Construing Consumer Decision Making

Understanding how consumers represent outcomes and weigh different decision criteria is critical to consumer behavior research. Construal-level theory articulates how psychological distance alters the mental representation of inputs and the effective weight given to “high-level” and “low-level” criteria. Trope, Liberman, and Wakslak (2007) provide a review of this literature. In this commentary, we illustrate the relevance of construal-level theory to issues in consumer psychology, particularly consumer decision making. We highlight specific questions that researchers could address by considering consumer behavior within the framework of changes in construal. We focus our discussion on how construal levels affect consideration sets and how shifts in weight from high-level to low-level features might lead to consumer regret and dissatisfaction. Construal level can help us understand follow-through on stated intentions for “really new” products and illuminate public-policy issues such as consumer saving for retirement and nonredemption of rebates. We identify open issues related to how construal levels for the same object evolve over time and whether resources differ in terms of how susceptible they are to psychological distance effects.