Abstract
According to conceptual metaphor theory, individuals are thought to understand or express abstract concepts by using referents in the physical world—right and left for moral and immoral, for example. In this research, we used a modified Stroop paradigm to explore how abstract moral concepts are metaphorically translated onto physical referents in Chinese culture using the Chinese language. We presented Chinese characters related to moral and immoral abstract concepts in either non-distorted or distorted positions (Study 1) or rotated to the right or to the left (Study 2). When we asked participants to identify the Chinese characters, they more quickly and accurately identified morally positive characters if they were oriented upright or turned to the right and more quickly and accurately identified immoral characters when the characters were distorted or rotated left. These results support the idea that physical cues are used in metaphorically encoding social abstractions and moral norms and provided cross-cultural validation for conceptual metaphor theory, which would predict our results.
Highlights
Morality is a reflection of fundamental judgments about good and bad, right and wrong
Average reaction time (RT) did not differ between immorality words under distortion and it under no distortion
Identifying immorality words was more likely in the distortion condition than in the no distortion condition
Summary
Morality is a reflection of fundamental judgments about good and bad, right and wrong. Many cultural phenomena further indicate that horizontal spatial orientation has been related to moral concepts (“right” referring to moral rectitude and “left" referring to immoral or aberrant behavior) These perceptual cues or orientation of the objects can be redundantly mapped onto each other: right can refer to up, and left refers to down. We manipulated the congruence words’ meanings and their visual display and used response time to measure facilitation or interference effects on word semantic classification (moral vs immoral) We applied this experimental paradigm to test the possible facilitation of the proposed morphological metaphor mapping for moral concepts present in Chinese culture. We hypothesized participants would more quickly recognize nondistorted moral words and distorted immoral words (congruent condition) and that they would take more time to parse non-distorted immoral words and distorted moral words (incongruent condition)
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