Judgement and Decision Making

This paper discusses the impact of social/physical distance on employee decision making based on the construal level theory. It also identifies the impact of social distance within an expanded function of an employee within a company and how they affect the process of decision making.

Running Head: JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING 1
JUDGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING
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Task 1: Social/physical distance in judgement and decision making
The process of making decisions in working places can sometimes be difficult,
particularly when it is based on multiple ideas and expectations. A number of argument in
various scholarly works show that decision making under information overloads leads to
suboptimal results. The main objective of this paper is to draw key insights from the construal
level theory to design a psychological distance in judgement and decision making: Social
distance or physical space. Moreover , we also seek to identify the impact of social distance
within an expanded function of an employee within a company and how they affect the
process of decision making
Based on the construal theory, Social/physical distance has revealed that whether
events are construed as concrete or abstract in a significant factor in affecting the moral
judgement of people. It is important to note that people have the capability of thinking about
the past, and the future. By considering the unique aspects of each process, making decision
constitutes of different forms of traversing the social distance. Transcending the concept of
“self” involves psychological construal, and the further an event might form direct
familiarity, the more nonconcrete the construal level of that event or object (Trope, &
Liberman, 2011).
A key premise in social/physical distance in that the perception of decision making
process and events differs based on their psychosomatic distance to an individual (Danziger,
Montal & Barkan, 2012).Motivations that are psychologically distant among employees are
often construed as high-level construal, while psychologically close motivations are
construed as low-level construal. This association has been viewed to be multidirectional,
implying that the construal levels have a huge impact on the perception of the psychological
distance the same way the construal levels are affected by psychological distance.

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(Mårtensson, 2017). Based on the CLT, social distance can be evaluated on multiple
dimensions for which studies based on the concept have shown that whether an event is
construed as concrete or not the key factor is how it influences the moral judgement of the
observer (Trope, & Liberman, 2010).
Moral foundations often elaborate the idea of CLT in multiple dimensions. Žeželj, &
Jokić (2014) argues that moral judgements are based on a number of foundations: fairness,
harm, group loyalty, and authority. Fairness and harm are described as the foundations of the
perceiver because they are concerned with safeguarding the freedom and rights of the people
from a collective perspective (Huang, et al., 2016).In-group reliability, power, and
transparency are viewed as the binding fundamentals of social/physical distance since they
are used for the safeguarding of a group as a whole.
Social/physical distance can have significant strength of the influence of an
employee’s way of making decisions to an extent that decisions rest on a sheer prestige
.An emotionally weak employee may benefit from a good social distance where his or her
shortcomings are less easily recognisable , while emotionally intelligent employees may
benefit for letting their decisions be followed by others due to their strong influence.
Task 2
In reality, the different dimensions in distance can be separated. The fact that an event
occurred long ago does not mean that it occurred far away. However, there are identified
commonalities on how different perceivers respond to different psychological distances. CLT
posits that the commonalities in psychological distance stem from the fact that responding
to a certain event that is increasingly distant requires reliance on mental construal and
less on the direct experience of an event (Liberman, & Trope, 2014).

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This paper has discussed the impact of social distance on employee decision making
even when people are told about CLT and its impacts. Therefore, when confronting multiple
decision with multiple pieces of information, an employee might improve the outcome of
their decisions through self –induced psychological distance. Abstract thinking might lead to
a stronger moral judgement as well as differences in theoretical perspective, which in some
cases affects the construal level of moral judgement.

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References
Danziger, S., Montal, R., & Barkan, R. (2012). Idealistic advice and pragmatic choice: A
psychological distance account. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
102(6), 1105-1117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027013
Huang, N., Burtch, G., Hong, Y., & Polman, E. (2016). Effects of multiple psychological
distances on construal and consumer evaluation: A field study of online reviews.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(4), 474-482.
Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2014). Traversing psychological distance. Trends in cognitive
sciences, 18(7), 364-369.
Mårtensson, E., 2017. Construal Level Theory and Moral Judgments: How Thinking
Abstractly Modifies Morality. Journal of European Psychology Students, 8(1), pp.30–
40. http://doi.org/10.5334/jeps.413
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance.
Psychological review, 117(2), 440-463. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2011). Construal level theory. Handbook of theories of social
psychology, 1, 118-134
Žeželj, I. L., & Jokić, B. R. (2014). Replication of experiments evaluating impact of
psychological distance on moral judgment: (Edal, Liberman & Trope, 2008; Gong &
Medin, 2012). Social Psychology, 45(3), 223-231. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-
9335/a000188

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