Seeing far: Abstract construal and visual distance judgments

Abstract

Abstract construal underlies mental travel. As a result, the human mind associates abstraction and psychological distance, whereby prompting abstract construal begets the inference of psychological distance – in time, social distance, hypotheticality, and physical space. That final distance is the only dimension that can be appraised visually, so would abstract construal impact judgments related to perceived visual distance? Two experiments provide evidence that abstract construal causes targets in the visual field to be judged as physically farther away. Further, the exacerbated sense of distance gives rise to related inferences about those visual targets (size and weight). These results deepen and broaden Construal Level Theory with practical implications for how people reason about the physical properties of objects – including but not limited to their physical distance.