Transcending the “Here”: The Effect of Spatial Distance on Social Judgment Marlone D. Henderson, Kentaro Fujita, and Yaacov Trope New York University Nira Liberman Tel Aviv University Construal level theory proposes that increasing the reported spatial distance of events produces judg- ments that reflect abstract, schematic representations of the events. Across 4 experiments, the authors examined the impact of spatial distance on construal-dependent social judgments. Participants structured behavior into fewer, broader units (Study 1) and increasingly attributed behavior to enduring dispositions rather than situational constraints (Study 2) when the behavior was spatially distant rather than near. Participants reported that typical events were more likely and atypical events less likely when events were more spatially distant (Study 3). They were also less likely to extrapolate from specific cases that deviated from general trends when making predictions about more spatially distant events (Study 4). Implications for social judgment are discussed. Keywords: construal, spatial distance, psychological distance, extrapolation, unitization How do individuals think and make judgments about events that take place in other neighborhoods, towns, states, continents, or planets? In other words, how does the perceived spatial distance of events from one’s immediate physical surrounding affect judg- ments and decisions about those events? Individuals frequently think about and make decisions regarding social events that are spatially near or distant. For example, a parent may make decisions about a child who is attending a nearby or faraway university. The present article examines how people’s responses to the same social event can change depending on whether it is believed to occur at a spatially near or distant location. A large body of work suggests that individuals’ understanding of spatially near versus distant objects is constructed through different sensory modalities and representational systems (e.g., McNamara, 1986; Tversky, 2003, 2005). In fact, spatial cognition research suggests that different areas of the brain might even be recruited to represent the same object at near and distant locations (e.g., Berti & Fassinetti, 2000; Halligan, Fink, Marshall, & Vallar, 2003). Representations of spatially near objects are dependent on the axis of the body (head–feet, front– back, left–right) and the three-dimensional space surrounding the body, whereas represen- tations of spatially distant objects have been associated with men- tal constructions that are more global and schematized (e.g., Bry- ant & Tversky, 1999; Tversky, 2003). In representing spatially distant objects, individuals circumvent the need to encode all fine-grain metric values by relying instead on categorical informa- tion, which can lead to systematic biases and distortions in spatial distance judgments (e.g., Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan, 1991; McNamara, 1986; Tversky, 1981). Despite the amount of work on spatial distance and mental representations, the question of how representations of near and distant events might affect social judgment remains largely unex- plored. The present studies investigate the consequences of spatial distance for social judgment within the framework of construal level theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003). According to CLT, space is a dimension of psychological distance, along with time, social distance, and hypotheticality. Psychological distance is pos- ited to affect the way individuals represent information such that psychologically distant events are represented more by their es- sential, general, and prototypical features (high-level construals) and psychologically near events are represented in terms of their incidental, specific, and unique features (low-level construals). CLT assumes that an association forms between psychological dis- tance and level of construal and that this association is then overgen- eralized, causing people to continue to form high-level construals for distant events and low-level construals for near events, even when information about events is completely known and reliable. Much of the research in support of CLT has focused on temporal distance from events (see Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, in press; Trope & Liberman, 2003) and has examined how temporal dis- tance affects construal and construal-mediated choice and predic- tion. Temporal distance has been shown to affect a wide range of psychological phenomena, from person perception to self- regulation to interpersonal interactions (e.g., see Gilovich & Med- Marlone D. Henderson, Kentaro Fujita, and Yaacov Trope, Department of Psychology, New York University, Nira Liberman, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship to Marlone D. Henderson, a National Science Foun- dation Graduate Student Fellowship to Kentaro Fujita, National Institute of Mental Health Grant 1R01MH59030-01A1 to Yaacov Trope, and United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation Grant 2001057 to Nira Liber- man and Yaacov Trope. We thank Ryan D. Coganow and Celia Gonzalez for their assistance with data collection. Special thanks also go to Ido Liviatan and Cheryl J. Wakslak for extensive discussion of ideas. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Marlone D. Henderson, who is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 or Kentaro Fujita, who is now at the Depart- ment of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: mhenderson@uchicago.edu or fujita.5@osu.edu Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association 2006, Vol. 91, No. 5, 845– 856 0022-3514/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.845 845