Increased Social Distance (Over)Simplifies Explanations

Ivan Jureta

There are different types of psychological distance, each with interesting implications for decision making. 

“Psychological distance is a subjective experience that something is close or far away from the self, here, and now. Psychological distance is thus egocentric: Its reference point is the self, here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point—in time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality—constitute different distance dimensions.” [1]

Social distance, in the context of decision making, refers to the decision maker’s perception of similarity to others that may somehow matter for the decision at hand. Perceived social distance from others influences the information that a decision maker uses to explain actions of others [2]: explanations will rely on more detailed information (though not necessarily more accurate) if the decision maker perceives others as socially closer.  

This text is part of the series on the design of decision governance. Decision governance are guidelines, rules, processes designed to improve how people make decisions. It can help ensure that the right information is used, that that information is correctly analyzed, that participants in decision making understand it, and that they use it before they make a decision. Find all texts on decision governance here.

“People have typically more low-level knowledge about socially closer others. One has more opportunities to observe the behavior of closer people and thus to accumulate more knowledge about contextual, specific (i.e., low-level) features about them […]. In addition, closer relationships ordinarily involve more intimate interactions and exposure to privileged information about the other’s thoughts and feelings, and thus to a better sense of the other’s complexities and depth of personality […]. People’s mental representations of close others therefore include more concrete, detailed features than do their representations of more distant others, and their judgments about close others become associated with retrieval of lower level information […]. In contrast, the limited knowledge of low-level features regarding socially distant others typically requires one to represent information about these individuals more abstractly and to rely on broad and central features in judgments related to their actions […].” [2]

Why is it important to regulate perceived social distance in decision making? And if it is, how to do it?

There is no reason why increased social distance would be useful for governed decision making. Perhaps it can be proven to be grounds for useful heuristics, and lead to, say, quicker choices. However, if we want to govern decisions, we want to remove such effects, so that – to the extent that this is feasible – we consider the same information, or develop equally elaborate explanations of the behavior or others, if that matters for the decision at hand, and regardless of how similar the decision maker may perceive them.

The aim with decision governance, in relation to social distance, is to introduce steps in the decision process which ensure there is a search for information about others that is relevant to the decision, and the search of that information so that it can be equally detailed for socially close and distant individuals. In firms, we often make decisions which will impact others, now and in the future (temporal distance matters too – see the text here). Consequently, it is important to ensure that the decision maker understands who these others are, and that if the decision maker has hypotheses about their goals and preferences, for example, that these hypotheses can be validated. 

Explanations about why others did or didn’t do something may be based on limited and invalid information – they may simply be uninformed assumptions, grounded in stereotypes. The more socially distant others are, and the more their reactions to the decision are important (as well as the importance of outcomes to them), the more we need to have a decision process which mandates the validation of the hypotheses about what they do, why they do it, and more generally, how options can impact them, and what they will likely say and do about it. Product managers and product designers know this well, although perhaps frame it differently: there is no way to achieve and maintain product-market fit, and understand why that fit exists, without understanding how product design decisions relate to expectations, values, beliefs, and in general behavior of the target users. 

References and Further Reading
  1. Trope, Yaacov, and Nira Liberman. “Temporal construal.” Psychological review 110.3 (2003): 403.
  2. Liviatan, Ido, Yaacov Trope, and Nira Liberman. “Interpersonal similarity as a social distance dimension: Implications for perception of others’ actions.” Journal of experimental social psychology 44.5 (2008): 1256-1269.
  3. Polman, Evan, and Kyle J. Emich. “Decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37.4 (2011): 492-501.