The spatial grounding of politics.

Margarida V Garrido,Gün R Semin,Oleksandr V Horchak,Ana R Farias

doi:10.1007/s00426-022-01654-2

Abstract

In three studies, we advance the research on the association between abstract concepts and spatial dimensions by examining the spatial anchoring of political categories in three different paradigms (spatial placement, memory, and classification) and using non-linguistic stimuli (i.e., photos of politicians). The general hypothesis that politicians of a conservative or socialist party are grounded spatially was confirmed across the studies. In Study 1, photos of politicians were spontaneously placed to the left or right of an unanchored horizontal line depending on their socialist-conservative party affiliation. In Study 2, the political orientation of members of parliament systematically distorted the recall of the spatial positions in which they were originally presented. Finally, Study 3 revealed that classification was more accurate and faster when the politicians were presented in spatially congruent positions (e.g., socialist politician presented on the left side of the monitor) rather than incongruent ones (e.g., socialist on the right side). Additionally, we examined whether participants' political orientation and awareness moderated these effects and showed that spatial anchoring seems independent of political preference but increases with political awareness.

Highlights

The political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ originated in 1789 from the seating arrangement of the legislative bodies in the French National Assembly
The studies reported here examined whether such an arbitrarily established spatial anchoring grounds how we represent and process stimuli that are associated with political positions
Farias et al (2013) demonstrated that participants placed conservatism and socialism-related words correspondingly to a right or left spatial position on horizontal space. When those same words were presented loud to both ears, they were disambiguated as being louder to the ear that was congruent with the political position expressed by the word

Summary

Introduction

The political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ originated in 1789 from the seating arrangement of the legislative bodies in the French National Assembly. The ‘ancien régime’ sat to the right of the president, the ‘revolutionaries’ to his left (cf Gauchet & Taylor, 1999). This incidental spatial organization of politics has been with us ever since, condensing a variegated political spectrum (Ware, 1996) on the horizontal dimension. Farias et al (2013) demonstrated that participants placed conservatism and socialism-related words correspondingly to a right or left spatial position on horizontal space. When those same words were presented loud to both ears, they were disambiguated as being louder to the ear that was congruent with the political position expressed by the word. Apart from showing that a spatial relationship between political categories and the horizontal space exists, these results

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