Abstract or concrete? The effect of climate change images on people’s estimation of egocentric psychological distance

Abstract

Climate change has been widely perceived as a psychologically distant risk, largely viewed as separated from one’s direct experience. Using construal-level theory, we examined how the level of abstraction and concreteness of climate change imagery affects viewers’ perceived psychological distance of climate change, including spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical (level of uncertainty) distances. Participants ( n = 402) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions, one with abstract images and one with concrete images. Results show that the abstract and concrete images successfully activated people’s abstract and concrete mind-sets, respectively, and people who viewed abstract images were more likely to perceive climate change as a spatially and temporally distant issue.