Near and Far--Construal and Psychological Distance · 4:17am Jul 20th, 2017
Near and Far
A current area of research in psychology called "construal-level theory" (CLT) is—I promise—relevant to literature. It talks about a very general phenomenon called "psychological distance". In popular accounts, it's called the "near / far" distinction. Robin Hanson summarized it on Overcoming Bias. The more-detailed review (Trope & Liberman 2010) calls these things Near and Far:
Abstraction and idealism appear to make up the dominant dimension: Far things are more abstract and more idealized. Distance seems to me peripheral; only near / far in space and in time relate to distance [2].
CLT claims that:
- Every object of thought has many different attributes (rows of the table) which distance can be a metaphor for. Distance itself, of course; and distance in time is similar. More metaphorical distances include level of familiarity (familiar = near, strange = far) and abstraction (detailed = near, abstract = far). The distance metaphor has even been stretched to include color (red = near, blue = far) and transactional direction (buy = near, sell = far), though I'm not convinced.
- In all [1] experiments reported in (Trope & Liberman 2010), being shown anything from the Near column of the Near / Far table makes people think in Near terms for every other row of the table. Similarly for things from the Far column. For example, subjects asked to mark points far away from each other on a graph, and then asked how close they were to their family, reported being "farther away" socially from their families than subjects who were asked to mark points that were close together on the graph (Trope & Liberman 2010 p. 443). Many experiments used a Stroop-effect task to show interference (longer reaction time) when the priming attribute was near (far) and the tested attribute was far (near).
- Therefore, near / far is, or can be regarded as, a single mode of human thought. Perceptions of nearness of one attribute are not merely correlated with perceptions of nearness of other object attributes; they cause other attributes to be perceived as near, or to be approached or thought about (construed) in the manner one would if they were near. Near / far is thus a mode of human thought, and while a person can be in a mode between near and far, a person cannot perceive some attributes of a mental object in far mode, while simultaneously perceiving other attributes or other mental objects in near mode.
Near and Far in Art & Culture
I claim, additionally, that Near and Far characterize not just how individuals think at a given moment, but characterize artistic movements, literary genres, and entire cultures. These works, artists, genres, and cultures can be classed as usually endorsing or displaying either Near or Far values:
Far: The Aeneid, Beowulf, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Pilgrim's Progress; John Milton; heroic fantasy, superhero comics; Christianity, Nazism
Near: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Robert Frost, Raymond Chandler; realist and naturalist novels, hard-boiled detective fiction; empirical science
The history of European art, science, and culture from 1300 up until 1900 was, excepting the 18th century, one of moving gradually from Far to Near mode. The first-person POV in fictional narrative was (I think) an invention of the 18th century, and the 20th-century dictums "write what you know" and "show, don't tell" are both commands to write in near rather than far mode.
The novel that began Modernist literature, James Joyce's Ulysses, is all about confusing the Near and the Far. It takes a narrative that is very, very Far—an Archaic Greek epic poem about an idealized, overconfident, noble hero—and superimposes it on a protagonist who is very Near—an irreligious Irish Jew whose mundane, pathetic, and comical inner thoughts and bodily functions are described in more detail than anyone had ever described any character's before.
Near and Far will be important concepts in understanding the history of art and culture. They are so important that they were discovered independently several times before.
Using Near and Far in Writing
Ursula LeGuin wrote an essay called "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" which I think is pretty awful. She tried to pin down what made something fantasy rather than ordinary fiction with dragons and swords, and she started out right—
Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion.
The phrase "get in touch with reality", used to talk about something that is definitively unreal, is instantly diagnostic of philosophical realism, also called Idealism. That's the belief that reality isn't real, but instead some fantasy world of yours, an imagined ideal world such as Plato's cave, is real. Plato, Jesus, Hegel, and Heidegger are probably the most-famous Idealists.
Idealism is indeed the basis of classic heroic fantasy, although now, in the age of democracy, we've got hobbits as heroes. Idealism seems to mean nearly the same thing as Far mode.
However, she goes on to say...
What is it, then, that I believe has gone wrong in the book and the passage quoted from it? I think it is the style.
