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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER PSYCH OLOGY, 17(2), 107-1 12CopyrightO 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Construing Consumer Decision MakingJohn G. Lynch Jr .

Duke UniversityGal Zaubennan

University of Pennsylvania

Understanding how consumers represent outcomes and weigh different decision criteria iscritical to consumer behavior research. Construal-level theory articulates how psycholog icaldistance alters the mental representation of inputs and the effective weight given to "high-level" and "low-level" criteria. Trope, Liberman, and Wakslak (2007) provide a review ofthis literature. In this commentary, we illustrate the relevance of construal-level theory toissues in consumer psycholog y, particularly consumer decision making. We highlight specificquestions that researchers could add ress by considering consum er behavior within the frame-work of chang es in construal. We focus our discussion on how con strual levels affect consid-eration sets and how shifts in weight from high-level to low-level features might lead toconsumer regret and dissatisfaction. Construal level can help us understand follow-throughon stated intentions for "really new" products and illumin ate public-policy issues such as con-sumer saving for retirement and nom edemp tion of rebates. We iden tify open issues related tohow construal levels for the same object evolve over time and whether resources differ interms of how su sceptible they are to psycho logical distance effects.

Alba, Hutchinson, and Lynch (1991, p. 2) identified fourfundamental questions researchers must answer in order tounderstand consumer decision m aking.

1. Which of the available brands o r alternatives are con-sidered, and why ?2. What information is processed in evaluating eachbrand considered, and wh y?

3. How are these inputs combined to arrive at a finalchoice?

4. How d o memories of prior decisions alter the answersto the first three questions?

We organize our comm ents on Trope, Liberman, and Wak-slak (2007) around questions 1, 2, and 4. W e a im to h igh-light connections between the points that Trope et al. make,drawing mainly from work in psychology, and issues thathave concerned consum er psycholog ists.

Correspondence should be addressed to John G. Lynch, Jr., FuquaSchool of Business, Duke University, Box 90120, Durham, NC , 27708-0120. E-mail: [email protected] or Gal Z auberm an, The WhartonSchool, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104. E-mail:[email protected]

Order of authorship is alphabetical.

Th e pr imary con tr ibution of construal theory to under-s tanding consumer dec is ion making i s i t s r e levance toquestion 2. T o understand consum ers ' p red ic t ions, judg-ments , and choice ou tcomes , r e sea rche r s mus t f i r s tde te rmine which few inputs ou t o f many a re r ec ru i tedexte rna l ly or r e t r ieved f rom memory and know wha tde te rmines the i r e f fec t ive we ight in dec is ion ou tcomes .Construal- level theory i l luminates how psychologicaldistanc e a lters the mental representa tion of inpu ts and theeffective weight given to "high- level" and "low-level"criteria.

In Liberman and Trope's (1998) seminal article, con-strual-level theory focused in itially on the effects of tempo-ra l distance. Liberman and Trope showed that comparedwith representations of events in the n ear future, representa-tions of events in the distant future were mo re abstract andframed in terms of superordinate categories. Varyinginformation about low-level feasibility and high-level desir-ability, they also showed that in simple, stimulus-baseddecision problems, the relative weight of feasibility wasgreater in the near term and that of desirability was greaterin the mo re distant future.

That ar t ic le has inspired an explosion of research in avery short t ime, making c lear that the effects of tempo raldistance generalize to several other common antecedents

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108 LYNCH AND ZAUBERMANof psychological distance. Trope et al. (2007) provide anexcellent review of this literature, showing that similareffects are observed if outcomes are in the distant future orthe distant past, if they are geographically distant, if theypertain to socially distant others, or if they are made dis-tant by low subjective certainty of occurrence. In general,the evidence in prior work has tended to be either abouteffects of distance on the relative weights of stimulus-based cues in judgments or on some measure of abstract-ness and categorization (e.g. Kardes, Cronley, and Kim,2006). We are unaware of any studies linking abstractnessas a mediator of distance effects on weight. W e focus ourdiscussion on effects mediated by changes in relativeweight of criteria related to attributes that reflect feasibil-ity and desirability in consumer judgment, choice, andexchange. We also consider possible implications for con-sideration-set formation (question 1 from Alba et al.,1991) and the issue of changes in weights a s a function ofprior decisions (question 4).

