University of Nevada, Reno, USA.
Michigan State University, USA.
Public Underst Sci. 2019 Oct;28(7):828-844. doi: 10.1177/0963662519865982. Epub 2019 Jul 30.
Climate change has been widely perceived as a psychologically distant risk, largely viewed as separated from one's direct experience. Using construal-level theory, we examined how the level of abstraction and concreteness of climate change imagery affects viewers' perceived psychological distance of climate change, including spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical (level of uncertainty) distances. Participants ( = 402) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions, one with abstract images and one with concrete images. Results show that the abstract and concrete images successfully activated people's abstract and concrete mind-sets, respectively, and people who viewed abstract images were more likely to perceive climate change as a spatially and temporally distant issue.
气候变化被广泛认为是一种心理上遥远的风险，在很大程度上被视为与个人的直接经验相分离。本研究运用构建水平理论，考察了气候变化图像的抽象水平和具体水平如何影响观众对气候变化的心理距离感知，包括空间、时间、社会和假设（不确定性水平）距离。参与者（n=402）被随机分配到两个实验条件之一，一个是抽象图像，另一个是具体图像。结果表明，抽象和具体的图像成功地分别激活了人们的抽象和具体思维模式，并且观看抽象图像的人更有可能将气候变化视为空间和时间上遥远的问题。