Not heroism, idealistic principles, or karma in the world, as Tolkien would have said. No; LeGuin says true fantasy is anything written in a genuine phony archaic style.
I think style is certainly not the causative or definitive feature we want to find, but it is not as useless a conclusion as it first appeared to me. For a style specifies how one approaches the objects one writes about. Does one describe them concretely or abstractly? Does one focus on the physical details, or on purposes and meanings? Does the wording create distance or intimacy? All the choices presented in the "Near / Far" table could be called stylistic. A style, then, positions a text on the Near / Far continuum. The archaic style LeGuin recommends creates a vast distance in time between the reader and the text, placing the whole thing firmly in far mode.
Knowing what is Near and what is Far will therefore help you keep your style more psychologically plausible, by not mixing Near and Far stylistic elements.
(Trope & Liberman 2010) mentioned some research on Near vs. Far style. Here "dispositional" means saying someone did something because of their character, versus "situational", which means saying someone did something because of the situation they were in.
It has been shown, for example, that personal memories of behaviors that were recalled from a third-person perspective (e.g., “try to remember your first day at school, as if you are now watching the kid you were”) rather than from a first-person perspective (“try to remember your first day at school, as if you are a kid again”) tended to use dispositional (as opposed to situational) terms (Frank & Gilovich, 1989; Nigro & Neisser, 1983). In a similar vein, Libby and Eibach (2002, Study 4) found that imagining performing an activity (e.g., rock climbing, playing drums) from a third-person perspective produced less vivid and rich reports of the activity than imagining the same activity from a first-person perspective. In terms of CLT, this means that a third-person perspective, which imposes more distance than a first-person perspective, induces a higher level of construal. Indeed, Pronin and Ross (2006) showed that taking a third person perspective rather a first-person perspective on one’s own behavior promoted attribution of the behavior to personality traits rather than to specific situational factors. — Trope & Liberman 2010 p. 447-8
All this means that your choice of first or third person point of view should take into account the construal mode you want to invoke in your reader. If you want to work in high fantasy, and have your reader concerned with romantic ideals and to see codes of ethics as absolute and inviolable, you should write in third person. If you want to confront your reader with unpleasant or messy truths and shake them out of dogmatic complacency, or bring them into close empathy with a unique individual, first-person would do better. This is why Tolkien and LeGuin's fantasies are in third person, while Glen Cook's Black Company and Roger Zelazney's Chronicles of Amber, both subversions of heroic fantasy, are in first person. It's also why Raymond Chandler's gritty, cynical detective novels are in first person.
These are not absolutes. Third person is extremely flexible. Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine is in a third person that is so close-in to the protagonist that it might as well be first-person. Hemingway's third person is so objective and concrete, and carefully stripped of Far-mode subjective judgments and abstractions, that it probably puts the reader in Near mode rather than Far.
[1] Trope & Liberman report on about 100 experiments, and in every case the results agreed with the predictions. This is literally too good to be true. Either the authors, the journals, or the reviewers consistently filtered out all adverse results. One important study has been retracted for being fraudulent.
[2] Even many of the experiments that attempted to measure distance also measured familiarity and abstraction, as they contrasted a nearby, well known place with a distant, unknown place which the subjects could only envision abstractly. So we should really call this the concrete / abstract dimension. But near / far is a more concrete way of describing it.
References
Yaacov Trope & Nira Liberman, 2010. Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance. Psychological Review 117(2): 440 – 463.
My brain hurts!!
You know what I'm going to post.
Ok, with that out of the way. (ahem) I really don't write first person well.
I think I do a bang-up job of third person (and getting better the longer I write), so I've resigned myself to 3P for most likely the rest of my writing career. I'm going to have to re-read Bradbury because I never did understand Dandelion Wine the first time I read it (think I've got a copy in the basement) as part of my quest to become a well-rounded writer (and not just from pizza and lazy).
3P Near is a very visceral writing experience, particularly when you want your readers to sympathize with the POV character. It doesn't do Great Arcs of World Events well, but it can drag a reader right down into the shoes of the character, something I really tried hard to do with 'Drifting' and the POV character, Turpentine. It's about as close to 1P Near as I've done, and best carried in dialogue, both internal and external (which is 1P for the most part anyway).