CONSTRUAL EFFECTS ONCONSIDERATION-SET FORMATION

Perhaps the single most important determinant of consumerchoice outcomes is what gets considered. Nedungadi (1990)showed that primes altered choice of a focal brand X byinfluencing whether the alternative came to mind and whatcompeting alternatives came to mind simultaneously. Thus,how does construal level influenc e consideration -set forma-tion and consequent patterns of interbrand competition?To date, no research has examined the issue of con-strual level and consideration-set formation, but severalnotable hypotheses can be advanced. People representtemporally distant actions more abstractly (Liberman &Trope, 1998), and they think about distant events andobjects more in terms of broader categories than whenthe same events draw near (Liberman, Sagristano, &Trope, 2002). This suggests that when a consumer deci-sion is imminent, there is less competition from nomi-nally different subcategories (cf. Nedungadi, 1990).Similarly, when a person is choosing for him- or herselfrather than for others, cross-category considerationshould be lower (e.g., ginger ales and colas in the sameconsideration sets; Ratneshwar, Pechmann, & Shocker,1996). Finally, when consumers spontaneously form con-sideration sets from goal-derived categories (Ratnesh-war, Barsalou, Pechmann, & Moore, 2001), the goalsthey use to retrieve alternatives are likely to differ, thatis, to pertain to abstract dimensions of desirability whenconstrual levels are high and to concrete considerationsof feasibility when construal levels are low. This coulddramatically affect which competing brands co-occur inconsideration sets with a focal brand.

CONSTRUAL EFFECTS ON INPUTSTO DECISIONS

Once an alternative is considered, the decision outcome ismost directly influenced by the selectiv ity in which few outof many possible inputs are used in an evaluation (Albaet al., 1991 ). Empirical work on construa l theory has show nrepeatedly that psychologically distant events lead to afocus on high-level aspects of decision s rather than lo w-levelconstraints because the constraints either are not representedin memo ry-based decisions or are ignored in stimulus-baseddecisions.The thrust of Trope et al.'s (2007) and others' work onconstrual-level theory is to show th e similarity of the effectsof different causes of psychological distance: temporal dis-tance, physical distance, social distance, or uncertainty ofoutcomes. However, from a consumer behavior perspective,there is a critical difference that distinguishes some anteceden tsof distance from others, namely, whether the dimension ofdistance varies more within individual or across individuals.This affects the kinds of consumer behavior consequences thatcould be most fruitfully stud ied. We suggest that for tempo -ral distance and uncertainty , there is relatively more within-person variation that creates intrapersonal dissatisfactionwhen a decision taken from a distant perspective is reevalu-ated from a more proximal perspective. For physical andsocial distances, within-person variation is rarer, butbetween-person differences in perspective can create inter-personal conflict.Between-personDifferences in Construal: Implicationsfor Exchange ConflictFor social and spatial distance, between-individual differ-ences tend to dominate within individual differences. Here,the main consumer behavior implication is for conflictbetween individuals (e.g., mistakes in trying to predict thepreferences of distant others for giving gift, conflictbetween buyers and sellers).In the well-known endowment effect (Kahneman,Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990), participants randomly assignedto roles of sellers of an object required a higher reservationprice to sell than randomly assigned buyers were willing topay, a result attributed to loss aversion. It is interesting toconsider how these buyer-seller asymm etries migh t differas a function of the social distance or geographic distancebetween buyer and seller. Zhang and Fishbach (2005) foundthat anything that reduced anticipated negative emotionreduced the size of the endowment effect. We conjecturethat anticipated negative emotion strengthens as thinkingbecomes more concrete; thus, stronger endowment effectsand greater difficulty in com ing to agreement might occurwhen selling to a family memb er rather than to a stranger orwhen selling to a buyer in the same town rather than to onein another country. This is consistent with Malkoc and

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CONSTRU ING CONSUMER DECISION MAKING 109Zauberman's (2006) results, which show that the more con-cretely the outcome is represented, the more people requirea greater premium to delay a cu rrent outcome than to pay toexpedite a future outcom e (i.e., tempo ral loss aversion).

