Construe Differences in Disability Duration

In a study reported by researchers at Northwestern University, sighted participants stated how capable they thought blind people, in general, were of living independently. But prior to doing that, some of the participants carried out challenging physical tasks while wearing a blindfold. This group estimated the difficulty of independent living to be substantially higher than did the others, who hadn’t worn the blindfold first.
     The flaw in these estimates was that the blindfold group participants were blind to how people can learn to adjust to a long-term disability. Given proper support, people who are born blind are likely to do just fine living on their own.
     This difference between temporary and permanent disabilities was explored in a study of shopping behavior by researchers at Copenhagen Business School, University of Leeds, and University of Amsterdam. They considered disabilities as restrictions on behavior. Their examples of temporary restrictions included recovering from a broken arm and being on a diet to lose a specific amount of weight. Permanent restriction examples included diabetes and celiac disease.
     The researchers found that a shopper’s perceived duration of their restrictions influences whether they’ll be more responsive to marketing to a concrete or abstract mindset—what is called the shopper’s “construal level.”
     When thinking concretely, we focus on how we’ll carry out an action. When thinking abstractly, we focus on why to take one or another action. Ranking alternatives by ease of use is concrete. Ranking alternatives by item quality is abstract. A chocolate candy might be thought of concretely in terms of the appeal of its particular ingredients or abstractly in terms of how good eating it leads one to feel. An ad for a diamond pendant could use the tag line, “Flawless quality and pure color,” in order to appeal to concrete thinkers, or “Make it unforgettable,” to appeal to abstract thinkers.
     Compared to those who think concretely, shoppers thinking abstractly prefer a broader categorization of products when evaluating alternatives in a store. In the study of perceived duration of restrictions, those considering their gluten-free restriction to be long-term preferred supermarket shelves with all the gluten-free items shelved together. On the other hand, those who considered the restriction temporary, such as for a limited-term diet, preferred shelves to contain adjacent assortments of gluten-free and non-gluten-free products. They were comfortable with narrower categories, which is a characteristic of concrete thinking.

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