It has just come to the attention of the authors of this paper that two articles from Sanna et al. [1, 2] which we cite have recently been retracted from their respective journals at the request of their authors. The first article was retracted from Psychological Science while our paper was in review with PLoS ONE [3]. The second article was retracted from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology after our paper was already published [4]. My coauthors and I were all unaware of these retractions until January 27th 2013, thus could not have taken measures to remove these citations from our paper prior to its publication on December 26th 2012. Needless to say we were disappointed to hear about retractions of the Sanna et al. papers.

The lead author stated in his letters to each journal editor as follows:
“The data reported in this article are invalid and should not be considered part of the scientific literature. The responsibility for this problem rests solely with the first author, Lawrence J. Sanna, and the co-authors are in no way responsible for this problem.” [3,4]

Now that we are aware of the retractions, we feel an obligation to the scientific community to recommend that they avoid citing the Sanna et al. papers in any future publications. We would have preferred to revise our own paper to remove the citations completely, but the Editorial Staff at PLoS ONE has informed us that the most appropriate forum to communicate with readers in cases such as these is through this online “Comments” page. Since the Sanna et al. references must remain in our paper; we wish to apologize in advance to any well-meaning scientists that are mistakenly led down fruitless paths. We hope the retraction notices issued by the other journals, and which we list among our references below, will limit future problems.

We also feel obliged to the scientific community to offer a candid assessment of how the retracted Sanna et al. citations may or may not affect our paper. We believe the impact is quite superficial and offer the following points for our readers to consider:

First, none of the coauthors of our paper has ever had any contact with Dr. Sanna.

Second, the papers in question have no bearing whatsoever on our survey design, the handling of our survey data, or the statistical approach that we employ to test our hypotheses.

Third, while the retracted papers do provide a minor piece of the literature review for our paper, only one sentence in the introduction and one sentence in the discussion touch on the retracted studies. And while the data presented by Sanna et al. have been removed from the scientific record, the notion that high level construal may lead people to act in cooperative rather than self-interested ways remains a valid and testable hypothesis. In fact, our results lend support to this hypothesis and contribute to the growing body of work assembled by a wide range of scientists who are showing how Construal Level Theory (CLT) can be usefully applied to an array of fields including negotiation, self-control, and environmental decision making [5,6,7]. The well-established literature on CLT goes back more than a decade and there is broad consensus in the field of social psychology that it will continue to be a very useful theoretical framework [8].

Having made these three points, we feel that our paper remains a scientifically sound contribution to the literature, albeit with rather dreadful luck and timing in respect to the Sanna retractions. But looking ahead and not behind, we invite our readers to use the “Comments” forum provided by PLoS ONE to share your thoughts on our paper. We will make every effort to reply to your comments whenever we have the time.

Best Regards,
Van R. Haden, Meredith T. Niles, Mark Lubell, Josh Perlman, and Louise E. Jackson

References:
1. Sanna, L.J., Chang, E.C., Parks, C.D., and Kennedy, L.A. (2009) Construing collective concerns: Increasing cooperation by broadening construals in social dilemmas. Psychological Science, 20:1319–1321.

2. Sanna L.J., Lundberg K.B., Parks C.D., and Chang E.C. (2010) “RETRACTED: Think and act globally, think and act locally: Cooperation depends on matching construal to action levels in social dilemmas,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6):1126–1129.

3. Sanna, L.J., Chang, E.C., Parks, C.D., and Kennedy, L.A.(2012) “Retraction of ‘Co
nstruing Collective Concerns: Increasing Cooperation by Broadening Construals in Social Dilemmas’,” Psychological Science, 23(8):949–949, Published Aug. 2012.

4. Sanna L.J., Lundberg K.B., Parks C.D., and Chang E.C, (2013) “Retraction notice to ‘Think and act globally, think and act locally: Cooperation depends on matching construal to action levels in social dilemmas’ [Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010) 1126–1129],” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Published Jan. 2013.

5. Henderson, M. D., & Trope, Y. (2009) The effects of abstraction on integrative agreements: When seeing the forest helps avoid getting tangled in the trees. Social Cognition, 27:399–415.

6. Fujita, K., Trope, Y., Liberman, N., and Levin-Sagi, M. (2006) Construal levels and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90: 351–367.

7. Spence A., Poortinga W., and Pidgeon N.F. (2012) The psychological distance of climate change. Risk Analysis, 32(6): 957–972.

8. Trope, Y., and Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance, Psychological Review, 117(2):440–463.