Within-individual Shifts in Psychological Distanceand RegretWithin-individual shifts in perspective produce preferenceinconsistency and preference reversals, causing consumersto experience regret, as is shown in Zau berman and Lynch's(2005) "Yes Damn" effect of making time commitmentsthat are regretted later. Temporal distance and uncertaintyboth tend to covary within individual; both decrease overtime as a decision draws nearer. It is predictable that whenevents are in the distant future, people focus on abstract,high-level benefits rather than concrete, low-level con-straints on behavior and then reverse this perspective whenthe same events become imminent and the relative weightof costs increases. For example, a woman living in a Con-necticut suburb may commit to taking her large extendedfamily to a Broadway show ov er the holidays and then bit-terly regret the decision when faced with all the logisticaldifficulties of gettin g children out of bed, catching the traindown town, and transporting the family to the theater.Trope, Liberman, and colleagues have also shown thatthe same events are reevaluated when they fade into the dis-tant past, where, again, considerations of high-level desir-ability dominate low-level considerations of feasibility.This may explain Gilovich and Medvec's (1995) findingthat people regret actions more than inactions in the shortrun but regret inactions more than actions in the long run.We would argue that inactions occur because, in themoment, people give a great amount of weight to the costsof action and constraints on behavior. At a greater temporaldistance, those costs and constraints seem less comp elling.Similarly, predictable intraindividual shifts in perspectivewith respect to uncertainty might occur. If our theater-goingsuburbanite is originally uncertain about whether her relativeswill all be in town at the same time to see a show , it is predict-able that she will give more weight to low-level details later onwhen she confirms that the event is a go.

Preference lnconsistency and Temporal ConstrualPreference consistency in intertemporal choice has beenextensively studied in recent years, but construal-level the-ory provides a new perspective on such tradeoffs. We nextfocus our discussion on how temporal distance plays intoimportant consumer decision contexts that have attractedthe interest of marketers and public-po licy makers.'

'For a more detailed public-policy analysis of these issues, see Lynchand Zauberman (2006).

Preference lnconsistency and Saving forRetirementEyal, Liberman, Trope, and Walther (2004) showedthat benefits loom larger than costs in the future, but thereverse is true in the present. Consistent with this work,

Lynch and Zauberman (2006) noted that people do notsave for retirement because in the sho rt run, saving exactsa cost. However, Thaler and Benartzi's (2004) "Save M oreTomorrow" plan overcomes the barrier by letting workersprecommit to save money for retirement from futureraises, increasing annual savings rates. Lynch and Zauber-man (2006, p. 70) noted that this can be explained by con-strual-level theory and that "when people are makingdecisions about saving in the current period, constraintsand costs should loom large compared with the potentialbenefits of having adequate savings for retirement. When aperson is given a choice of precommitting future raisemoney to retirement savings, the consequences are moretemporally distant. Consequently, people give moreweight to benefits and less to costs, causing participationto i n ~ r e a s e . " ~he general point is that when policy makerswant to encou rage people to take actions that are costly inthe short run but beneficial in the long run, they shouldencourage people to frame the decision as if it were in thedistant future and offer opportunities for precommitment.

Preference lnconsistency and RebatesIn general, policy makers want to prevent consumers fromchoosing actions that look attractive in the long run but that

they will regret when the time comes to use the product orservice. In such cases, the remedy is to in duce consum ers toframe the decision as if it were imm inent, even though it isin the future (Lynch and Zauberman, 2006). Consider thewell-documented tendency for consumers to choose optionson the basis of rebates that they never get aroun d to redeem-ing (Silk, 2005; Soman, 1998). This finding can be inter-preted through the lens of construal theory (though otherinterpretations exist; see Zauberman and L ynch, 2005). Theweight of feasibility (i.e., the time to redeem the rebate)decreases with temporal distance. Therefore, to correct forconsumers' tendency to buy on the basis of a rebate thatthey will never redeem, they should be induced to thinkabout the decision they would make if the rebate had to beredeemed that day.

