From Whom Do People Seek What Type of Support? A Regulatory Scope Perspective

From whom do people seek what type of support? Although people regularly seek support from close and distant others, little work has systematically investigated when and why people approach different people in their support network for different types of support. The present research introduces a novel distinction of social support and explores its relationship to the scope or range of support providers people would consider asking for support. Based on a recent extension of construal level theory (Trope et al., 2021), five experiments tested the bidirectional relation between levels of support and scope—the latter assessed by the social distance of potential support providers. Experiment 1 demonstrated that people can categorize supportive behaviors into low-level support (i.e., addressing the effect of a problem) and high-level support (i.e., addressing the cause of a problem). Experiments 2 and 4 showed that being prompted to seek low-level (vs. high-level) support-oriented people toward support providers who are socially proximal (vs. distal). In Experiment 3, thinking about interacting with a socially proximal (vs. distal) support provider led to a greater focus on receiving low-level (vs. high-level) support. Testing the implication of the link between levels of support and scope, Experiment 5 demonstrated that support recipients reported they would feel more gratitude when they imagined receiving low-level (vs. high-level) support from socially proximal (vs. distal) support providers.