Keeping One’s Distance: Mask Wearing is Implicitly Associated With Psychological Distance
- 14 September 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Social Psychological and Personality Science
- Vol. 13 (4), 875-883
- https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211044061
Abstract
Mask wearing plays a vital role in the fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite its ubiquity in everyday social life, it is still unknown how masked faces are mentally represented. Drawing on construal-level theory, we test the hypothesis that masked faces and unmasked faces are implicitly associated with psychological distance and proximity in memory, respectively. Four preregistered, high-powered experiments (N = 354 adults) using the Implicit Association Test lend convergent support to this hypothesis across all four dimensions of psychological distance: social distance, spatial distance, temporal distance, and hypothetical distance. A mini meta-analysis validates the reliability of the findings (Hedge’s g = 0.46). The present work contributes to the growing literature on construal-level effects on implicit social cognition and enriches the current discussion on mask wearing in the pandemic and beyond.Keywords
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