Subjective likelihood and the construal level of future events: A replication study of Wakslak, Trope, Liberman, and Alony (2006).

Abstract

C. J. Wakslak, Y. Trope, N. Liberman, and R. Alony (2006), Seeing the forest when entry is unlikely: Probability and the mental representation of events, Journal of experimental psychology: General, examined the effect of manipulating the likelihood of future events on level of construal (i.e., mental abstraction). Over seven experiments, they consistently found that subjectively unlikely (vs. likely) future events were more abstractly (vs. concretely) construed. This well-cited, but understudied finding has had a major influence on the CLT literature: Likelihood is considered to be one of four psychological distances assumed to influence mental abstraction in similar ways (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Contrary to the original empirical findings, we present two close replication attempts (N = 115 and N = 120; the original studies had N = 20 and N = 34) which failed to find the effect of likelihood on construal level. Bayesian analyses provided diagnostic support for the absence of an effect. In light of the failed replications, we present a meta-analytic summary of the accumulated evidence on the effect. It suggests a strong trend of declining effect sizes as a function of larger samples. These results call into question the previous conclusion that likelihood has a reliable influence on construal level. We discuss the implications of these findings for construal level theory, and advise against treating likelihood as a psychological distance until further tests have established the relationship.

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