Affiliation:
1. HMKW Hochschule für Medien, Kommunikation und Wirtschaft, University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany
2. New York University, NY, USA
Abstract
Mask wearing plays a vital role in the fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite its ubiquity in everyday social life, it is still unknown how masked faces are mentally represented. Drawing on construal-level theory, we test the hypothesis that masked faces and unmasked faces are implicitly associated with psychological distance and proximity in memory, respectively. Four preregistered, high-powered experiments ( N = 354 adults) using the Implicit Association Test lend convergent support to this hypothesis across all four dimensions of psychological distance: social distance, spatial distance, temporal distance, and hypothetical distance. A mini meta-analysis validates the reliability of the findings (Hedge’s g = 0.46). The present work contributes to the growing literature on construal-level effects on implicit social cognition and enriches the current discussion on mask wearing in the pandemic and beyond.
Subject
Clinical Psychology,Social Psychology
Cited by
3 articles.
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