Association between abstraction level and time: Are future and past more abstract than the present?

Abstract

Construal level theory suggests that objects or events are represented differently depending on their psychological distance from ourselves. Specifically, objects and events should be represented more abstractly the farther they are removed from direct experience through distance in the spatial, temporal, social, or hypotheticality domains. Bar-Anan et al. reported a key finding supporting this assumed association of the various distance dimensions and abstraction level. In their study, participants responded faster in an Implicit Association Task when temporally near and concrete concepts, as well as temporally far and abstract concepts, were mapped to the same rather than different response keys. In this study, we conceptually replicated this basic finding when employing temporal adverbs relating to present versus future time, and nouns referring to concrete versus abstract concepts (Experiment 1). Evidence for such an association, however, was largely absent (and significantly weaker than in Experiment 1) when temporal adverbs relating to the past were employed as instances of the large temporal distance category (Experiment 2). We propose that the uncertainty associated with the future, as opposed to the past, might play an important role in this temporal asymmetry by increasing psychological distance.