Preference lnconsistency and Really New ProductsAlexander, Lynch, and Wang (2006) combined con-strual-level theory with Hoeffler's (2003) theory of differ-ences between "really new" and "incrementally new"

' ~ ~ n c hnd Zauberman (2006) offered a second account based onZauberman and Lynch's (2005) resource slack theory of discounting.

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110 LYNCH AND ZAUBERMANproducts, in which "newness" is a psychological constructrather than a measure of chronological or technologicalnewness. Alexander et al. reasoned that really new productsare characterized by more extreme benefits and costs,whereas incrementally new products have more modestbenefits and costs. Com bining these premises with construaltheory, they reasoned that really new products should bedevalued more dramatically than incrementally new prod-ucts from the time people stated a positive intention toacquire them to the moment of deciding whether to followthrough and acquire them.3In a large field survey, Alexan der et al. (2006 ) predictedand found that people who had stated an intention to acquire22 entertainment and communication technologies in thenext six months followed through at a lower rate the higherthe technology scored on an index of psychological new-ness. Consistent with a c onstrual account, this difference infollow-through between really new and incrementally newproducts emerged only with time; it was not evident in theinitial period when people stated an intention to acquirewithin six months.Two other studies by Alexander et al. (2006) suggestedthat psychological newness is itself a form of psychologicaldistance. In one study, consumers who were within oneweek of actually acquiring new products represented theirexpected use in the first week more abstractly the "newer"the product was. In another study , consum ers who stated anintention to acquire products in the next six months wereless likely to report forming "implementation intentions"the newer the product was; that is, consumers were lesslikely to think about exactly when and where they wouldbuy really new products than incrementally new products.This may well explain the lesser follow-through on inten-tions for really new products; implementation intentionshave been show n to dramatically increase the fulfillment ofintentions (Gollwitzer, 1999).

Remedy for Preference Inconsistency: MentalSimulationHow can one correct for consumer shifts in mental repre-sentation that produce preference inconsistency and, thus,dissatisfaction, regret, product returns, or disuse? Elabora-tion on future tasks changes evaluations in a way that pre-vents negative surprises in the future. Kruger and Evans(2004) demonstrated that putting future tasks into subtasks

' ~ a s t a n o ,Sujan, Kacker, and Sujan (2006) made a similar argument,though they did not compare really new with incrementally new products.When people considered adopting a really new product in the distantfuture, they were optimistic and focused on performance gains andsymbolic gains; in contrast, in the near future, they shifted to estimatingswitching costs and affective costs as well as increased anxiety and low-ered behavioral intentions.

reduces the planning fallacy, or the chronic underestima tionof the time to complete a task. A way to interpret this resultis that reducing an ov erall task (e.g., holiday sho pping) intosubtasks (e.g., writing down each person for whom a gift isneeded) changes the level of construal from high to low.Integrating construal-level theory and ideas about mentalsimulation, Zhao, Hoeffler, and Zauberman (2006) dem on-strated that asking people to mentally simulate the benefitsof an immediate outcome before making a decision causestheir immediate decisions to become more consistent withdistant-future preferences. Moreover, asking people t o men-tally simu late the process associated w ith a distant outcomebefore making a decision causes their distant decisions tobecome more consistent with near-future preferences. Zhaoet al. (2006) showed that counter to peop le's natu ral tenden-cies, outcome simulation for near-future events (a focus onthe benefits and performance of a produ ct) and process sim-ulation for distant-future events (a focus on the constraintsand convenience of using a product) lead to preferenceconsistency over time.

