Abstract:  Decision making means the evaluating and choosing among alternatives which contains some outcomes. No matter what the results of the decision making refer to money, health, environment or others, all these outcomes may embrace multiple attributes, such as the probability, time and places of the occurrence. And these attributes, as well as the amount of outcome affect individuals’ evaluation of outcome utility and their choices. Previous researches have proposed some models of evaluation, which associate the amount of outcome with its attributes respectively. However, theory of psychological distance has proposed that the probabilistic, temporal, spacial and social distance all can be represented by psychological distance. It indicates that the intertemporal choice, risky decision making and the other kinds of decision making may be unified by the perspective of psychological distance. Recently, a series of researches have been conducted to analyze the homogeneity of these four dimensions of psychological distance. Moreover, the researchers explored the phenomena and rules of discounting based on psychological distance. They also examined the effect of the time, probability, spacial and social distance on individuals’ decision making. For the future research, more attention should be paid to the multi-attribute decision making. And more studies should focus on the common currency of four kinds of psychological distance and the way of integrating different psychological distance. At last, it is expected to construct a general model of decision making based on psychological distance.

Key words: decision making, psychological distance, construal level, discounting