Michael D. Sagristano
Assistant Professor
Ph.D.
Research Area: Social, Evolutionary
Contact Information:
Office: 203 Behavioral Science
Telephone: (561) 297-0650
Fax: (561) 297-2160
E-mail: sagrista@fau.edu
General Research Interests
Michael Sagristano conducts research on social cognition, attitudes, and decision-making. Much of his work concerns how information relevant to an attitude or decision is categorized, classified, and weighted. He and his colleagues have shown that this mental construal process is influenced by the temporal distance to an event. Peoples mental representation of a distant future event tends to highlight the abstract, general, and essential features of the event, but their representation of a near future event typically consists of concrete, specific, or peripheral features. This basic difference in level of representation has been shown to have a number of noteworthy implications. For example, the typical approach to measuring attitudes emphasizes relatively abstract and general features of attitude-relevant behavior, and thus is more compatible with representations of distant as opposed to near future events. As a result, the ability of attitudes to predict behavior is, paradoxically, often greater for distant events than for more immediate events. Dr. Sagristano has confirmed this hypothesis with respect to real-life decisions concerning blood donation, exercise, gambling, and voting in the 2000 presidential election. Future research will extend this model to other domains, with an eye toward reframing traditional models of judgment and decision-making within a dynamic framework that emphasizes the fluid nature of mental representations. Additional focus will be given to the functionality of mental representation, including why variation in construal would have evolved and been selected for.
Representative Publications
Sagristano, M. D., Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2002). Time-dependent gambling: Odds now, money later. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131, 364-376.
Liberman, N., Sagristano, M. D., & Trope, Y. (2002). The effect of temporal distance on level of mental construal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 523-534.
