Automatic processing of psychological distance: Evidence from a Stroop task.
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: A picture-word version of the Stroop task was used to test the automatic activation of psychological distance by words carrying various senses of psychological distance: temporal (tomorrow, in a year), social (friend, enemy), and hypotheticality (sure, maybe). The pictures implied depth, with the words appearing relatively close to or distant from the observer. The participants classified the spatial distance of words faster when the word's implicit psychological distance matched its spatial distance (e.g., a geographically close word was classified faster when it was "friend" than when it was "enemy"). The findings are consistent with the idea that psychological distance is accessed automatically, even when it is not directly related to people's current goals, and suggest that psychological distance is an important dimension of meaning, common to spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance, and hypotheticality.
Institutions: University of Virginia, Tel Aviv University, New York University
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2023290309