Construals

In social psychology, construals are how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them, particularly the behavior or action of others towards themselves.

Researchers and theorists within virtually every sub-discipline of psychology have acknowledged the relevance of a subjective construal, especially with regards to the concepts of the false consensus effect and the fundamental attribution error. There is a difference between self-construal and construal in a social atmosphere. While self-construal is a perception of the self, the latter is a perception of one's surroundings. Construal plays a crucial role in situations "whenever people are obliged to venture beyond the information immediately provided by the direct observation or secondhand report of a stimulus event, in particular whenever they are obliged to infer additional details of content, context, or meaning in the actions and outcomes that unfold around them." In other words, a person is most likely to use construal when he or she lacks the knowledge to correctly deal with a given situation.

The concept of construal is not a new one, and the components of construal can be seen in the works of many past psychologists including Kurt Lewin's recognition of the importance of a subjective reality and its effect on one's personal significance; Kurt Koffka's theories of gestalt psychology; Brunswik's emphasis on subjective distinction; Murray's discussion of "beta press"; Kelly's account of personal constructs; Merleau-Ponty's reference to personal situations; and more recent discussions by personality theorists such as Endler and Pervin. Construal used to be viewed as an obstruction in one's perception of the world, but has evolved into a mechanism used to explain how or why a person thinks the way they do.

Cognitive psychologists have been perhaps the most preoccupied with the idea of construal. This is evident in their emphasis on a human's formation of schemas "that help perceivers to resolve ambiguity, fill in the gaps, and generally perceive predictability and coherence." They focus on the idea that we rely on other sources to form our ideas of our surroundings.

Solomon Asch presented an important concept in construal theory when he stated, "that the very meaning of a message can change as a function of the source to which it is attributed." His most classic example is the effect of the phrase "a little rebellion…is a good thing." This statement coming from Thomas Jefferson has a different meaning to the recipient than it does coming from V.I. Lenin. The meaning of the statement is dependent on not only who says it, but also on how the recipient of the message interprets it.

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