Gogrial As part of its push for more plain English in disclosures, the SEC argues that firms should use more concrete language to make abstract concepts clearer to investors. We use two experiments to show that,…
Cary The current study investigated the effect of distance on medium preferences in interpersonal communication. Five experiments showed that people’s preference for using pictures (vs. words) is increasingly higher when communicating with temporally, socially, or geographically…
Existing evidence shows that more abstract mental representations are formed and more abstract language is used to characterize phenomena that are more distant from the self. Yet the precise form of the functional relationship between…
Virtual work has become an increasingly important part of the international business environment. In particular, two components of virtual work; workplace mobility and distributed work, depicting physical and psychological distance to the workplace, have gained…
Construal level theory proposes that events that are temporally proximate are represented more concretely than events that are temporally distant. We tested this prediction using two large natural language text corpora. In study 1 we examined posts…
Construal-level theory proposes that increasing the reported spatial distance of events leads individuals to represent the events by their central, abstract, global features (high-level construal) rather than by their peripheral, concrete, local features (low-level construal)….
According to politeness theory (P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987), politeness serves to both reflect and regulate social distance. On the basis of this notion and on construal level theory (N. Liberman & Y. Trope,…
In this research, we examine the relationship between power and three characteristics of construal—abstraction, valence, and certainty—in individuals’ verbatim reactions to the events of September 11, 2001, and during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist…
Abstract: Power can be gained through appearances: People who exhibit behavioral signals of power are often treated in a way that allows them to actually achieve such power (Ridgeway, Berger, & Smith, 1985; Smith &…