Corrigendum to “Spatial Distance and Mental Construal of Social Events”

Fujita, K., Henderson, M. D., Eng, J., Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2006). Spatial distance and mental construal of social events. Psychological Science, 17(4), 278–282. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01698.x

In the above article, the authors presented the results of two experiments that demonstrate that people mentally represent the same event more abstractly when it occurs at a physically distant vs. near location. There was a minor discrepancy in the materials that were actually used compared to the way the materials were described in the first of the two experiments. The discrepancy does not impact the merits of the findings nor of the conclusions.

In the materials that were used, New York University students were asked to imagine that they were moving to a new apartment just outside New York City vs. Los Angeles. Participants were presented with 13 items adapted from the Behavior Identification Form (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989). Each item asked participants to consider a behavior that they might engage in while in NYC vs. LA (e.g., “reading”), and to select one of two re-statements of this behavior that they preferred. One re-statement was always more abstract than the other (e.g., “gaining knowledge” vs. “following lines of print”). Results revealed that participants were more likely to prefer the more abstract re-statements when they imagined moving to LA vs. NYC. In the Method section, it was incorrectly suggested that the instructions had participants imagine that they were helping a friend move to a new apartment, rather than imagine that they themselves were moving. The corrected paragraph is as follows:

Materials and procedure. Participants were asked to imagine a scenario in which they were moving into a new apartment. The apartment was described as located “outside of New York City, about 3 miles away from here” (spatially near condition) or “outside of Los Angeles, about 3,000 miles away from here” (spatially distant condition). Participants were then asked to imagine performing a number of behaviors related to this event. These behaviors were adapted from the Behavior Identification Form(BIF; Vallacher & Wegner, 1989), a questionnaire designed to measure individual differences in action identification. Each item presented a target behavior (e.g., “locking a door”) and asked participants which of two alternate descriptions they preferred: one describing the behavior in terms of its means (how it is performed; e.g., “putting a key in the lock”) and one describing it in terms of its ends (why it is performed; e.g., “securing the house”). Only 13 of the original 25 items from the BIF were presented to participants, as they related to the topic of “moving” (see Table 1). Preference for the low-level identification for any item was coded as 0, whereas preference for the high-level identification was coded as 1. These item scores were then summed to create an index of level of action identification ranging from 0 to 13, with higher scores indicating stronger preferences for high-level action identifications.