The article explores how people transcend the present and mentally traverse different dimensions of psychological distance, including temporal, spatial, social, and hypotheticality. The authors propose that this ability is facilitated by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. They review research showing that these different dimensions of psychological distance are mentally associated and that increasing psychological distance leads to higher-level construals, which are more abstract and schematic representations of objects or events. Higher-level construals enable people to predict, evaluate, and plan for distant situations more effectively. The article discusses how these higher-level construals affect perception, categorization, inference, and behavior, suggesting that they lead to more confident predictions, polarized evaluations, and clearer choices. The authors conclude that the increasing reliance on high-level construals for distant situations often results in more decisive and confident decisions, despite the intuitive expectation that distant situations should afford less certainty.The article explores how people transcend the present and mentally traverse different dimensions of psychological distance, including temporal, spatial, social, and hypotheticality. The authors propose that this ability is facilitated by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. They review research showing that these different dimensions of psychological distance are mentally associated and that increasing psychological distance leads to higher-level construals, which are more abstract and schematic representations of objects or events. Higher-level construals enable people to predict, evaluate, and plan for distant situations more effectively. The article discusses how these higher-level construals affect perception, categorization, inference, and behavior, suggesting that they lead to more confident predictions, polarized evaluations, and clearer choices. The authors conclude that the increasing reliance on high-level construals for distant situations often results in more decisive and confident decisions, despite the intuitive expectation that distant situations should afford less certainty.