Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2014 Jul;18(7):364-9. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2014.03.001. Epub 2014 Apr 10.
Traversing psychological distance involves going beyond direct experience, and includes planning, perspective taking, and contemplating counterfactuals. Consistent with this view, temporal, spatial, and social distances as well as hypotheticality are associated, affect each other, and are inferred from one another. Moreover, traversing all distances involves the use of abstraction, which we define as forming a belief about the substitutability for a specific purpose of subjectively distinct objects. Indeed, across many instances of both abstraction and psychological distancing, more abstract constructs are used for more distal objects. Here, we describe the implications of this relation for prediction, choice, communication, negotiation, and self-control. We ask whether traversing distance is a general mental ability and whether distance should replace expectancy in expected-utility theories.
穿越心理距离涉及超越直接经验，包括规划、换位思考和思考反事实。这种观点认为，时间、空间和社会距离以及假设性相互关联，相互影响，并相互推断。此外，穿越所有距离都涉及到抽象的使用，我们将抽象定义为对主观上不同的对象的特定用途的替代性形成一种信念。事实上，在抽象和心理距离的许多实例中，更抽象的结构被用于更遥远的对象。在这里，我们描述了这种关系对预测、选择、沟通、谈判和自我控制的影响。我们想知道穿越距离是否是一种普遍的心理能力，以及距离是否应该取代期望效用理论中的期望。
