School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2022 Jul;151(7):1733-1743. doi: 10.1037/xge0001126. Epub 2021 Dec 20.
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).
生活中的许多情况（例如考虑投资哪种股票，或与哪些人成为朋友）都需要对一系列数值进行平均处理。在这里，我们检验了从构念水平理论中得出的预测，并测试了抽象思维与具体思维相比是否更有利于将数值聚合到统一的综合表示中。在四个实验中，参与者被诱导进行更抽象（而非具体）的思考，并使用数值（实验 1-2 和 4）和情感面孔（实验 3）执行了不同的平均值任务变体。我们发现，与具体思维相比，抽象思维的诱导提高了聚合的准确性（实验 1-3），但并没有提高对特定项目的记忆（实验 4）。具体来说，在具体思维中，与抽象思维相比，平均值的特点是向平均值回归增加，信噪比降低。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
