Do People Think Abstractly Inside Cathedrals? The Role of Place Size and Religiosity on Construal Level

This registered report (N = 2,466; >90% power to detect d ≥ 0.13) tested whether imagining oneself in large and religious places, such as cathedrals, promotes abstract thinking. Participants imagined themselves in one of the four experimental scenarios varying in size (large vs. small) and type (religious vs. secular), wrote about their imagined experience there, and completed validated measures assessing abstraction (neutral vs. religious content) and personal religiosity. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, abstraction was higher in religious than secular places, for religious than neutral content, and among more religious participants; the latter two factors also interacted. In contrast, place size showed no effect. Equivalence tests indicated that only effects involving personal religiosity approached practical significance (d = .40). Overall, religiosity-related factors predicted abstraction whereas spatial magnitude did not. Because spatial magnitude was a proxy for the spatial dimension of psychological distance, the findings did not support Construal Level Theory.