Individuals who display independent and interdependent self-construals present different views on the importance of clarity. For instance, individuals who exhibit independent self-construals perceive clarity as significant in pursuing goals more than individuals who stimulate interdependent self- construals. Individuals who display both independent and interdependent self- construals focus more on relational and clarity restraints. On the other hand, individuals who do not exercise independent or interdependent self-construals do not visualize clarity and relational constraints imperative.
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CLT divides mental construals into two levels: the high-level and the low-level. High-level construals are a way of thinking in a big-picture way. This is a superordinate or central approach, thinking about the overall idea of the situation and extracting the main gist of the situation. Low-level construals are more detail-oriented or subordinate thought processes.
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Distance or high-level construals can make alternative choices that are hard to accomplish more desirable. Near-future or low-level construals can oppositely make alternative choices that are hard to accomplish less desirable. Risky behavior therefore, can be explained by CLT. High level construals can make more difficult or impossible outcomes more attractive and therefore cause people to take greater risks for less likely outcomes.
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Psychological distance can influence levels of politeness. Higher-level construals and increasing distance increase politeness cues, and lower-level construals or less distant events decrease politeness cues. Even physical distance can be reflective of high and low level construals of politeness. For example, the distance from which people stand from each other when having a conversation, or after initially meeting, can determine the level of politeness displayed.
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When taking an Implicit Association Test, people with induced high-level construals are significantly faster at associating temptations (such as candy bars) with "bad," and healthy choices (such as apples) with "good" than those in the low- level condition. Further, higher-level construals also show a significantly increased likelihood of choosing an apple for snack over a candy bar. Without any conscious or active self-control efforts, temptations can be dampened by merely inducing high-level construals. It is suggested that the abstraction of high-level construals reminds people of their overall, lifelong values, such as a healthy lifestyle, which deemphasizes the current tempting situation.
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This section summarizes the prominent construals of human nature and outlines the key arguments from philosophers on both sides of the debate.
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Individuals who highlight interdependent self- construals want to avoid face loss as much as possible and want to feel welcomed by particular social groups. These individuals see avoiding hurt feelings as more significant than individuals who use independent self- construals. Individuals who are more feminine and need more approval than others tend to put more focus on the concern for others than more dominant individuals.
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Thus CLT predicts that when low-level construals are more valuable, time delay will discount the attractiveness of an option, but when high-level construals are more valuable, time delay will increase its attractiveness. Thus, the discounting rate is affected and measured by the amount of value placed on the event or outcome. If there is a small reward, it is discounted faster than if the reward were larger.
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Therefore homogeneous groups consisting of members that activate independent will take longer to reach a decision. The process is less cooperative and will have more conflicts than with homogeneous groups whose members activate interdependent self-construals. In addition to that, heterogeneous groups will less likely reach consensus than homogeneous groups since with homogeneous groups the single members are more committed to their group and that their contributions are treated more equally than in heterogeneous groups. Furthermore Oetzel claims that groups were the majority of members activate independent self-construals will most likely use dominating conflict-strategies, whereas with groups were most members use interdependent self-construals will use strategies of avoiding, compromising or obliging when dealing with conflicts.
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Self-construal has been shown to have moderating effects on social comparison. Researchers hypothesized that individuals with highly independent self-construals would experience accentuated contrast effects while individuals with highly interdependent self-construals would experience strengthened assimilation effects. This hypothesis was based on Schwarz and Bless's 1992 inclusion/exclusion model of judgment. The results of the experiment supported Kemmelmeier and Oyserman's hypothesis, demonstrating that self-construal moderates social comparison effects like the BFLPE.
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Because high-level construals support self-control, conceiving of a tempting situation at a higher level promotes the use of both of these strategies and thus can improve self-control.
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This implies that individuals using high-level construals are better able to place a temptation in context and properly evaluate its long- term impact, and therefore are more likely to maintain self-control.
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The theory contains 14 propositionsOetzel, John G. (1995), "Intercultural small groups: An effective decision-making theory", in Wiseman, Richard L (ed.), Intercultural communication theory, 247-270, Thousands Oaks: Sage. as a core. Of those, the first half focuses on the influence of input on the process of decision-making. Here Oetzel assumes that individual members of homogeneous groups activate either independent self-construals (such members emphasize the quality decision and are not primarily interested in relationships among members) or interdependent self construals (those members are concerned for cooperation and others; the decision is secondary).
