The Effects of Emotional Involvement and Psychological Distance on Integrative Complexity1

Integrative complexity is a measure of information processing that is scored either from archival documents or from written material generated for experimental purposes. Low complexity is associated with a lack of attention to diverse dimensions of, or perspectives on, a topic. Moderate complexity is characterized by the differentiation of such dimensions or perspectives. Finally, high complexity is shown by conceptual integration of the differentiated components. A large number of situational variables have been identified as affecting the level of complexity at which decision makers operate; however, emotional factors have been studied only indirectly (e.g., inferred from the individual's being in an apparently stressful situation). The current study presented university students with fictional scenarios describing interpersonal conflict that were designed to vary the psychological distance between the writer and the people involved in the problem. The complexity level of essays in which the students analyzed and described solutions for the conflict was positively related to both increasing psychological distance and to self‐rated emotional involvement, regardless of distance. The distance results may have been due to an unconsidered variable, social perspective. Complexity was significantly and positively correlated with the self‐rated effort expended in writing the essay. The findings partially confirm the cognitive manager model of complexity: The complexity of decision strategies is affected by the balance between the importance of the problem and the resources (cognitive and other) that must be invested to operate at different levels of complexity. The data have implications for understanding the impact of emotional involvement on cognitive complexity.