 Influence of Psychological Distance on People’s Willingness to Help Accident Victims: Discrepancies Between Implicit and Explicit InferencesYuri Taniguchi and Tomoko Ikegami SAGE Open, 2021, vol. 11, issue 3, 21582440211033251 Abstract: Drawing on construal-level theory, this study explored how a sense of psychological distance from an accident influences people’s willingness to help victims. We conducted a scenario experiment with a sample of 81 Japanese undergraduates. Participants were presented with a short scenario describing an accident that happened on either a distant or a nearby mountain. The results show that the greater the distance perceived by participants from the accident, the more likely they were to infer negative traits about the victim at an implicit level. However, the more they inferred negative traits at an implicit level, the more likely they were to attribute the cause of the accident to external situational factors, at an explicit level. Finally, explicit external causal attribution aroused greater sympathy for the victim, resulting in an increased willingness to help. This discrepancy between implicit and explicit inferences was discussed in terms of cognitive elaboration, in which people engage in helping behaviors when they feel responsible for the fate of the victim. Keywords: psychological distance; construal-level theory; spontaneous inferences; correction of implicit inference; relationship between implicit and explicit inferences (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:11:y:2021:i:3:p:21582440211033251 DOI: 10.1177/21582440211033251 Access Statistics for this article More articles in SAGE Open |
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