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People judge all aspects of their lives, including events, people, and society. If an event is close in time, we are more likely to think in terms of concrete low-level construals, making the details more important. If an event is further away, however, we think more in terms of abstract overall ideas that follow high-level construals. When judging how much time it takes to finish a task, participants in a series of studies thought it would take them more time to complete a task when it was further in the future (temporally distant), posed as hypothetical (hypothetically distant) or when they were primed with abstract ideas beforehand.
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High level construals can help to create social diversity by making people interested in meeting new and different people. Low-level construals are more helpful to relationships with people who are more similar to us, and aid in sustaining already formed relationships with people in our inner circle and in-group. The frequency of exposure to a certain situation or person can also influence the construal level used. The more often a person has been exposed to an event or person, the more likely it is that they are going to use a lower-level approach to describe them, involving more specific detail learned over time.
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This research led to the study of how choices organized peoples' lives. She developed the Choice Pattern Technique, that required people to indicate their construals of occupations and free-time activities. In 1962, she received the Fulbright scholarship to work at the University of Amsterdam. This allowed her to test her ideas and methods cross-culturally.
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People tend to view others as either similar or different from oneself. As discussed previously, this corresponds to social distance. If a person is viewed as less similar to oneself, they are thought of as more socially distant and thus at a higher-level construal. If they are seen as more similar to oneself, social distance decreases, resulting in lower-level construals.
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According to linguists William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, there are four broad cognitive abilities that play an active part in the construction of construals. They are: attention/salience, judgment/comparison, situatedness, and constitution/gestalt. Each general category contains a number of subprocesses, each of which helps to explain the ways we encode experience into language in some unique way.
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Negotiations and persuasion are social conflicts can be understood in terms of CLT. When negotiating or trying to persuade someone, there are often major, high-level, considerations and minor, low-level, considerations. Major issues are aspects such as values, ideology, and overall beliefs. The major issues are often focused on to a greater extent when thinking about the distant future, or with high-level construals.
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Thinking that is characterized by high construals, whenever individuals "are obliged to infer additional details of content, context, or meaning in the actions and outcomes that unfold around them",Ross, L. (1987). The Problem of Construal in Social Inference and Social Psychology. In N. Grunberg, R.E. Nisbett, J. Singer (eds), A Distinctive Approach to psychological research: the influence of Stanley Schacter. Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum.
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Misconstrual of future events: When predicting how an experience will impact us emotionally, events which have not been experienced are particularly difficult. Often how we think an event may be like does not relate to how the experience is like. People know that the future is uncertain, but fail to recognize their projections as construals, subjective perceptions or interpretations of reality. (Griffin & Ross, 1998; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003).
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On 14 October 2019, a student who has worked under Chatterjee for a theatrical performance, alleged of sexual harassment. Subsequently, two other women raised similar allegations and FIRs were lodged. Chaterjee rejected the allegations, deeming them to be mis-construals of a particular form of theatrical training involving sexual overtones and has since claimed of being compelled to resign from his teaching position at Heritage Academy. He was arrested, shortly thereafter.
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It has been shown that crossover is more likely to occur in situations where individuals pay close attention to others (Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T. & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion [Elektronische versie]. Current directions in psychological science: a journal of the American Psychological Society, 2 (3), 96-99.). Also, the crossover is more likely when individuals have self-construals that are focused on being interrelated to others, rather than being unique and independent.
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Respondents from Oman, Cameroon and Malaysia were most likely to say that they prefer keeping harmony within a group to engaging in self-expression. Sub-Saharan Africans from Namibia, Ghana and Uganda considered that they would follow their own interests even if this means harming the interests of those close to them. Europeans from Belgium, Italy and Sweden had the opposite preference, considering self-sacrifice for other members of the community as being more important than accomplishing selfish goals. Contrary to the theory of Markus & Kitayama, egoism correlates negatively with individual uniqueness, independent thinking and self- expression. Self-reliance correlates strongly and negatively with emotional self-containment, which is also unexpected given Markus & Kitayama’s theory. The binary classification of cultural self-construals into independent versus interdependent is deeply flawed because in reality, the traits do not correlate according to Markus & Kitayama’s self construal theory, and this theory fails to take into consideration the extremely diverse and complex variety of self-construals present in various cultures across the world.
