抄録
Recent research has indicated that people spontaneously infer traits from observed behaviors and use these traits to predict the actor’s future behaviors. The construal level theory contends that the spontaneous trait inference (STI) would more likely occur as the psychological distance (in terms of temporal or spatial dimensions) from the behavioral events increases. In the present study, we conducted four experiments to investigate what happens if psychological distance changes between the time of observation and prediction. It was shown that once participants made an STI from observed behaviors elicited by a distant actor, they continued to rely on the STI to make behavioral predictions even if the temporal distance from the actor changed from far to near (Experiment 1a). On the other hand, they did make behavioral predictions in terms of an implied trait when the temporal distance changed from near to far, though they had hardly formed an STI at the time of observation (Experiment 1b). The results were somewhat different in the dimension of spatial distance. Participants inhibited the use of initially inferred traits for behavioral predictions when the spatial distance changed from far to near (Experiment 2a). However, participants were unresponsive when the spatial distance changed from near to far (Experiment 2b). These results suggest that people are capable of shifting construal levels (abstractness) and reinterpreting behavioral events according to the changes in psychological distance from the actors, but the underlying mechanisms are somewhat different across the temporal and spatial dimensions.
