Escalation of commitment causes people to continue a failing course of action. We study the role of construal level in such escalation of commitment. Consistent with the widely held view of construal level as a primed effect, we employed a commonly used prime for manipulating this construct in a laboratory experiment. Our findings revealed that the prime failed to produce statistically significant differences in construal level, which was measured using the Behavior Identification Form (BIF). Furthermore, there was no effect of the prime on escalation of commitment, or on constructs that have previously been linked to construal level such as the perceived importance of feasibility considerations relative to desirability considerations, and the number of pros and cons that subjects can think of.

Interestingly, however, subjects’ actual construal level scores on the BIF were found to significantly affect escalation. Specifically, our findings show that people with a low construal level are less willing to continue a failing project. This relation is mediated by the perceived importance of the feasibility of the project relative to its desirability. For people with a low construal level, the perceived importance of feasibility relative to desirability is higher, which in turn makes escalation of commitment less likely.

Our findings are consistent with prior research suggesting that priming construal level may not always be effective. Thus, while construal level has typically been regarded as a state-like variable that can be primed, in this study, we show that construal level may also be considered as a trait.

承诺的升级使人们继续采取失败的行动。我们研究了建构水平在这种承诺提升中的作用。与人们普遍认为的解释水平是引发效应相一致，我们在实验室实验中采用了常用的引发剂来操纵这种结构。我们的研究结果表明，素数在行为水平上没有产生统计学上的显着差异，而这是使用行为识别表（BIF）进行测量的。此外，素数对承诺的提升或以前与解释水平相关的构架没有影响，例如相对于合意性考虑的可行性考虑的重要性，以及受试者可以想到的利弊数量。

然而，有趣的是，发现受试者在BIF上的实际理解水平得分显着影响升级。具体而言，我们的发现表明，具有较低建设水平的人不太愿意继续失败的项目。这种关系由项目可行性相对于其可取性的感知重要性来调节。对于具有较低建设水平的人而言，相对于可取性而言，可行性的重要性被认为更高，这反过来又使得承诺升级的可能性降低。

我们的发现与先前的研究相吻合，表明启动解释水平可能并不总是有效的。因此，虽然解释力水平通常被认为是可以启动的类似状态的变量，但在这项研究中，我们证明了解释力水平也可以被视为特质。