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High-level construals can have an effect of valuing rewards that are more risky, and further in the future. For example, people will take riskier bets when the bet is in the distant than the near future. The ideas of time and probability are often thought of in very similar ways; therefore, they tend to correspond, as one increases the other one does as well. The connections between these two are often made automatically, without the conscious knowledge of the individual.
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In contrast, a less familiar event or person would probably be described in a higher level more abstract manner due to the lack of exposure involved. People tend to use these construals to interact with and form an opinion of others. These opinions can often be unconscious or automatic, and thus are not always something that people are aware of doing. People tend to form more of these snap judgments when the person they are judging is more spatially distant.
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Minor issues are more specific interests that are focused on when thinking about the near future, or low-level construals. CLT and persuasive communications are connected and interrelated in many aspects. When looking at negotiations in relation to high-level construal, there were multiple findings that have shown a difference between the future and the present. When people are more temporally distant or personally distant from an outcome, they are less likely to come to an easy conclusion or compromise over minor objectives.
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In other words, when low BII Chinese-Americans are presented with American cues, unlike high BII bicultural individuals, they would not behave like Americans but instead, more like a Chinese. However, the identity struggle for bicultural individuals can be made less arduous. It is important to note that like other personality traits, BII is malleable to contextual factors. BII can be increased by asking bicultural individuals to recall positive cross- cultural exchanges or like in another study, make high-level construals.
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Another trait of cognitive semantics is the recognition that meaning is not fixed but a matter of construal and conventionalization. The processes of linguistic construal, it is argued, are the same psychological processes involved in the processing of encyclopaedic knowledge and in perception. This view has implications for the problem of compositionality. An account in cognitive semantics called the dynamic construal theory makes the claim that words themselves are without meaning: they have, at best, "default construals," which are really just ways of using words.
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In an 1996 interview, Weiner elaborated how attribution contributes to "high ability, high achievement, and giftedness", stating that "other-perception and self-perception form a unity, together, which influence task persistence and, therefore, actual ability." According to Weiner, everyone all have similar psychodynamics in the classroom and students tend to seek explanation for personal failure. Weiner raised the question on what is considered "sin" and what is "sickness." The construals he gave surrounded obesity: obesity due to overeating is a sin; obesity because of a thyroid problem is a sickness.
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Decision making can be applied to various situations, such as consumer behavior. High and low level construals affect the way people consider purchasing items. When buying items, feasibility (how we can buy the item) which is low-level and desirability (how much we want the item) which is high-level, play a large role in what we buy and why we buy it. This includes the way we view rebates, and the more distance involved to receive the rebate, the less likely the buyer is to pursue the rebate.
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Time discounting or temporal discounting is a wide range of ideas involving the connection between time and the extent to which an object, situation, or course of action is seen as valuable. The overall theory is that people put more value and worth into immediate events and outcomes, and apply less value to future outcomes or events. According to Trope and Liberman, CLT can provide a framework with which to understand the broad array of phenomena described by temporal discounting research. Different construals may differ in the extent to which they are associated with positive or negative evaluations.
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Frame-based terminology is a cognitive approach to terminology developed by Pamela Faber and colleagues at the University of Granada. One of its basic premises is that the conceptualization of any specialized domain is goal- oriented, and depends to a certain degree on the task to be accomplished. Since a major problem in modeling any domain is the fact that languages can reflect different conceptualizations and construals, texts as well as specialized knowledge resources are used to extract a set of domain concepts. Language structure is also analyzed to obtain an inventory of conceptual relations to structure these concepts.
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Kramer also argues that the presidents were the final decision-makers of the fiascos; while determining which course of action to take, they relied more heavily on their own construals of the situations than on any group-consenting decision presented to them. Kramer concludes that Janis' explanation of the two military issues is flawed and that groupthink has much less influence on group decision-making than is popularly believed to be. Groupthink, while it is thought to be avoided, does have some positive effects. A case study by Choi and Kim Choi, J. N., & Kim, M. U. (1999).
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For example, people thinking in a more distant or high-level construal, will be more open to comprehensive exams which cover a wider overarching idea of the subject, whereas people thinking in lower-level construals or the more near future tend to be more content with a detailed-specific test. In one study, participants viewed a number of partial pictures paired with ideas of either the near or the distant future. When looking at these images, with the idea of the near future, the participants were more able to view the image as a whole concrete image, while they had more abstract interpretations of the distant future images.
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