Nira Liberman

This research addresses the long-standing debate about the determinants of sex/gender differences. Evolutionary theorists trace many sex/gender differences back to natural selection and sex-specific adaptations. Sociocultural and biosocial theorists, in contrast, emphasize how societal roles and social power contribute to sex/gender differences beyond any biological distinctions. By connecting two empirical advances over the past two decades—6-fold increases in sex/gender difference meta-analyses and in experiments conducted on the psychological effects of power—the current research offers a novel empirical examination of whether power differences play an explanatory role in sex/gender differences. Our analyses assessed whether experimental manipulations of power and sex/gender differences produce similar psychological and behavioral effects. We first identified 59 findings from published …

Based on the cognitive ecological approach and on logical-functional principles, in twelve studies (eleven preregistered) we examine the novel hypotheses that psychological distance and construal level are associated in people’s minds with stimulus speed: the psychologically distant/abstract is slow, and the psychologically close/concrete is fast. The findings support our expectations. Study Set I examined the association between psychological distance and speed. Findings show that psychological distance is implicitly and explicitly associated with speed (Study 1), that psychological distance is seen as compatible with slow and proximity with fast (Study 2), that stimulus psychological distance affects its perceived speed (Study 3), and that stimulus speed affects its psychological distance (Study 4). Study Set II examined the association between construal level and speed. Findings show that construal level is explicitly associated with speed (Study 5), that abstract is seen as compatible with slow and concrete with fast (Study 6), that natural language word distribution structures reflect an association between abstractness and speed (Study 7), that construal level affects speed (Study 8) and that speed affects stimulus construal level (Study 9). Study Set III examined implications for communication and person perception. Findings suggest that slow-paced (vs. fast-paced) speech is associated with larger perceived spatial and social distance between speaker and audience and larger audiences (Studies 10a, 10b); and that people infer an expansive (contractive) regulatory scope from slow-paced (fast-paced) spoken messages (Study 11). We …

Humans have developed a unique ability to think about hypothetical events (imagined, fictional, improbable events) and to distinguish them from real events (directly experienced, factual, certain events). We examined how people mentally construe events that are more and less hypothetical. In six pre-registered studies (N = 1605) participants completed the Behavioral Identification Form, in which they chose between abstract and concrete action descriptions. We found that participants preferred to describe more hypothetical actions by their abstract goals and less hypothetical actions by their concrete means when the more and the less hypothetical actions were contrasted, but not in the absence of such contrast. We discuss potential difficulties of manipulating hypotheticality and suggest how to overcome them. We also discuss the nature of hypotheticality and how it is both similar to and different from other …

Many studies found that in physical tasks, reducing certainty regarding their endpoints hinders performance. However, the impact of reducing certainty regarding other aspects of physical tasks is unknown. Here we manipulated the certainty of the required effort on an unrelated, parallel task (i.e., off-task uncertainty) and examined how it impacts force production in two within-subject experiments (N = 79). In two sessions, subjects completed 20 repetitions composed of maximal forces using a gripper with their dominant hand. Between repetitions, participants applied either submaximal constant or varied grip forces, with their non-dominant arm, matched for total forces across repetitions. While we observed trivial differences in total forces between conditions, under the varied condition, participants produced a steeper decrease in forces, suggesting that off-task uncertainty impacted their effort allocation strategy. We …

We predicted and found in three experiments that psychological distance increases conceptual generalization. We manipulated psychological distance by describing a medicine as being either domestic (proximal) or foreign (distal) and examined generalization by testing how information about initial experience (positive vs. negative) with this medicine influences evaluations of similar products. In all three experiments, and across both Israeli and German participants, we found that people generalized from experience with products that are distal (foreign) more than from proximal (domestic) products. We explain the relation between distance and generalization in terms of the accuracy–applicability trade-off inherent in generalization and discuss how it aligns with construal-level theory.

Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010) proposes that people's subjective construals become more abstract with increasing psychological distance—the removal of an event from one's direct experience. We propose and test an updated version of the most common measure of abstraction: the Behavior Identification Form (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989). We enhance the 1989 measure by 1) updating the items, 2) allowing participants to personalize the response options, which makes the measure psychologically meaningful to them, and 3) using a continuous rather than dichotomous scale. Four studies (total N = 1057) validate the newly proposed dynamic BIF by showing that it is sensitive to temporal distance manipulations. Study 4 also provides an example of customizing the measure to the academic domain. Two additional studies (total N = 426), in which the measure was customized to prosocial behaviors …

