How To Reduce Perceived Distance To A Humanitarian Cause ? Influence Of Abstraction And Valence Of A Message

This research aims at showing the impact of the level of abstraction and valence of a message on proximity to a humanitarian “cause”. We hypothesized and found that a Positive Abstract message leads to more proximity to a humanitarian “cause” compared to a Positive Concrete message while a Negative Concrete message creates more proximity than a Negative Abstract message. Our results extend the findings of the Construal Level Theory (Liberman and Trope, 1998; Trope and Liberman, 2003) and detail how linguistically biased messages impact recipients of such messages. It provides guidelines to managers of organizations supporting humanitarian “causes” to increase the efficiency of their messages.