What was I Thinking? Effect of Construal on Memory Based Choice

Construal Level Theory (CLT) argues that one’s construal level, or the degree to which one represents information concretely vs. abstractly, has a broad influence on attitudes, choice, and related behavior (Trope and Liberman, 2010). Despite the theory’s wide impact, a fundamental aspect of the theory’s mechanism is still unclear. Consider a situation where information is encountered long before a decision relevant to that information will be made. For example, consumers encounter most advertisements far from the moment of choice. This type of situation raises an important question about how construal operates: does abstract construal at the time of encountering a stimulus determine the effect of that stimulus on a later choice or does the concrete construal at the time of choice determine the effect of the previously encountered stimulus? In other words, does construal operate at encoding, causing the memory representation to reflect the encoding level of construal or does construal operate at the time of retrieval via differential weighting of information from a construal-free memory representation? In our research, we examine decisions where all the information has been learned before the moment of choice to discriminate an encoding and a retrieval account of CLT effects. Across all studies, we use a single paradigm in which participants learn information at one point in time (with or without making a choice) and later make a choice based on their memory of the information they saw before. Construal level at exposure and final choice were independently manipulated. In order to remove potential ceiling effects, all studies involved choices between 2 vacation destinations that had 4 feasibility attributes and 4 desirability attributes. One of the vacations was high on desirability and one was high on feasibility.