidentiary value of behavioural science.

Aging Impairs Inhibitory Control Over Incidental Cues: A Construal-Level Perspective.

Age-related changes in decision making have been attributed to deterioration of cognitive skills, such as learning and memory. On the basis of past research showing age-related decreases in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, we hypothesize that these changes occur, in part, because of older adults' tendency to give more weight to low-level, subordinate, and goal-irrelevant information than younger adults do. Consistent with this hypothesis, our findings demonstrated that young adults are willing to pay more for a product with superior end attributes than a product with superior means attributes (Study 1, N = 200) and are more satisfied after an experience with superior end than means attributes (Study 2, N = 399). Young adults are also more satisfied with a goal-relevant than with a goal-irrelevant product (Study 3, N = 201; Study 4, N = 200, preregistered). Importantly, these effects were attenuated with age. Implications for research on construal level and aging, as well as implications for policymakers, are discussed.

Grounded separation: can the sensorimotor be grounded in the symbolic?

According to Lee and Schwarz, the sensorimotor experience of cleansing involves separating one physical entity from another and grounds mental separation of one psychological entity from another. We propose that cleansing effects may result from symbolic cognition. Instead of viewing abstract meanings as emerging from concrete physical acts of cleansing, this physical act may be appended with pre-existing, symbolic meaning.

Regulatory Scope and Its Mental and Social Supports.

Adaptive functioning requires the ability to both immerse oneself in the here and now as well as to move beyond current experience. We leverage and expand construal-level theory to understand how individuals and groups regulate thoughts, feelings, and behavior to address both proximal and distal ends. To connect to distant versus proximal events in a way that meaningfully informs and guides responses in the immediate here and now, people must expand versus contract their regulatory scope. We propose that humans have evolved a number of mental and social tools that enable the modulation of regulatory scope and address the epistemic, emotive, and executive demands of regulation. Critically, across these tools, it is possible to distinguish a hierarchy that varies in abstractness. Whereas low-level tools enable contractive scope, high-level tools enable expansion. We review empirical results that support these assertions and highlight the novel insights that a regulatory-scope framework provides for understanding diverse phenomena.

Above and beyond "Above and beyond the concrete".

The commentaries address our view of abstraction, our ontology of abstract entities, and our account of predictive cognition as relying on relatively concrete simulation or relatively abstract theory-based inference. These responses revisit classic questions concerning mental representation and abstraction in the context of current models of predictive cognition. The counter arguments to our article echo: constructivist theories of knowledge, "neat" approaches in artificial intelligence and decision theory, neo-empiricist models of concepts, and externalist views of cognition. We offer several empirical predictions that address points of contention and that highlight the generative potential of our model.

Above and beyond the concrete: The diverse representational substrates of the predictive brain.

In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities that allow humans to transcend the "here-and-now." Consistent with the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the representational substrates of the mind are built as a hierarchy, ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that there are qualitative differences between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged, diversity. Echoing views from philosophy, we suggest that the representational hierarchy can be parsed into: modality-specific representations, instantiated on perceptual similarity; multimodal representations, instantiated primarily on the discovery of spatiotemporal contiguity; and categorical representations, instantiated primarily on social interaction. These elements serve as the building blocks of complex structures discussed in cognitive psychology (e.g., episodes, scripts) and are the inputs for mental representations that behave like functions, typically discussed in linguistics (i.e., predicators). We support our argument for representational diversity by explaining how the elements in our ontology are all required to account for humans' predictive cognition (e.g., in subserving logic-based prediction; in optimizing the trade-off between accurate and detailed predictions) and by examining how the neuroscientific evidence coheres with our account. In doing so, we provide a testable model of the neural bases of conceptual cognition and highlight several important implications to research on self-projection, reinforcement learning, and predictive-processing models of psychopathology.

Psychological distance modulates goal-based versus movement-based imitation.

