Alter Adam L, Oppenheimer Daniel M
Psychology Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2008 Feb;19(2):161-7. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02062.x.
People construe the world along a continuum from concretely (focusing on specific, local details) to abstractly (focusing on global essences). We show that people are more likely to interpret the world abstractly when they experience cognitive disfluency, or difficulty processing stimuli in the environment, than when they experience cognitive fluency. We observed this effect using three instantiations of fluency: visual perceptual fluency (Study 1b), conceptual priming fluency (Study 2b), and linguistic fluency (Study 3). Adopting the framework of construal theory, we suggest that one mechanism for this effect is perceivers' tendency to interpret disfluently processed stimuli as farther from their current position than fluently processed stimuli (Studies 1a and 2a).
人们沿着从具体（关注特定的局部细节）到抽象（关注整体本质）的连续统来理解世界。我们发现，与经历认知流畅时相比，当人们经历认知不流畅，即处理环境中的刺激有困难时，他们更有可能以抽象的方式来解释世界。我们通过流畅性的三种实例来观察这种效应：视觉感知流畅性（研究1b）、概念启动流畅性（研究2b）和语言流畅性（研究3）。采用解释理论的框架，我们认为这种效应的一种机制是，感知者倾向于将处理不流畅的刺激解释为比处理流畅的刺激离他们当前位置更远（研究1a和2a）。
