Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Stepping Back to See the Big Picture: When Obstacles
Elicit Global Processing
Janina Marguc, Jens Förster, and Gerben A. Van Kleef
Online First Publication, August 29, 2011. doi: 10.1037/a0025013
CITATION
Marguc, J., Förster, J., & Van Kleef, G. A. (2011, August 29). Stepping Back to See the Big
Picture: When Obstacles Elicit Global Processing. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0025013

Stepping Back to See the Big Picture:
When Obstacles Elicit Global Processing
Janina Marguc, Jens Förster, and Gerben A. Van Kleef
University of Amsterdam
Can obstacles prompt people to look at the “big picture” and open up their minds? Do the cognitive
effects of obstacles extend beyond the tasks with which they interfere? These questions were addressed
in 6 studies involving both physical and nonphysical obstacles and different measures of global versus
local processing styles. Perceptual scope increased after participants solved anagrams in the presence,
rather than the absence, of an auditory obstacle (random words played in the background; Study 1),
particularly among individuals low in volatility (i.e., those who are inclined to stay engaged and finish
what they do; Study 4). It also increased immediately after participants encountered a physical obstacle
while navigating a maze (Study 3A) and when compared with doing nothing (Study 3B). Conceptual
scope increased after participants solved anagrams while hearing random numbers framed as an “obstacle
to overcome” rather than a “distraction to ignore” (Study 2) and after participants navigated a maze with
a physical obstacle, compared with a maze without a physical obstacle, but only when trait (Study 5) or
state (Study 6) volatility was low. Results suggest that obstacles trigger an “if obstacle, then start global
processing” response, primarily when people are inclined to stay engaged and finish ongoing activities.
Implications for dealing with life’s obstacles and related research are discussed.
Keywords: obstacles, construal level, goal pursuit, processing styles, task engagement
Daily life is full of obstacles: A construction site blocking the
usual road to work, a colleague’s background chatter interfering
with one’s ability to concentrate, a newborn child hindering par-
ents in completing their daily routines, or a lack of resources
standing in the way of realizing an ambitious plan. How do people
cognitively respond to such obstacles? How do the ways in which
they perceive and process information from their environment
change when an obstacle interferes with what they want to accom-
plish? Might the cognitive effects of obstacles reach beyond the
very goal or task at hand? In the present research, we aim to shed
light on these questions by investigating the impact of obstacles on
global versus local processing. We propose that unless people are
inclined to disengage prematurely from ongoing activities, obsta-
cles will prompt them to step back and adopt a more global,
Gestalt-like processing style that allows them to look at the “big
picture” and conceptually integrate seemingly unrelated pieces of
information.
Conceptualizing Obstacles and Their Effects
Obstacles can come in many shapes. They can be physical,
social, situational, or merely mental in nature. They can appear in
a variety of settings, including organizational, clinical, or private
ones. We define obstacles in terms of what they all have in
common: They act as interfering forces (Higgins, 2006) that pre-
vent people from reaching their goals along the most direct or
initially intended path and, thus, require them to find out how to
accomplish what they want to do despite the obstacle. Based on
this definition, some kinds of interference are obstacles by their
very nature. For example, a broken wheel would naturally repre-
sent an obstacle to a bicycle courier because biking is an essential
part of the job. To be able to work, the courier would have to find
a way to deal with the problem, such as borrowing a bike from a
colleague, repairing the bike, buying a new one, and so forth.
Perhaps less obviously, distractions or nuisances can constitute an
obstacle if they directly interfere with the task at hand and require
people to figure out how to continue despite the interference. For
example, hearing someone else’s conversation on the phone may
directly interfere with a poet’s attempts to find the right words for
the next piece. To succeed nevertheless, he or she might try to
ignore the noise, use the snippets of speech as inspiration, or go to
another room. Notably, not all factors that potentially hinder task
performance would per se qualify as an obstacle according to our
definition. Rather, they might act as an obstacle if they are
perceived as such. For example, traffic noise as such is irrelevant
to the task of searching for words and is thus unlikely to directly
interfere with it. However, if a poet considered the noise as an
obstacle to overcome, he or she would need to find a way to deal
with it, and the situation would be similar to the one described
above. Analogously, competing goals, temptations, or other inter-
Janina Marguc, Jens Förster, and Gerben A. Van Kleef, Department of
Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Nether-
lands.
This research is part of Janina Marguc’s doctoral dissertation. The
research was supported by German Science Foundation (DFG) Grant FO
392-8-2 awarded to Jens Förster. We thank the student research assistants
from SoCoLab for collecting data, Jasper Wijnen for programming the
obstacle maze, and Bettina Olk and Tim Faber for their invaluable sug-
gestions concerning the eye tracking study.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Janina
Marguc, Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam,
Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail:
j.marguc@uva.nl
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology © 2011 American Psychological Association
2011, Vol. ●●, No. ●, 000–000 0022-3514/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0025013
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