OPEN QUESTIONSHow Do Prior Decisions Affect Construal Levels?Carryover of Past ConstrualsQuestion 4 from Alba et al. (1991) pertained to how mem o-ries of earlier decisions alter the consideration sets or crite-ria selected for use in evaluating alternatives. Theoverwhelming majority of construal studies examine singledecisions. Consumer psycholog ists, however, have been inter-ested in the problem of how representations from prior deci-sions alter subsequ ent decisions (e.g., Biehal& Chakravarti,1983; Novemsky & Dhar, 2005).Our focus on preference inconsistency as a key outcomeof construal level theory leads to a fundamental question ofwhether the construal level for a product when it is evalu-ated at time t carries over to affect decisions involving thesame product at a later point in time. To date, the literaturehas largely been silent, as high-level and low-lev el constru-als are typically manipulated between subjects rather thanstudied longitud inally within su bjects, though som e relevantresearch does exist.

Some times, consum ers form "online" overall judgm entsof brands at time t of an initial decision; they then use thosejudgments to make later decisions involving those brands att+n, rather than recomputing new judgments (Hastie &Park, 1986; Lynch, Marmorstein, & Weigold, 1988). Thus,will construal levels from time t become "immortalized" inconsumers' stored overall evaluations, determining theweight of feasibility and desirability at t+n and forestallingpreference inconsistency and regret? The conditions u nderwhich manipulations of distance do or do not cause regretdeserve further investigation.

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CONSTRUING CONSUMER DECISION MAKING 111Past construals affect future ones in other ways as well.Malkoc, Zauberman, and Bettman (2006) asked consumersto make a decision about brands in an Internet store andthen decide how to ship their choice. They found that fac-tors affecting the construal of the pro duct decision (e.g., du eto comparing either alignable or nonallignable options

[Johnson, 1984; Malkoc, Zauberm an, & Ulu, 20051) carriedover to affect consum er impatience in a decision abo ut pay-ing for fa ster delivery.Similarly, when people make timing decisions of w hetherto receive the same object now or later, impatience andpresent bias differ if the choice is framed as delaying de liveryfrom an earlier default to a later time rather than as speedingup delivery from a later default to an earlier time. M alkoc an dZauberman (2006) argue that this occurs because the frameddefault induces a construal level that do mina tes or inhibits theconstrual level of the a lternative timing.

How Do ResourcesAffect the Malleability ofConstrual Levels?In our work on resource slack (Zaub erman & Lynch, 2005),we found that people falsely believe that they will havemore spare time in the future but not m ore spa re money, andthis finding explains different discount rates for time andmoney. To interpret this finding in term s of ch anges in con-strual, it is necessary to assume tha t the cha nge of represe n-tation over temporal distance shifts more for events framedas time (an hour spent cutting the lawn) than for eventsframed as money ($60 payment for landscaping). An inter-esting question for future work is to examine whetherresources differing in their susceptibility change fromconcrete to abstract representation with increasing psycho-logical distance.

CONCLUSIONThe goal of this com mentary was to illustrate the relevanceof the construal-level theory to issues in consumer decisionmaking that have not been the focus of social cognitionresearch and to suggest some open issues. We relied onAlba et al.'s (1991 ) analysis of fou r fundamental q uestionsto understand the de cisions. W e call for additional resea rchinto how construal levels affec t consideration sets and, thus,patterns of competition among brands. We analyze howshifts in weight from high-level to low -level features mightlead to consumer regret and dissatisfaction, and we suggestways to overcome these effects. We offer evidence of howconstrual level can help us understand practical marketingissues, such as consumers' use of rebates o r their follow-throughon stated intentions for really new versus incre mentally newproducts, and on public-policy issues, such as saving forretirement and the use of rebates. W e also call for resea rchto understand whether construal levels that drive the evaluation

of a product are revised in later evaluations of the sameobject or remain sticky over time, as well as for researchabout whether con cepts or resources differ in their suscepti-bility to variations in how they are represented and, thus,how feasibility and desirability are weighted in decisions.Construal-level theory is a delightfully heuristic theory thatholds promise of providing many interesting questions andanswers for consumer psychologists in the near and moredistant future.

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