Performance on standardized academic aptitude tests (AAT) can determine important life outcomes. However, it is not clear whether and which aspects of the content of test questions affect performance. We examined the effect of psychological distance embedded in test questions. In Study 1 (N = 41,209), we classified the content of existing AAT questions as invoking proximal versus distal details. We found better performance with proximal compared to distal questions, especially for low-achieving examinees. Studies 2 and 3 manipulated the distance of questions adapted from AATs and examined three moderators: overall AAT score, working-memory capacity, and presence of irrelevant information. In Study 2 (N = 129), proximity (versus distance) improved the performance of low-achieving participants. In Study 3 (N = 1744), a field study, among low-achieving examinees, proximity improved performance …

We suggest that individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience difficulty accessing their internal states, including their feelings, emotions, preferences, and motivations. Instead, they rely on proxies to inform them of these states—that is, discernible substitutes in the form of fixed rules and rituals, observable behavior, and indexes. The Seeking Proxies for Internal States (SPIS) model of OCD proposes that compulsions, obsessions, indecision, and doubt result from seeking and using such proxies. The SPIS model not only accounts for these OCD symptoms but also sheds new light on normal processes of action control, metacognition, decision-making, and introspection.

Symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder are related to atypical sensory processing, particularly sensory over-responsivity, in both children and adults. In adults, obsessive–compulsive symptoms are also associated with the attenuation of access to the internal state and compensatory reliance on proxies for these states, including fixed rules and rituals. We aimed to examine the associations between sensory over-responsivity, the tendency to seek proxies for internal states, and obsessive–compulsive symptoms in children. Parents of 404 children between 5 and 10 years of age completed online measures of obsessive–compulsive symptoms, seeking proxies for internal states, sensory over-responsivity, and anxiety. Linear regression, dominance analysis, and network analysis were used to explore the unique associations between these variables. The tendency to seek proxies for internal states was more strongly associated with obsessive–compulsive symptoms than with anxiety symptoms and uniquely associated with all major obsessive–compulsive symptom dimensions except obsessing. Both the tendency to seek proxies for internal states and sensory over-responsivity were significantly associated with obsessive–compulsive symptoms, but the association was significantly stronger for the tendency to seek proxies for internal states. While limited by the sole reliance on the parent-report, the present study shows that the tendency to seek proxies for internal states could help clarify the developmental processes involved in the onset of obsessive–compulsive symptoms during childhood and that sensory sensitivity may be important to …

The Seeking Proxies for Internal States (SPIS) model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) explains symptoms of OCD as stemming from attenuated access to internal states, which is compensated for by using proxies, which are indices of these states that are more discernible or less ambiguous. Internal states in the SPIS model are subjective states that are not accessible to others, encompassing physiological states, motivations, preferences, memories, and emotions. Compensatory proxies in OCD include fixed rules and rituals as well as seeking and relying on external information. In the present review, we outline the SPIS model and describe its basic tenets. We then use the SPIS conceptualization to explain two pivotal OCD-related phenomena-obsessive doubt and compulsive rituals. Next, we provide a detailed overview of current empirical evidence supporting the SPIS in several domains, including physiological states, emotions, sense of understanding, decision-making, and sense of agency. We conclude by discussing possible neural correlates of the difficulty in accessing internal states, focusing on the anterior insular cortex (AIC) and highlighting potential clinical implications of the model to the treatment of OCD.

Performance on standardized academic aptitude tests (AAT) can determine important life outcomes. However, it is not clear whether and which aspects of the content of test questions affect performance. We examined the effect of psychological distance embedded in test questions. In Study 1 (N= 41,209), we classified the content of existing AAT questions as invoking proximal versus distal details. We found better performance with proximal compared to distal questions, especially for low-achieving examinees. Study 2 and 3 manipulated the distance of questions adapted from AATs and examined three moderators: overall AAT score, working-memory capacity and presence of irrelevant information. In Study 2 (N= 129), proximity (versus distance) improved the performance of low-achieving participants. In Study 3 (N= 1,744), a field study, among low-achieving examinees, proximity improved performance on questions that included irrelevant information. Together, these results suggest that the psychological distance that is invoked by the content of test questions has important consequences for performance in real-life, high-stakes tests.

The Seeking Proxies for Internal States (SPIS) model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) posits that OCD is associated with attenuated access to internal states. Here we explored the implications of this model in the realm of emotions. Participants with OCD, anxiety disorders, and nonclinical control participants completed the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), assessing two domains of emotional intelligence: Experiential emotional intelligence (EI), reflecting the ability to perceive and feel emotions accurately, and Strategic EI, reflecting the ability to understand and manage emotions correctly. As only Experiential EI requires accurate perception of one’s emotions for adequate performance, we predicted an interaction between group and EI area. Specifically, we predicted that compared to both anxiety disorders and healthy control participants, OCD participants would show a larger …

