The

Power of
Metaphor
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 The
Power of
Metaphor
Examining Its Influence on Social Life

Edited by Mark J. Landau,

Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier

American Psychological Association • Washington, DC

 Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Except
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The power of metaphor : examining its influence on social life / edited by Mark J. Landau,
Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier.
   pages cm
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-1-4338-1579-9 — ISBN 1-4338-1579-6  1.  Social perception. 2.  Cognitive
grammar. 3.  Metaphor—Social aspects. 4.  Metaphor—Psychological aspects.  I. Landau,
Mark J. (Mark Jordan)
  HM1041.P69 2014
 303.3'7—dc23
               2013024820

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-000

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 Contents

Contributors.................................................................................................  vii

I.  Metaphor as a Cognitive Tool for Understanding

Abstract Social Concepts............................................................................. 1
Chapter 1. Introduction........................................................................3
Mark J. Landau, Michael D. Robinson,
and Brian P. Meier
Chapter 2. Conceptual Metaphor in Thought
and Social Action............................................................ 17
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.

II.  Metaphor’s Role in Social and Personality

Psychology Phenomena.............................................................................. 41
Chapter 3. Conceptual Metaphor Theory
and Person Perception...................................................... 43
Brian P. Meier, Abigail A. Scholer,
and Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer

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 Chapter 4. The Role of Conceptual Metaphor in Memory............... 65
L. Elizabeth Crawford
Chapter 5. Metaphor in Judgment and Decision Making.................. 85
Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz
Chapter 6. Dirt, Pollution, and Purity: A Metaphoric
Perspective on Morality................................................. 109
Chen-Bo Zhong and Julian House
Chapter 7. Toward a Metaphor-Enriched
Personality Psychology................................................... 133
Michael D. Robinson and Adam K. Fetterman
Chapter 8. The Role of Metaphors in Intergroup Relations............ 153
Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, and Luciano Arcuri
Chapter 9. The Metaphoric Framing Model:
Political Communication and Public Opinion.............. 179
Victor Ottati, Randall Renstrom, and Erika Price

III.  Current Issues and Direction for Future Research........................ 203

Chapter 10. Do Evaluative Metaphors Shape
Emotional Thought? A Call for New Evidence............. 205
Gary D. Sherman and Gerald L. Clore
Chapter 11. Are There Basic Metaphors?.......................................... 225
Simone Schnall
Chapter 12. Experiential Origins of Mental Metaphors:
Language, Culture, and the Body................................... 249
Daniel Casasanto
Chapter 13. Metaphor Research in Social-Personality
Psychology: The Road Ahead........................................ 269
Mark J. Landau, Michael D. Robinson,
and Brian P. Meier
Index ......................................................................................................... 287
About the Editors...................................................................................... 301

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 Contributors

Luciano Arcuri, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Developmental

and Socialization Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Daniel Casasanto, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology,
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Gerald L. Clore, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville
L. Elizabeth Crawford, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychol-
ogy, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA
Adam K. Fetterman, MS, Graduate Student, Department of Psychology,
North Dakota State University, Fargo
Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychol-
ogy, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, Univer-
sity of California at Santa Cruz
Julian House, MA, Graduate Student, Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Mark J. Landau, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Uni-
versity of Kansas, Lawrence

vii

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 Spike W. S. Lee, PhD, Assistant Professor, Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Anne Maass, PhD, Professor, Department of Developmental and Socializa-
tion Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Brian P. Meier, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Get-
tysburg College, Gettysburg, PA
Victor Ottati, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, Loyola University
Chicago, Chicago, IL
Erika Price, MA, Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Loyola Uni-
versity Chicago, Chicago, IL
Randall Renstrom, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology,
Central College, Pella, IA
Michael D. Robinson, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, North
Dakota State University, Fargo
Simone Schnall, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology, Univer-
sity of Cambridge, Cambridge, England
Abigail A. Scholer, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology,
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Norbert Schwarz, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor
Gary D. Sherman, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Decision Science
Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Caterina Suitner, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Developmental
and Socialization Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Chen-Bo Zhong, PhD, Assistant Professor, Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

viii       contributors

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 I
Metaphor as
a Cognitive Tool
for Understanding
Abstract Social
Concepts

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 1
Introduction
Mark J. Landau, Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier

Browse a bookstore’s philosophy section and you will find hefty tomes
devoted to the analysis of single concepts such as friendship, authenticity, guilt,
power, morality, freedom, and evil. Scholars wrestle with the precise meaning
of these concepts because they are inherently abstract. Unlike concepts that
refer to categories of things that we experience with our senses, these concepts
lack a concrete referent existing in the world outside ourselves—you cannot
see evil, for instance.
It is therefore remarkable that, generally speaking, people seem to have
little difficulty making sense of these and other abstract concepts. They form
impressions of coworkers’ friendliness and authenticity, suffer the pangs of
guilt, buy luxury goods to advertise their power, judge the moral implications
of political policy, and support wars to spread freedom and stem the tide of evil.
The question then becomes: What cognitive processes do people normally use
to grasp the abstract concepts that lie at the center of their social life?