“And this is as far as you go,” said Gaberdine. “I’m sending you home.”
A spark of frustration broke loose in his chest and Turpentine lunged to his hooves. “I don’t have a home! How old do you think I need to be before I can go to Baltimare? Next year? The year after that? You say I can’t go to Baltimare, but can’t I at least try!”
That's interesting. I wonder if it holds for sci-fi as well (I'm not familiar enough to draw conclusions) but off the top of my head I feel like in both sci-fi and fantasy I can see a time/setting parallel to this, where things set closer to us in time tend to evoke the near (urban fantasy, magical realism, cyberpunk) while things set farther in the past or future are more likely to evoke the far. But I can also see exceptions -- Harry Potter gives a pretty thorough mix of near and far in setting and style, but deals totally in far themes.
(ETA Also possible that if you took the Harry Potter books individually, you could see a shift from near to far. Too tired right now to follow that analysis through.)
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I'm drawn to 1st person, myself, and for a while all of my OF was writen first person. I had to back off, because first person is pretty awkward if you want more than one POV character and because narrator reliability becomes an issue. Also, I find it a bit distracting in ponyfic -- I could have written Lost Time first person, but that's a lot of Rainbow Dash. I'm not sure that much Rainbow Dash is good for anyone.
Close third person limited does seem to be the most efficient "near" writing; you can get a lot of the same tone and still have multiple POVs and more easily signal when the perspectives should be taken with a grain of salt.
But with this in mind, I think I'll give myself permission to play more with first person in the future.
Good stuff. I do wonder if this is a side-effect / consequende of speaking English. Do other languages exhibit the same effect?
I can buy it.
Though I note that list is, in some places, entirely objective. For example, if you yourself are "high-born", rich and powerful, the common and low-born will be Far to you. That's the major one I can think of, though.
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>tfw you don't even have to play the video to instantly know what it is
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I know that nearness is an aspect of many languages, built-in to the construction of sentences, but how it relates to this concept and what languages those might be, I cannot recall off the top of my head.
Here's what I think of this theory.
There has only been a few books that I have read where I liked first person point of view. Unless the point of view character has a strong voice, and the author themselves is a good writer, the first person just never really interests me.
I really hope that second person point of view never moves beyond fimfiction and Archive of Our Own.
That explains why I'm writing my worst, most depressing story in first-person POV. To immerse readers in the hopelessness and powerlessness experienced by the character, bring it right up close and make it intensely personal, and thereby making her final redemption that much more powerful. How often do we reinvent the wheel.
I'm going to have to second Trick Question, with a caveat.
I don't think this isn't useful information. I just think, as it's currently presented, it's so vague and generalistic and self-contradicting in places as to not have a practical application to how I plan my writing.
I don't doubt what I've read here is, largely, true. I just find it difficult to see how I could practically apply it.
Near/Far might be better described as Local/Global. Local being driven-by-immediate-things (like back-and-forth conversations or minutiae in the present setting) and Global being driven-by-greater-forces (like stereotypes, morality, and worry). This seems to fit the table with fewer mental hops than Concrete/Abstract. Local styles would resist Global forces (i.e., the story would flow moment-to-moment without any indication of a preferred plan), and Global styles would resist Local forces (i.e., the story would flow as part of a plan without regard for details).
Local would be an alias for Entropic, of course, and Global an alias for Ordered.
The Concrete/Abstract view comes to the wrong conclusion for peripheral/central. I'd think that the Concrete/Abstract view would see "peripheral" features as abstract, but your second link (and the table) places it under Near/Concrete/Local/Entropic.
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I'm pretty sure this is wrong and that high-born, rich, and powerful belong to Far regardless of the individual. This is because I expect people that see themselves as high-born, rich, and powerful to also see themselves as being closer to ideal/order/good.
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If you want to know more, read the linked-to paper. I don't think any of what I've written here is self-contradictory, though I may have explained it poorly. I would rather you point out what is self-contradictory if you say it's self-contradictory . I think it is more specific, applicable, and well-founded in experiment than any writing advice you'll find in a book on how to write fiction. It is of limited use, but is clear within those limits.
