Influence of Psychological Distance on People’s Willingness to Help Accident Victims: Discrepancies Between Implicit and Explicit Inferences

Abstract

Drawing on construal-level theory, this study explored how a sense of psychological distance from an accident influences people’s willingness to help victims. We conducted a scenario experiment with a sample of 81 Japanese undergraduates. Participants were presented with a short scenario describing an accident that happened on either a distant or a nearby mountain. The results show that the greater the distance perceived by participants from the accident, the more likely they were to infer negative traits about the victim at an implicit level. However, the more they inferred negative traits at an implicit level, the more likely they were to attribute the cause of the accident to external situational factors, at an explicit level. Finally, explicit external causal attribution aroused greater sympathy for the victim, resulting in an increased willingness to help. This discrepancy between implicit and explicit inferences was discussed in terms of cognitive elaboration, in which people engage in helping behaviors when they feel responsible for the fate of the victim.

The effects of psychological distance on spontaneous justice inferences: A construal level theory perspective

“…For example, recent study ( Holbrook et al, 2022 ) found that although Korean and American participants showed similar moral parochialism in moral condemnation, Korean participants were more likely than American ones to attribute transgressive behavior to situational and contextual factors. Moreover, Taniguchi and Ikegami (2021) found that participants were more likely to apply implicit attribution to a victim’ s internal disposition (carelessness) from an accident that occurred at a distant relative to the near location, which is consistent with the CLT theory. These evidence suggested that implicit attributions (such as spontaneous justice inferences) and explicit moral condemnation might be two different processes.…”

“…Second, the present study also extends the literature on CLT and spontaneous social inference. Previous research has found that psychological distance affects spontaneous trait inferences (STIs, Rim et al, 2009;Taniguchi and Ikegami, 2021). It should be noted that STIs reflect spontaneously dispositional attribution processes made about the actor (Trait A is a property of actor X).…”

Multilevel causal attributions on transboundary risk: Effects on attributions of responsibility, psychological distance, and policy support

“…Perceptions of the cause and effects are often closely intertwined, and parallel literature on correspondence bias (Gilbert, 1989) has addressed the linkage between psychological distance and attribution judgments (Mentovich et al., 2016; Taniguchi & Ikegami, 2021). While this line of work has examined how the cause of psychologically distant versus proximal behaviors is differently attributed, causal attribution frames may also shape to what extent people feel close to the issue or behavior described in the message.…”