A fundamental cognitive problem that humans constantly face is how much to generalize from one experience to another, which they navigate across various domains. In the realm of social psychology, this process is known as attitude generalization, referring to how individuals apply past experiences to make judgments and decisions about new, yet related, objects. In this line of research, we examine how psychological distance affects attitude generalization. Specifically, we hypothesized—and found—that experiences with more distal objects are generalized to a greater extent than similar experiences with more proximal ones. Currently, we are expanding this work to investigate how psychological distance might influence generalization differently for positive versus negative experiences.
