Source: SpeedyEJL/Wikimedia Commons

Psychological distance has been the focus of a lot of research lately: Studies suggest that you think about things that are mentally near to you more specifically than things that are mentally distant. That is why you focus on general aspects of a trip you are going to take when it is several months away, but you worry a lot about the specific details of the trip when it is just a week away.

Most of the research exploring distance has focused on the consequences of being near or far rather than on psychological factors that make something seem near or far away. It turns out that psychological distance is not that straightforward to calculate.

Consider first, physical distances. Is a mile away near or far? That depends on the size of the thing you judging distance from. If you are looking for a mailbox, and someone says it is a mile away, that seems far away. But, if you are looking for New York City, and someone says you are a mile away from it, then that seems like you are fairly close to it. Part of that comes from what you can see from a mile away. You are unlikely to be able to see a mailbox that is a mile away, but you can see the buildings of New York City when you are a mile from it.

An interesting paper in the December, 2015 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Alf Borre Kanten and Karl Halvor Teigen explored a similar question for events. They were interested in whether the severity of events affected judgments of distance in time and space.

As an example of distance in space, participants were shown a map of an apple orchard. The various trees in the orchard were organized into clumps of trees, and each tree was depicted as a circle. On the map, two trees were marked because they were the sites of two accidents. In one condition, the accidents were minor (two small children suffered small scrapes when they fell playing around the trees in separate incidents). In the other condition, the accidents were serious (two young children were killed after falling from trees in separate incidents). Participants were asked how far apart the trees were in the orchard. They judged the trees where the accidents happened to be closer when the accidents were severe than when they were minor.

A similar thing happened with distance in time. Participants judged how long it would be to say that you were somewhere shortly before an event happened. Some events were minor (such as a small explosion at a factory that left two people with minor burns). Other events were more significant (a major explosion at a factory that killed 50 people). People judged that a longer period of time still counted as close in time when the event was severe than when it was not.

A third set of studies looked at the probability of events. People also judged that when you say there is a big chance of a severe event that event, that event is more probable than when you say there is a big chance of a minor event (even if the objective probability of the events is the same).

These studies suggest that there is a perceptual that affects judgments of closeness in time and space. Objects are prominent when they are large. Events are prominent when their consequences are significant. When something is prominent, you can be further from it and still sense it as being near to you than when the object is not prominent.

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