Yaacov Trope

New York University, New York, New York ~Professor of Psychology. Contributions to knowledge of the psychological mechanisms underlying how people understand events in the world and make decisions. Studied whether people act in a self-enhancing manner or in a manner to attain veridical assessment of their competencies; found convincing support for the accuracy proposal. Illuminated psychological processes underlying people's explanations for others' actions. Fundamentally changed how psychologists understand the nature of attributional processes by showing that situations influence not only later causal inferences but also how behavioral events are identified initially, with this early identification process often the major determinant of the final attribution. Elucidated whether individuals make different choices depending on how they construe the decision. In testing original theory of psychological distance, discovered considerable similarity in the way people mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, and social distance, that the process of mental abstraction underlies traversing the different distances, and that this process guides the way people predict, evaluate, and plan psychologically near and distant situations. Theories and discoveries challenge established ways of thinking about fundamental issues in human judgment and inference, decision-making, self-regulation, and self-control.~~