You're getting warmer: Level of construal affects the impact of central traits on impression formation

Construal Level Theory argues that psychologically distant information will be processed conceptually, while psychologically near information will be processed concretely. Such theorizing implies that in the classic Asch (1946) paradigm in which participants make trait judgments of targets after viewing lists of trait words describing the targets, the words “warm” and “cold” should have more impact on impressions when targets are psychologically distant than when they are psychologically near. Results from two studies, indeed, found that the “warm–cold” effect reported by Asch was moderated by psychological distance. We interpret these findings as providing support both for the idea that the processes used to form impression of others can vary across situations and they do so in accord with the tenets of Construal Level Theory.

► Asch (1946) demonstrated that including “warm” or “cold” in a list of descriptors affected overall impressions formed
► Construal Level Theory suggests that distal targets will be mentally represented schematically (relative to near targets)
► Two studies described near or distant others as “warm” or “cold”
► In general, warm individuals were warmer (and cold individuals were colder) when psychologically distant than psychologically near