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Effects of multiple psychological distances on construal and consumer evaluation: A field study of online reviews
Author(s) -
Huang Ni,
Burtch Gordon,
Hong Yili,
Polman Evan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of consumer psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.433
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1532-7663
pISSN - 1057-7408
DOI - 10.1016/j.jcps.2016.03.001
Subject(s) - construal level theory , construals , psychology , social distance , affect (linguistics) , self construal , social psychology , psychological research , cognitive psychology , sociology , communication , interdependence , social science , medicine , disease , covid-19 , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
Through a large‐scale field study of 166,215 online restaurant reviews, we found evidence of a distance boosting effect, whereby experiencing spatial distance (i.e., authoring a review about a geographically distant restaurant, rather than proximate one) and temporal distance (i.e., authoring a review after a lengthy delay, rather than immediately) jointly affect review positivity by amplifying consumers' high‐level construals. Although past research has explored the relationship between psychological distance, construal and consumer evaluation, the effects of various dimensions of distance have only been considered in isolation. Our research contributes to past work by testing the effects of experiencing two dimensions of psychological distance simultaneously on construal and consumer evaluations. Moreover, because our data contain naturalistic observations, our research includes a wide range of temporal and spatial distances. We found that the effect of one distance increases the effect of the other. Metaphorically speaking, the effect of one distance is boosted by another.