The distance that shapes our thinking
Six months out from your vacation, you’re probably dreaming about relaxing and reconnecting with nature. The day before, you’re frantically checking to make sure your sunscreen is packed and you can access your tickets on your phone. This mental shift - from big picture thinking down to the nitty-gritty - isn’t just about vacation planning, it’s a fundamental pattern in how your mind works and it has profound implications for teaching and learning.
Perceiving the distance
Psychologists call this phenomenon “psychological distance” and it affects how we process everything from math problems to climate change. When something feels far away in time, space, social connection, or likelihood, we tend to think about it very abstractly. We understand it as something without detail or context, more like a vibe than an actual tangible thing. When it feels closer, we think about it concretely with details and specificity that we hadn’t before.
Psychological distance comes in four flavors:
Spatial - literally how far away something feels, like something right in front of you vs something three states over
Temporal - a distance in time, like how far in the future or past an object or experience exists
Social - how far another social group feels from you, like whether or not something is part of your culture or a much different culture
Hypothetical - the likelihood of something happening… if something is definitely happening, you perceive it closer than if it is most likely not happening
What it means for the classroom
As educators, we can leverage this to enhance learning. We can move students psychologically closer and further away using teaching moves and activities depending on where your students might be and where you want them to go, psychologically. Think about teaching climate change. It can feel spatially distant from students if they aren’t directly feeling the effects of climate change but they’ve seen images of polar bears floating on icebergs. It can feel temporally distant when the message our students get is that climate change is a “future problem”. It can feel socially distant when our students perceive climate change as something that is only affecting people who live in the extreme heat of the desert. It can feel hypothetically distant if your students are in an area where they are unlikely to see things like extreme weather. It behooves us as educators to move these students psychologically closer to climate change in order for our students to see it as a more concrete issue with real life ramifications and real life solutions.
Teachers have many tools for moving students across a psychological distance. Documentaries that have stunning visuals and relatable characters, for instance, can bridge the psychological gap for students. Field trips and first hand experiences with phenomena can bring the psychological distance to zero by showing students that the phenomena is here, now, and happening to them at this moment. For climate education, building connections to watershed health and biodiversity loss by taking students into the field is an excellent way to bridge psychological distance. Sharing local stories from those who are dealing with climate issues every day like farmers, energy suppliers, and conservation managers can add necessary context to your lessons.
Psychological distance is bi-directional, and I think that’s really important to understand. As educators, we know there are times where we’d like to push our students to think more abstractly and broadly about content as well. Just like there are ways to reduce psychological distance, there are ways to increase it as well. Connecting local phenomena with global phenomena, for instance, pushes students to increase the spatial distance between them and the content and encourages them to think more broadly about it.
Where do we go from here
My hunch is that many of you are already traversing psychological distance in your classrooms everyday, you just might not realize it yet. There is a beauty here that psychological distance isn’t fixed - we can work with it. By thoughtfully shifting distance through narratives, experiences, and activities, we create learning environments that are not just effective but add context to the phenomena being studied.
This is the crux of my research. Psychological distance in education is under explored. In my day to day, I’m looking at ways that teachers are already traversing psychological distance and finding new teaching methods and tools that encourage students to shift their psychological perspective. Stay tuned, there is a lot of power here and I’m excited to share my findings.