The vicarious construal effect: Seeing and experiencing the world through different eyes

That 2 individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the power of construal. People's construals are shaped by their idiosyncratic attitudes, belief systems, and personal histories. Eleven studies provide support for and explain the origin of a vicarious construal effect: Considering perspectives one once had but seemingly lost, one ordinarily would have only with more experience, or one would not have had spontaneously, all exerted an assimilative pull on one's ongoing experiences. This means habituation can be slowed or stalled by considering another's fresh perspective (Studies 1-6), desensitization can be preemptively achieved by considering another's stale perspective (Study 5), and the experience of a performance can change by considering how fans or nonfans would see it (Study 7). Blind to the power of construal in defining their experiences, participants believed they were learning about a stimulus's properties or their own underlying preferences, not simply the experience-distorting effects of the perspective manipulations (Studies 6-7). These effects emerged in examinations of positive emotions, negative emotions, interest, and perceptions of humor. The final 2 pairs of studies used causal chain designs to elucidate an underlying mechanism. Trying to understand another's perspective encouraged participants to approach a stimulus by posing different questions or directional hypotheses to themselves (Studies 8a and 9a), which caused participants' own experiences of the stimulus to shift (Studies 8b and 9b). The implications of this account for when considering another's perspective should change one's own experience are detailed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).