Research
Construal Level Theory (CLT) of Psychological Distance
People experience only the here-and-now, and yet they care about things that are psychologically distal – things that will happen in the future or have happened in the past, in other places, to other people, and hypothetical rather
than real things. I seek to understand how people navigate between proximal and distal concerns: How distance from an object changes the way it is mentally represented and subjectively evaluated; how proximal decisions differ from
distal ones; how motivation changes with proximity to a goal; and what makes people expand versus contract their mental horizons. Construal Level Theory suggests that abstraction enables traversing of psychological distance.
The basic questions of what is psychological distance, what is abstraction and how they are related has been the focus of my research over the years. In addition, my lab addressed and continues to address more specific questions,
for example, how psychological distance affects working memory, social comparison, embodied representation, attitude-behavior correspondence, moral reasoning, and intensity of motivation.
Key publications on CLT
Seeking Proxies for Internal States (SPIS): A Social-Cognitive Model of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by intrusive thoughts, pervasive doubts, self-monitoring, repeated checking and behavior guided by fixed rules and compulsive rituals. I apply social-cognitive theories of how people
know themselves, how they make decisions, and how they monitor and terminate action in order to explain OCD phenomenology. In collaboration with researchers in clinical psychology, I propose to explain OCD as stemming from attenuated
access to internal states, including bodily states, feelings, emotions, wishes and preferences. To counter this deficit, according to our theory, individuals with OCD seek and rely on proxies, which are relatively discernible indices
of these internal states.
Key publications on SPIS
Essentialism, Disgust, and Conservatism
Building on the construct of essentialism, I propose that both physical and moral disgust involve essentializing, namely, ascribing of a clear, distinct and deep negativity to the entity that is deemed disgusting.
Key publications on essentialism