Effects of temporal distance on a dynamic measure of action identification

Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010) proposes that people's subjective construals become more abstract with increasing psychological distance—the removal of an event from one's direct experience. We propose and test an updated version of the most common measure of abstraction: the Behavior Identification Form (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989). We enhance the 1989 measure by 1) updating the items, 2) allowing participants to personalize the response options, which makes the measure psychologically meaningful to them, and 3) using a continuous rather than dichotomous scale. Four studies (total N = 1057) validate the newly proposed dynamic BIF by showing that it is sensitive to temporal distance manipulations. Study 4 also provides an example of customizing the measure to the academic domain. Two additional studies (total N = 426), in which the measure was customized to prosocial behaviors, further support the measure's predictive validity by demonstrating that it correlates with expected outcomes. We believe that the dynamic BIF is a useful and flexible tool for measuring abstraction and that its dynamic approach may be applied more broadly by researchers in other domains.