Think and Act Global and Local: A Portrait of the Individual as a Flexible Information-Processor

Abstract

orster and Dannenberg (this issue) have fashioned a compelling account of how global (i.e., looking at the forest) and local (i.e., looking at the trees) perceptual processing systems exert dramatically different effects on task performance; how such effects transfer across sensory modalities; and how mechanisms such as regulatory focus, psychological distance, and novelty are critical instigators of global and local processing. We believe their systems account has great heuristic value because of its ability to integrate and synthesize a wide variety of findings within the social judgment literature under a more parsimonious conceptual umbrella. In their target article, F¨ orster and Dannenberg (this issue) describe a host of studies that either (a) examine the differential effects of manipulations of global versus local processing on subsequent task performance (e.g., Friedman, Fishbach, F¨ orster, & Werth, 2003) or (b) examine the extent to which various perceptual or conceptual priming manipulations instigate differential levels of global versus local processing (e.g., F¨