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- Title
Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: consequences for insight and creative cognition.
- Authors
Förster, Jens; Friedman, Ronald S; Liberman, Nira
- Abstract
Six studies investigate whether and how distant future time perspective facilitates abstract thinking and impedes concrete thinking by altering the level at which mental representations are construed. In Experiments 1-3, participants who envisioned their lives and imagined themselves engaging in a task 1 year later as opposed to the next day subsequently performed better on a series of insight tasks. In Experiments 4 and 5 a distal perspective was found to improve creative generation of abstract solutions. Moreover, Experiment 5 demonstrated a similar effect with temporal distance manipulated indirectly, by making participants imagine their lives in general a year from now versus tomorrow prior to performance. In Experiment 6, distant time perspective undermined rather than enhanced analytical problem solving.
- Publication
Journal of personality and social psychology, 2004, Vol 87, Issue 2, p177
- ISSN
0022-3514
- Publication type
Journal Article
- DOI
10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.177