Moving, Fast or Slow: How Perceived Speed Influences Mental Representation and Decision Making

Abstract Can the sensation of moving fast versus slow systematically influence consumer behavior? With recent technological innovations, people increasingly experience speed during decision making. They can be physically on the move with their devices or virtually immersed in speed simulated through their devices. Through seven experiments, we provide evidence for a speed-abstraction effect, where the perception of moving faster (vs. slower) leads people to rely on more abstract (vs. concrete) mental representations during decision making. This effect manifests for virtually simulated (experiment 1) and physically experienced (experiment 2) movement on moving trains. We suggest that it stems from an underlying speed-abstraction schema where people associate faster speed with abstraction and slower speed with concreteness (experiments 3a–3c). Weakening this schema attenuates the effect (experiment 4). Through a field study, experiment 5 demonstrates that video ads placed on Facebook are more engaging when virtually simulated speed matches the linguistic abstraction level of the message. Dimensions of psychological distance (time, space) and factors influencing mental representation (affect, fluency, spatial orientation) are addressed as possible alternative explanations that cannot account for the effect. We propose a framework for understanding how experiencing speed—both physical and virtual—can influence decision making.