Humans have developed a unique ability to think about hypothetical events (imagined, fictional, improbable events) and to distinguish them from real events (directly experienced, factual, certain events). We examined how people mentally construe events that are more and less hypothetical. In six pre-registered studies (N = 1605) participants completed the Behavioral Identification Form, in which they chose between abstract and concrete action descriptions. We found that participants preferred to describe more hypothetical actions by their abstract goals and less hypothetical actions by their concrete means when the more and the less hypothetical actions were contrasted, but not in the absence of such contrast. We discuss potential difficulties of manipulating hypotheticality and suggest how to overcome them. We also discuss the nature of hypotheticality and how it is both similar to and different from other psychological distances.

人类已经发展出一种独特的能力来思考假设事件（想象的、虚构的、不可能的事件）并将其与真实事件（直接经历的、事实的、某些事件）区分开来。我们研究了人们如何在心理上解释或多或少假设的事件。在六项预先注册的研究中（N = 1605) 参与者填写了行为识别表，在其中他们在抽象和具体的行为描述之间进行选择。我们发现，当比较更多和更少的假设性行为时，参与者更喜欢用抽象目标来描述更多的假设性行为，而用具体手段来描述更少的假设性行为，但在没有这种对比的情况下则不会。我们讨论了操纵假设的潜在困难，并提出了如何克服这些困难的建议。我们还讨论了假设性的本质以及它与其他心理距离的相似和不同之处。