Transcending Temptation Through Abstraction

Abstract

Many goals that people pursue are distal in that they cannot be attained in the here and now but rather must be achieved through action across varied social contexts over time. Self-control requires people to make decisions consistent with distal goals when tempted by more immediate rewards. Inspired by construal-level theory, we propose and review evidence that the way in which people subjectively represent, or construe, events systematically influences these decisions. We suggest that high-level construal (the use of cognitive abstraction to extract the essential and goal-relevant features common across a class of events), relative to low-level construal (the process of highlighting the incidental and idiosyncratic features that render a particular event unique), promotes self-control. We discuss implications for future research.