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Trope & Liberman 2010 p. 456, VIII. "Distance-related extensions" argues that power creates social distance directly, so that people with power consider society at large to be distant from them.
(Also, embedding quotes doesn't shade right anymore.)
An argument to the contrary is that I knew a woman who was a member of one of the billionaire families that run America, and she told me that each city has a group of rich people who run the city, and think of themselves as the city. E.g., someone in those circles who says "See what Chicago thinks of that" means "talk to some of the big Chicago families", and someone who is already in Buffalo may say "I'm going to Buffalo tonight," meaning they are going to a party that many of the ruling citizens of Buffalo will attend. To them, non-super-rich people simply don't exist--which might make them think of society as Near, since society only has a few thousand people in it.
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The paper also uses that terminology.
Global does, I think, match Ordered. I'd rather say High-entropy than Entropic, as "entropy" is a direction along that continuum rather than a position along it. I don't know whether people would interpret "entropic" as "High entropy" or "increasing entropy". I didn't mention them because they aren't mentioned in the paper.
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Different people can react to the same stimuli differently, and trying to get people to account for people thinking in same categories as a result can come down to the author and reader disagreeing on the value of those ideas.
Which you're probably exploring or working through in your prose anyway.
Even at the end you show third and first person being used effectively to serve opposite categories, so I have to ask, how is this actually helpful or useful to take into consideration when planning a story, in your opinion?
Largely what you've covered is the general principle.
As to "this is better than any writing book", I endorse guides written by psycholinguists on how writing and prose is processed in the brain.
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As I wrote:
Third and first person can be used differently? So what? What were you expecting, an inviolable rule?
What specific guides?
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Sorry, didn't mean to come across as confrontational, I'm just trying to actually sift through this. Yes that chunk was a good example of how it could be applied to one element of planning a story, first vs third person, but there are other -- I'd argue more compelling -- reasons than this (immersion, style of protagonist you're using, do you need to have a character know less about the world than the audience (Hitchhiker's Guide, Discworld) or learn it with the audience (Hero's Journeys) of which this is just one more consideration to take into account), to have come to the same conclusions on that one. To be more specific with what I meant by planning a story; How would I apply the near/far idea to, say, writing a screenplay.
As to the book; There's one really good one that I like, but it unfortunately has a rather generic title, and I lent it to a friend... over a year ago, so I don't remember the author and I can't just look at the cover. I'll give him a shout and PM you as soon as I got it.
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The basic idea is that you can nudge readers/viewers towards abstract thinking by manipulating otherwise unrelated things. This is not remarkable; it's very much like setting a fast or slow tempo by having fast or slow background actions, scene changes, camera movements, movements of shadows, dialogue, high-pitched vs. low-pitched noises, etc. In cinema far / near would be even more important because that's visual. For instance, I saw a film recently that had a funeral scene near the beginning. Wish I could remember what movie it was! It was filmed from abnormally far away, so that you couldn't hear anything anyone said or make out their faces, which made it seem unreal, like the POV character was suppressing the reality.
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If people shift between Near and Far perspectives, then it might not make sense to have Local be the baseline for typical interactions. (I.e., "Near" and "normal" don't have to align.) If super-rich people perpetually focus on very few people that represent larger organisations, then I would expect their idea of "normal" to be shifted towards abstract, holistic, and idealistic.
Did the woman seem not to have that skewed perspective of "normal"?
4609321 Local would be the baseline for physical interactions, but that might not be typical.
One section of the article claims high-level managers are shifted towards the far, though it gives different reasons.
Not inasmuch as she was very interested in sex and architecture. I suppose it depends on the type of architecture.
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I think it would also depend on the type of sex.
4612027 Ba-dum. You owe me a straight line.
But it's hard for me to imagine how one would have abstract and idealistic sex. Perhaps by lying back and thinking of England.
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Your table at the top has some good suggestions.
I'm not sure if the last one is hilarious or depressing.
4612190 Heh.
I put "love" in quotes only because it is a hyper-ambiguous word.