[The following is a guest article and does not necessarily reflect the view of Pumpkin Person.]

For a while now I’ve been interested in the concept of psychological distance (PD). It’s about the level of abstractness on which you operate at a given moment.
The dimensions of PD are:

1) Temporal distance
2) Geographical distance
3) Social distance
4) Probabilistic distance

The more distant a thought you’re having is (in terms of time, location, class or probability) the more abstract is your processing.
For example, when thinking of a possible event, the abstractness of your thinking will increase the more distant in the future you imagine it to be, the less likely to happen you imagine it to be and the more distant in location you imagine it to be.
In a similar way, the more distant in terms of class/social power the person you’re thinking about is, the more abstractly you will think about them.

As far I know, PD is not correlated to fluid or crystallized intelligence. I suspect it mostly affects how you use your g.

Larger or smaller PD is not better or worse by default. But in many cases, one is preferable than the other.
In my understanding, the larger the PD, the more wise is your thinking – you tend to understand the essence and not get lost in the details. But not all contexts require wisdom. I think wisdom is needed to get you on the right path and then more concrete thinking is needed to solve whatever problem to which that path leads you.

There are many studies that have explored the effects of manipulating PD. Each of them usually focuses on a specific dimension of PD but there’s also the concept of self-affirmation. Self-affirmation in the context of the studies I’ve seen is about focusing on your top value. Specifically, writing about your top value as opposed to writing about a value with which you don’t feel strongly connected. Self-affirmation seems to make you think more abstractly since it has been shown to make you better at the holistic Gestalt Completion Test than at the more concrete picture completion subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children.

PD also depends on things such as how positively you’re currently feeling or how lucky you’re feeling. I’m sure in the future we’ll understand more and more about it.

What I’ve found really interesting is the effects of manipulating your sense of social power. According to studies, increasing your feelings of power doesn’t only result in your thinking in a more abstract way, but it also makes you more creative (divergent thinking, specifically) and increases you spatial abilities or at least a subset of them. Not all those effects are necessarily caused by a change in PD.

I find the concept and all its components and possibilities fascinating and I wanted to share some info about it.

I’m including some studies but there are many more.
—–
Cognitive consequences of affirming the self: The relationship between self-affirmation and object construal – PMC (nih.gov)

Induced Social Power Improves Visual Working Memory – Britt Hadar, Roy Luria, Nira Liberman, 2020 (sagepub.com)

Effects of Power on Mental Rotation and Emotion Recognition in Women – Tali Nissan, Oren Shapira, Nira Liberman, 2015 (sagepub.com)

Warm-up time corrects creativity power imbalance — ScienceDaily