Hadar, Britt;
Glickman, Moshe;
Trope, Yaacov;
Liberman, Nira;
Usher, Marius;
(2022)
Abstract Thinking Facilitates Aggregation of Information.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
10.1037/xge0001126.
(In press).
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Abstract
Many situations in life (such as considering which stock to invest in, or which people to befriend) require averaging across series of values. Here, we examined predictions derived from construal level theory, and tested whether abstract compared with concrete thinking facilitates the process of aggregating values into a unified summary representation. In four experiments, participants were induced to think more abstractly (vs. concretely) and performed different variations of an averaging task with numerical values (Experiments 1–2 and 4), and emotional faces (Experiment 3). We found that the induction of abstract, compared with concrete thinking, improved aggregation accuracy (Experiments 1–3), but did not improve memory for specific items (Experiment 4). In particular, in concrete thinking, averaging was characterized by increased regression toward the mean and lower signal-to-noise ratio, compared with abstract thinking.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Abstract Thinking Facilitates Aggregation of Information |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1037/xge0001126 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001126 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10149521 |
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