The Speed of Change: Understanding How People Construe Political Change

With research into the relationship between memory and imagination broadening to include collective identities (i.e. race, nationality), and recent polarization in modern American politics, it is important to understand the way people think and strategize about political change from a collective standpoint. Based on what Klugman (2011) describes as a "theory of change", and informed by Trobe & Liberman’s (2003) original findings on abstract and concrete construals of events, the present study offers support for previous studies that have found patience and other temporal constraints to be an important predictor of how people conceptualize political change, including Wang's finding that an individual's patience is predictive of when they join a protest movement (2019), as well as various articles supporting the role temporal discounting plays in policy preferences (Barnfield, 2024) and moral future thinking (i.e. Law et al., 2024). In particular, it was found that the faster you desire social change to occur, as well as the more idealistic (i.e. abstract) you are about the type of system used to achieve political change (i.e. creating a new system vs. working within the current system), the more anxiety you have about your government's future response to issues you care about.