In past research on imitation, some findings suggest that imitation is goal based, whereas other findings suggest that imitation can also be based on a direct mapping of a model's movements without necessarily adopting the model's goal. We argue that the 2 forms of imitation are flexibly deployed in accordance with the psychological distance from the model. We specifically hypothesize that individuals are relatively more likely to imitate the model's goals when s/he is distant but relatively more likely to imitate the model's specific movements when s/he is proximal. This hypothesis was tested in 4 experiments using different imitation paradigms and different distance manipulations. Experiment 1 served as a pilot study and demonstrated that temporal distance (vs. proximity) increased imitation of a goal relative to the imitation of a movement. Experiments 2 and 3 measured goal-based and movement-based imitation independently of each other and found that spatial distance (vs. proximity) decreased the rate of goal errors (indicating more goal imitation) compared with movement errors. Experiment 4 demonstrated that psychological distance operates most likely at the input-that is, perceptual-level. The findings are discussed in relation to construal level theory and extant theories of imitation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological Distance Promotes Exploration in Search of a Global Maximum.

Agents must sometimes decide whether to exploit a known resource or search for potentially more profitable options. Here, we investigate the role of psychological distancing in promoting exploratory behavior. We argue that exploration dilemmas pit the value of a reward ("desirability") against the difficulty or uncertainty of obtaining it ("feasibility"). Based on construal level theory, which suggests that psychological distance increases the importance of rewards' desirability (vs. feasibility), we expect that psychological distance will increase exploration. Four experiments support this prediction. In Experiment 1, participants who were prompted to consider an exploration game from a physically distanced perspective were more likely to leave a local maximum in search of a global maximum. Experiments 2 and 3 show that social distance has similar results. Experiment 4 finds evidence of a direct association between construal mind-set and exploration. Overall, this research highlights how psychological distancing strategies can promote exploration.

The Gift of Psychological Closeness: How Feasible Versus Desirable Gifts Reduce Psychological Distance to the Giver.

Gift-giving is a common form of social exchange but little research has examined how different gift types affect the psychological distance between giver and recipient. We examined how two types of gifts influence recipients' perceived psychological distance to the giver. Specifically, we compared desirable gifts focused on the quality of the gift with feasible gifts focused on the gift's practicality or ease of use. We found that feasible (vs. desirable) gifts led recipients to feel psychologically closer to givers (Studies 1-4). Further clarifying the process by which receiving a desirable versus feasible gift affects perceived distance, when recipients were told that the giver focused on the gift's practicality or ease of use (vs. the gift's overall quality), while holding the specific features of the gifts constant, they felt closer to the gift-giver (Study 5). These results shed light on how different gifts can influence interpersonal relationships.

Temporal orientation.

Time in the mind orients people in one of two directions. An inward orientation points to the present, contracting the scope of thought to immediate concerns. An outward orientation, in contrast, points away from the present to the past or the future, expanding the scope of thought to a wider consideration set. These oriented arrows need not solely be used for mental time travel, as a similar inward/outward orientation can apply to social distance, spatial distance, and probability. We review recent findings illuminated by this broad form distancing, as illustrated in how people learn from and compare themselves to others, before concluding with a discussion of how change necessarily transpires over time, providing opportunities for future research at the intersection of future thought and present behavior.

Beyond direct reference: Comparing the present to the past promotes abstract processing.

A primary way that people make sense of their experience is by comparing various objects within their immediate environment to each other and to previously encountered objects. The objects involved in a comparison can be stimuli that are present within one's immediate environment, or mental representations of previously encountered stimuli that are now absent from one's immediate environment. In this research, we propose that the comparison process unfolds differently depending on whether an individual is comparing stimuli that are simultaneously present within a given context or is comparing a target stimulus to a stored representation of a previously encountered source stimulus. Across two studies, we found that people engage in more abstract processing when comparing a present stimulus to a previously encountered source than when comparing two simultaneously present stimuli. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of abstraction in comparison and memory-based reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record

Aversive smell associations shape social judgment.

