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MileyCyrus comments on Open Thread, July 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Do psychology researchers endorse the near/far mode model of thinking, or is that just Robin Hanson's pet theory?
I don't know how popular it is, but everyone else calls it "construal level theory". I also don't know why he decided to rename their close/distant to near/far.
Perhaps because "close/distant" is far, but "near/far" is near.
This comment was originally meant as a joke, but seriously, the "near/far" pair is easier to remember.
I think he came up with his theory first and then found it was basically construal level theory. In any case in the LW/OB social group he is hardly unique when it comes to using quirky terminology for existing stuff.
I believe your account of the history is mistaken. Here are the earliest posts tagged Near/Far. In the earliest he cites the Construal Level Theory post, but does not emphasize the terms "near" and "far." In the comments, Roko writes out "near/far," before there has been any later post. A month later is an untagged post that emphasizes "near" and "far." Similarly, the third post emphasizes them while condemning CLT as awkwardly named.
The second tagged post uses the near/far dichotomy, but does not seem to me to be about contrual level theory. This is evidence that he adopted the terms from his own theory, but search engines do not provide earlier posts using the terms.
Thank you for the correction and actual info! I should have made it clearer I was speculating.
I think I've heard LW/OB people using near/far mode to talk about how their desire to do certain things depend on how far away they are (e.g. "In far mode I want to have exercised every day a month from now, but in near mode, I don't want to do it today"). Is there actually any connection between this sort of usage and construal level theory? All construal level theory covers, to my knowledge, is how our brains map different kinds of distance into the same buckets.
That example is probably just hyperbolic discounting. But CLT does say that we think differently about near/far things. In particular, we think more abstractly about distant things. That sounds like a stronger claim than yours. Try Robin Hanson's first post on the subject. Do you agree with him? with his source?
An example of hypocrisy where RH goes beyond normal CLT, but where I think it is quite fair to say that there is some connection.
His source in the first place is where I learned about construal-level theory, and I find/found it quite convincing. Hanson seems pretty accurate in his summary/analysis there, too.
In the second post: The Good Samaritan experiment seems like a stretch to apply here, but his other source is just the kind of experiment I would have thought should tell you whether CT does apply to "ideals" or not, and it appears that it does. Thanks for pointing me to these posts.
Psychology is extremely fragmented. I don't think there is any theory well described as "endorsed by psychology researchers."
I'm not asking for a consensus. I just want to know if there's anyone in the field who has endorsed near/far mode.
A fair question. Khoth answered it, but since you still write in the present tense, I'll answer, too: Robin Hanson started with Construal Level Theory and renamed it near/far. In the first link and this summary, he cites reviews, so you can check how closely he matches his sources; and with the name you can find the rest of the literature and check how closely he matches it.
Thanks!