The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presented policymakers with the need to change people’s behavior in a fundamental way and for an extended period of time. Changing habits is difficult and requires sustained effort, and sustaining effort is especially difficult when it does not seem to yield conspicuous results. The COVID-19 pandemic presented exactly this difficulty, as numbers of infected people continued to rise despite the public’s efforts. In a representative sample from Israel (N = 600), collected online during the first outbreak of the pandemic, we found that compared to control conditions in which information on only actual infection cases was presented, counterfactual information on the number of averted cases enhances the perceived effectiveness of following the guidelines, which, in turn, enhances perceived importance and intention of doing so (e.g., intention to restrict mobility), but only among …

People tend to gradually reduce effort when performing lengthy tasks, experiencing physical or mental fatigue. Yet, they often increase their effort near deadlines. How can both phenomena co-occur? If fatigue causes the level of effort to decline, why does effort rise again near a deadline? The present article proposes a model to explain this pattern of behavior and tests three predictions that follow from it. Four lab experiments (N= 311) show that effort, indexed by the rate of keypresses in a computer game, increases more steeply (a) toward a deadline than toward a performance criterion,(b) when a concurrent task is present (vs. absent), and (c) with more (vs. less) effective actions. We suggest that changes in opportunity–cost, which is the cost of missing out on alternatives when engaging in a focal action, can explain these effects. Specifically, we suggest that as the deadline approaches,(a) the value of performing …

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 …

Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) tend to report higher levels of disgust, but not much is known about factors that might underlie this relationship. The present study was motivated by the behavioral immune theory, which suggests that disgust has evolved as a protective reaction to potential presence of disease agents in the immediate environment. We examined the relationships between the intensity of experienced physical disgust, perceived vulnerability to disease, and OCD symptoms. The intensity of experienced disgust was assessed with a recent procedure whereby participants rate how disgusted they feel in response to color versus black-and-white pictures that evoke physical disgust. In addition to this procedure, participants (N = 403) completed measures of perceived vulnerability to disease, OCD symptoms, depression and anxiety. OCD symptoms were positively related to the …

Recent findings suggest that stimulus construal level (high vs. low) is mentally associated with its vertical position (up vs. down). We delve deeper into this association and its meanings, and examine, for the first time, its complementary association, that of stimulus psychological distance (distant vs. close) and its vertical position (up vs. down). In Study 1 and 2 goals of activities were positioned higher than the means of performing them and were perceived as more compatible with a spatially higher viewpoint. In Study 3, self-perceptions were more invariant when items were presented at the top (vs. the bottom) of a visual display. In Study 4, participants positioned imagination-related concepts above reality-related concepts. In Study 5, participants provided more distant time estimates for scenarios presented at the top (vs. the bottom) of a display. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

In tasks that extend over time, people tend to exert much effort at the beginning and the end, but not in the middle, exhibiting the stuck-in-the-middle pattern (STIM). To date, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying this effect. As the supplementary motor area (SMA) was previously implicated in coding prospective task-demands, we tested its role in producing the STIM pattern. Participants first underwent an SMA-localization session in which they tapped their fingers repeatedly while fMRI-scanned. In the next two sessions, before playing a 10-min computer game that measured effort-engagement, participants underwent inhibitory 1-Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over the SMA, or over a control precuneus location. Three control experiments and a pretest confirmed that this task yields a STIM, which can be eliminated when the task lacks a salient end-point, or is too short. The results of …

Construal level theory suggests that less likely events and actions will be represented more abstractly. However, the effect of hypotheticality on level of construal has been studied less than the effect of other dimensions of psychological distance (time, space, social distance) and recently did not replicate in two experiments (Calderon et al. 2020). Two sets of pre-registered studies attempted to close this empirical gap. In the first set (N= 495), participants described more and less likely events. Participants rated the mental representations of the less likely, more distant events as being more abstract (less clear and less detailed). In the second set of studies (N= 723), participants completed the Behavioral Identification Form, in which they chose between abstract and concrete descriptions of actions. Participants preferred to describe actions that were only a hypothetical possibility by their abstract goals and actions that were actually performed by their concrete means, whether hypotheticality was manipulated within-or between-participants. We discuss potential difficulties of manipulating hypotheticality and suggest how to overcome them. We address, more generally, the nature of hypotheticality and how it is both similar to and different from other psychological distances.

Adaptive functioning requires the ability to both immerse oneself in the here and now as well as to move beyond current experience. We leverage and expand construal-level theory to understand how individuals and groups regulate thoughts, feelings, and behavior to address both proximal and distal ends. To connect to distant versus proximal events in a way that meaningfully informs and guides responses in the immediate here and now, people must expand versus contract their regulatory scope. We propose that humans have evolved a number of mental and social tools that enable the modulation of regulatory scope and address the epistemic, emotive, and executive demands of regulation. Critically, across these tools, it is possible to distinguish a hierarchy that varies in abstractness. Whereas low-level tools enable contractive scope, high-level tools enable expansion. We review empirical results that support …