Abstractions in Judgment: Does Construal Level Influence the System Specific Reasoning of Dual Process Theory?

Abstract

Recent research have proposed a link between two large theoretical bodies, namely the Construal Level Theory (CLT) and the Dual Process Theory (DPT). The proposed connection is that DPT systems share characteristics with CLT constructs; that systems operate at different levels of abstraction. While these claims have been made, there has been no direct attempt to scrutinize the implication. The hypothesis that a link between these theories exists is examined empirically in this paper. We investigate whether people respond in a DPT system specific way when primed with different levels of construal. 89 high school students were primed with different levels of construal and performed binary choice judgments of either easy or hard difficulty. We expected that the percent of correct judgments that participants made while primed with a lowlevel construal would be higher than participants primed with a high-level construal, in the easy condition. Conversely, we expected that the percent of correct judgments that participants made while primed with a high-level construal would be higher than participants primed with a low-level construal, in the hard condition. The results indicate that there is no such connection. We discuss whether this result is due to diminishing priming and/or a failure to replicate other studies