Physical warmth and perceptual focus: a replication of IJzerman and Semin (2009).

Janneke D Schilder,Hans Ijzerman,Jaap J A Denissen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112772

Abstract

With the changing of modal research practices in psychology, the grounded cognition perspective (sometimes categorized under the more popular term of “social priming”) has become heavily criticized. Specifically, LeBel and Campbell (2013) reported a failed replication of a study involving what some would call “social priming.” We sought to replicate a study from our own lab (IJzerman & Semin, 2009), to investigate the reproducibility of the reported effect that physical warmth leads to a greater focus on perceptual relations. We also improved our methods to reduce potential experimenter's bias (cf. Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012). We successfully replicated the finding that a simple cue of physical warmth makes people more likely to adopt a relational focus.

Highlights

The perspective that cognition is grounded in concrete experiences has been endorsed by most philosophers and researchers throughout human history [1] [2]
Language abstraction score was not measured in this study as IJ&S did since we were interested in the association between physical warmth and perceptual focus for the current replication
It is true that our replication was not ‘‘exact’’, but no study in psychology can be so

Summary

Introduction

The perspective that cognition is grounded in concrete experiences has been endorsed by most philosophers and researchers throughout human history [1] [2]. The past three decades have seen a re-emergence of sensorimotor states in representing cognition (for theoretical perspectives, see [1] [2]; [5]). LeBel and Campbell [6] reported a failed replication involving what some would coin ‘‘social priming’’. For these reasons, we replicated a study from our own lab with a much similar topic by IJzerman and Semin ([7]; hereafter IJ&S). The current study has as primary goal to investigate the effect’s stability, and as important secondary goal to further minimize experimenter bias, typically associated with this related field of ‘‘social priming’’ [8]

Methods

Results

Conclusion