Once associating another person with an unpleasant smell, how do we perceive and judge this person from that moment on? Here, we used aversive olfactory conditioning followed by a social attribution task during functional magnetic resonance imaging to address this question. After conditioning, where one of two faces was repeatedly paired with an aversive smell, the participants reported negative affect when viewing the smell-conditioned but not the neutral face. When subsequently confronted with the smell-conditioned face (without any smell), the participants tended to judge both positive and negative behaviors as indicative of personality traits rather than related to the situation. This effect was predicted by the degree of the preceding olfactory evaluative conditioning. Whole brain analysis of stimulus by stage interaction indicated differential activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and right angular gyrus to the conditioned versus the neutral person during the attribution phase only. These results suggest that negative smell associations do not simply induce a negative perception of the target person but rather bias the attribution style towards trait attributions. The fact that this bias was evident regardless of behavior valence suggests it may reflect enhanced psychological distance. Thus, the known observation of social rejection triggered by aversive smell may be driven by a shift in social attribution style.

Justice Without Borders: The Influence of Psychological Distance and Construal Level on Moral Exclusion.

The present research examines how psychological distance influences the weight given to individuating information about targets of justice judgments. Drawing on construal level theory, which links psychological distance to levels of construal, we hypothesize that increasing psychological distance from justice judgments reduces people's sensitivity to specific features of targets, thereby minimizing the extent to which applications of justice are influenced by target-specific information. Psychological proximity, by contrast, enhances the salience of targets' idiosyncratic characteristics, thereby leading to applications of justice that are more sensitive to targets' identity. Six studies, examining various justice principles, support these conclusions. Studies 1 to 3 show that psychological distancing reduces the weight of target-specific features in justice judgments. Supporting the role of construal level in driving these results, Studies 4 to 6 demonstrate parallel patterns when construal level is manipulated directly. This work offers a novel outlook on the role of construal and target characteristics in moral exclusion.

In the Eye of the Betrothed: Perceptual Downgrading of Attractive Alternative Romantic Partners.

People in monogamous relationships can experience a conflict when they interact with an attractive individual. They may have a desire to romantically pursue the new person, while wanting to be faithful to their partner. How do people manage the threat that attractive alternatives present to their relationship goals? We suggest that one way people defend their relationships against attractive individuals is by perceiving the individual as less attractive. In two studies, using a novel visual matching paradigm, we found support for a perceptual downgrading effect. People in relationships perceived threatening attractive individuals as less attractive than did single participants. The effect was exacerbated among participants who were highly satisfied with their current relationships. The studies provide evidence for a perceptual bias that emerges to protect long-term goals. We discuss the findings within the context of a broader theory of motivated perception in the service of self-control.

Cognitive control modulates attention to food cues: Support for the control readiness model of self-control.

Self-control in one's food choices often depends on the regulation of attention toward healthy choices and away from temptations. We tested whether selective attention to food cues can be modulated by a newly developed proactive self-control mechanism-control readiness-whereby control activated in one domain can facilitate control in another domain. In two studies, we elicited the activation of control using a color-naming Stroop task and tested its effect on attention to food cues in a subsequent, unrelated task. We found that control readiness modulates both overt attention, which involves shifts in eye gaze (Study 1), and covert attention, which involves shift in mental attention without shifting in eye gaze (Study 2). We further demonstrated that individuals for whom tempting food cues signal a self-control problem (operationalized by relatively higher BMI) were especially likely to benefit from control readiness. We discuss the theoretical contributions of the control readiness model and the implications of our findings for enhancing proactive self-control to overcome temptation in food choices.

The sound of distance.

Human languages may be more than completely arbitrary symbolic systems. A growing literature supports sound symbolism, or the existence of consistent, intuitive relationships between speech sounds and specific concepts. Prior work establishes that these sound-to-meaning mappings can shape language-related judgments and decisions, but do their effects generalize beyond merely the linguistic and truly color how we navigate our environment? We examine this possibility, relating a predominant sound symbolic distinction (vowel frontness) to a novel associate (spatial proximity) in five studies. We show that changing one vowel in a label can influence estimations of distance, impacting judgment, perception, and action. The results (1) provide the first experimental support for a relationship between vowels and spatial distance and (2) demonstrate that sound-to-meaning mappings have outcomes that extend beyond just language and can - through a single sound - influence how we perceive and behave toward objects in the world.