We propose that people judge immoral acts as more offensive and moral acts as more virtuous when the acts are psychologically distant than near. This is because people construe more distant situations in terms of moral principles, rather than attenuating situation-specific considerations. Results of four studies support these predictions. Study 1 shows that more temporally distant transgressions (e.g., eating one's dead dog) are construed in terms of moral principles rather than contextual information. Studies 2 and 3 further show that morally offensive actions are judged more severely when imagined from a more distant temporal (Study 2) or social (Study 3) perspective. Finally, Study 4 shows that moral acts (e.g., adopting a disabled child) are judged more positively from temporal distance. The findings suggest that people more readily apply their moral principles to distant rather than proximal behaviors.

The present research demonstrated that in considering an action, considerations against (con) the action tend to be subordinate to considerations in favor of (pro) the action in that cons are considered only if the level of pros is sufficient, whereas pros are considered independent of the level of cons (Studies 1A and IB). The authors therefore concluded that pros constitute a higher construal level than cons and predict, on the basis of temporal construal processes (Y. Trope & N. Liberman. 2003). that pros would be more salient in making decisions for the more distant future, whereas the reverse should hold for cons. As predicted, participants generated more pros and fewer cons toward new exam procedures (Study 2), public policies (Study 3), and personal and interpersonal behaviors (Studies 4-6) that were expected to take place in the more distant future. This research also examined the limiting conditions and the evaluative consequences of these shifts.

It was predicted that because of their abstract nature, values will have greater impact on how individuals plan their distant future than their near future. Experiments 1 and 2 found that values better predict behavioral intentions for distant future situations than near future situations. Experiment 3 found that whereas high-level values predict behavioral intentions for more distant future situations, low-level feasibility considerations predict behavioral intentions for more proximate situation. Finally, Experiment 4 found that the temporal changes in the relationship between values and behavioral intentions depended on how the behavior was construed. Higher correspondence is found when behaviors are construed on a higher level and when behavior is planned for the more distant future than when the same behavior is construed on a lower level or is planned for the more proximal future. The implications of these findings for self-consistency and value conflicts are discussed.

It is argued that the temporal distance of attitude objects systematically changes how the object is mentally represented, and thus influences the strength of particular persuasive appeals. Three experiments tested the hypothesis that people preferentially attend to arguments that highlight primary, abstract (high-level) vs. incidental, concrete (low-level) features when attitude objects are temporally distant vs. near. Results suggested that when attitude objects are temporally distant vs. near, arguments emphasizing primary vs. secondary features (Study 1), desirability vs. feasibility features (Study 2), and general classes vs. specific cases are more persuasive (Study 3). The relation of construal theory to dual process theories of persuasion and persuasion phenomena, such as personal relevance effects and functional matching effects, are discussed. Keywords mental construal; temporal distance; persuasion; attitude change; construal level theory In everyday life, attitude objects that people evaluate may be near or distant in time. For example, students may evaluate courses being offered at their college weeks vs. just days before enrollment. Similarly, voters might be asked to decide whether to adopt a policy that is to be implemented several years later vs. in only a few months. What kinds of information would influence people's attitudes toward these objects and events? For example, would students be more persuaded by the quality of a professor's lectures, or the location of the class? Will voters be more concerned about the outcomes a policy might promote, or how difficult the implementation of the policy might be? The question we address in this article is how the temporal distance of these objects -the difference in time between the present and experiencing

Taking another person's perspective is widely presumed to increase interpersonal understanding. Very few experiments, however, have actually tested whether perspective taking increases accuracy when predicting another person's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or other mental states. Those that do yield inconsistent results, or they confound accuracy with egocentrism. Here we report 25 experiments testing whether being instructed to adopt another person's perspective increases interpersonal insight. These experiments include a wide range of accuracy tests that disentangle egocentrism and accuracy, such as predicting another person's emotions from facial expressions and body postures, predicting fake versus genuine smiles, predicting when a person is lying or telling the truth, and predicting a spouse's activity preferences and consumer attitudes. Although a large majority of pretest participants believed that perspective taking would systematically increase accuracy on these tasks, we failed to find any consistent evidence that it actually did so. If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment. Perspective taking reduced egocentric biases, but the information used in its place was not systematically more accurate. A final experiment confirmed that getting another person's perspective directly, through conversation, increased accuracy but that perspective taking did not. Increasing interpersonal accuracy seems to require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge about another person. Understanding the mind of another person is therefore enabled by getting perspective, not simply taking perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record