Decisions at a Distance: Effects of Psychological Distance on Consumer Decision Making

Abstract

Many consumer decisions concern future rather than immediate consumption, consumption that will take place at a different location, or products and services that others will consume. In such cases, consumers must make decisions based on predictions about how they will feel at a different time, how they will feel when they are in a different place, or how someone else will feel when consuming a product. For example, while at the grocery store, shoppers may make predictions about which foods they will enjoy consuming at home later in the week and which foods other family members will enjoy consuming. These discrepancies in time, space, and identity are referred to as dimensions of “psychological distance” and require consumers to engage in a process of mentally construing the consumption alternatives (Liberman, Trope, and Stephan 2007). Understanding this mental construal process is critical to understanding consumer decision making because recent research suggests that it systematically influences both perceptions of the decision process and evaluations of the consumption alternatives. The five articles selected for this research curation examine the relationship between psychological distance and self-view and the effects of psychological distance on perceived decision difficulty, preferences for larger or smaller assortments, price perceptions, and negotiations. The first article by Spassova and Lee identifies an antecedent of psychological distance: the consumer’s self-view. The authors show that consumers who think of themselves as being independent from others tend to construe behaviors (e.g., “making a list”) more abstractly (e.g., “getting organized”) than consumers who define themselves primarily in terms of their relationships with others, who view the same behaviors more concretely (e.g., “writing things down”). Because self-view differs systematically across both cultures and contexts (Lee, Aaker, and Gardner 2000), we should expect to observe differences in perceived psychological distance across cultures and contexts. Turning to the consequences of psychological distance, Thomas and Tsai demonstrate that greater psychological distance can reduce the perceived difficulty of a task. When participants in one of their studies leaned forward toward their computer screens, reducing psychological distance, they rated the difficulty of pronouncing complex nonwords higher than those who performed the same task leaning away from their computer screens. Highlighting the marketing implications of this effect, reducing psychological distance by leaning toward their computer screens made participants who were anxious about the task significantly more likely to defer a complex choice. Also related to the process of making decisions, Goodman and Malkoc show that greater psychological distance increases consumers’ preferences for small relative to large assortments. Thus, consumers said they would prefer to go to a restaurant with a 14-item menu when told the restaurant would be opening that day, but a restaurant with a 7-item menu when the restaurant would be opening in 5 months. Notably, however, the effect reverses when the difficulty of choosing from a larger set is made salient: participants who had recently made a choice from a large assortment focused more on the feasibility/desirability trade-off and were more likely to prefer a large assortment in the distant future but a small assortment in the near future. Moreover, psychological distance has implications for the way consumers perceive prices. Prices can be construed by consumers either as a cue about the perceived quality of an item (making higher-priced