Thinking about the distant future promotes the prospects of peace: A construal-level perspective on intergroup conflict resolution

• Author: Nir Halevy,Yair Berson
• DOI: 10.1177/00220027221079402
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(6) 1119–1143

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221079402

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Thinking about the distant

future promotes the

prospects of peace: A

construal-level perspective on

intergroup conf‌lict resolution

Nir Halevy

1

and Yair Berson

2

Abstract

The current research reveals that the pursuit of peace entails an inherent paradox. The

urgent need to save lives and alleviate human suffering necessitates swift solutions to

the problem of intergroup conf‌lict. However, because the human mind associates

peace with longer time horizons, people anticipate peace more when considering the

distant rather than the near future. Six experiments demonstrate a robust and large

effect whereby thinking about the distant future promotes the prospects of peace

compared to thinking about the near future. These experiments also provide evidence

for the role that construal f‌it, that is, the tendency to match high temporal distance with

abstractness, plays in this effect. We discuss implications for shorter-term and longer-

term peace interventions.

Keywords

intergroup conf‌lict, temporal distance, construal level, construal f‌it, conf‌lict

management and resolution

1

Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

2

DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Nir Halevy, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

Email: nhalevy@stanford.edu

Intergroup conf‌lict remains one of humanity’s most pressing problems (De Dreu and

Gross 2019;Esteban, Mayoral, and Ray 2012;Fiske 2002;Fry 2012;Halevy and

Cohen 2019). The urgent need to save human lives and alleviate the suffering of

millions of people naturally propels us to seek immediate relief to intergroup conf‌lict.

Paradoxically, the pursuit of swift solutions to intergroup conf‌lict may undermine the

prospects of peace. This novel hypothesis is based on a simple idea, namely, that people

inherently associate peace with the distant future. We propose that the fundamental and

potent tendency of the human mind to associate peace with the distant future represents

an instantiation of construal f‌it, which in turn, promotes processing f‌luency. The

coupling of the distant future and peace is processed more f‌luently than the coupling of

the near future and peace, resulting in stronger expectations of peace when considering

the distant rather than the near future. Put differently, we predict that individuals would

judge peaceful solutions to intergroup conf‌lict as more viable and probable when

thinking about longer, rather than shorter, time horizons.

Construal Level Theory of Psychological Distance

Our novel hypothesis builds on the idea that people inherently associate peace with the

distant future. We derived this notion from the Construal Level Theory of psychological

distance (henceforth CLT; Trope and Liberman 2003,2010). A considerable body of

research suggests that people tend to form concrete mental representations of entities

and events that are present, proximate, or plausible. In contrast, people tend to form

abstract mental representations of entities and events that are absent, distant or im-

probable. Importantly, this research shows that causality f‌lows in both directions. That

is, increasing people’s distance from entities and events makes people think about them

abstractly. Complementarily, increasing the abstractness of entities and events makes

people experience them as farther away (Liberman et al. 2007;Trope and Liberman

2003,2010).

Numerous studies have established the reciprocal inf‌luence of psychological dis-

tance in general—and temporal distance in particular—on level of abstraction. For

example, asking participants to think about next year resulted in higher-level de-

scriptions of activities as compared with asking participants to think about tomorrow

(Liberman and Trope 1998). Similarly, asking participants to plan several months into

the future resulted in broader and more inclusive categories (e.g., of items to be taken on

a camping trip or to be sold in a yard sale) relative to asking them to plan just a few days

into the future (Liberman, Sagristano, and Trope 2002). Likewise, instructing par-

ticipants to think about next year increased the correspondence between their abstract

values and their behavioral intentions compared to instructing them to think about next

week (Eyal et al. 2009).

Importantly, a principal focus of the aforementioned studies and many similar

studies was establishing the bidirectional inf‌luence of temporal distance and level of

mental representation (Bar-Anan, Liberman, and Trope 2006;Liberman and Trope

2008). Relatively fewer studies have examined how temporal distance shapes

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