Moral Concerns Are Greater for Temporally Distant Events and Are Moderated by Value Strength

The present research examines the impact of temporal distance on moral concerns in situations where selfish motives clash with altruistic considerations. Drawing upon Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) which posits that abstract, high-level features of events and social values take on more weight with greater temporal distance, we hypothesized that moral concerns should be higher for temporally distant situations. The results from...