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-001
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M. J. Landau, M. D. Robinson, and
B. P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 This book explores the possibility that people understand and experi-
ence abstract social concepts using metaphor. From this perspective, metaphor
is not—as conventional wisdom would have it—simply a matter of words;
rather, it is a cognitive tool that people routinely use to understand abstract
concepts (e.g., morality) in terms of superficially dissimilar concepts that are
relatively easier to comprehend (e.g., cleanliness).
Although observations on metaphor’s cognitive significance date back
to Aristotle (circa 335 B.C.E./2006), the development of a formal theoretical
framework, labeled conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), has recently stimulated
systematic empirical study on metaphor’s role in social psychological phenom-
ena. This book summarizes current knowledge and integrates recent devel-
opments for readers interested in the topic of metaphor and the cognitive
underpinnings of social life more broadly. We hope this book stimulates and
guides future research on the causes and consequences of metaphoric think-
ing for how people perceive, act, and make judgments and decisions in their
social environment.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of CMT. We then review
recent developments in social psychology that have been useful for empirically
studying metaphors’ influence on thought, feeling, and action. We close with
an overview of how the rest of the book is organized.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Metaphor is commonly known as a figure of speech through which we

describe one thing in terms of another. When Romeo says, “Juliet is the sun,”
he cannot really mean that she is a giant spherical mass of hot plasma. Most of
us are taught in grade school that metaphor is a decorative frill—a colorful but
essentially useless embellishment to “normal” or even “proper” language—and
that it is the special province of poets and other literary elites. But this is incor-
rect. English speakers utter about one metaphor for every 10 to 25 words, or
about six metaphors a minute (Geary, 2011). Consider the following ordinary
expressions:
77 I can see your point (understanding is seeing)
77 I’ll keep that in mind (the mind is a container)
77 Christmas is fast approaching (events are moving objects)
77 That is a heavy thought (thoughts are objects with weight)
77 I feel down (feelings are vertical locations)
77 The national economy veered off course (economy as a vehicle)
77 I devoured the book, but I’m still digesting its claims (ideas are food)
77 Her arguments are strong (arguments are muscle force)

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 77 I’m moving forward with the book (progress is forward motion)
77 What a sweet person! (agreeableness is sweet taste)
Although these expressions strike most people as perfectly natural, they
do not make sense in strict literal terms. For example, thoughts lack weight,
feelings do not have an actual vertical location, and arguments cannot have
muscle strength. Given such points, and the fact that linguistic metaphors are
nevertheless pervasive (Geary, 2011), the big question is whether metaphoric
language possesses deeper significance for understanding the representational
processes that underlie thought.
According to many theories of language and, perhaps, common sense
as well, the answer to this question is “no.” Metaphoric expressions may be
simply idioms (figures of speech) that do not convey any meaningful insight
into how we think. If a person says, for instance, that she is “moving up in the
company,” we instantly understand that she is referring to her career with-
out, it seems, accessing any information about her vertical position. Another
possibility is that people speak metaphorically because they think doing so is
somehow more powerful in communication. From this related perspective,
we use expressions such as “a cold reception” to convey subjective experi-
ences in a manner that might be more easily comprehended by others, but,
critically, our private thinking about those experiences is essentially literal.
Yet there is a distinguished philosophical tradition that conceives of
metaphor as fundamental to human thought (Gibbs, 1994, 2008). On this
view, people speak metaphorically because they think metaphorically. This
notion was advanced by Friedrich Nietzsche (1873/1974) and 20th century
philosophers such as Julian Jaynes (1976) and Susanne Langer (1979), and
it finds its clearest formulation in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s 1980
book Metaphors We Live By. In what has come to be known as conceptual
metaphor theory, Lakoff and Johnson made a compelling theoretical case for
the view that metaphor pervades human thought processes (for an introduc-
tory overview, see Kövecses, 2010).
A conceptual metaphor consists of two dissimilar concepts, one of
which is understood in terms of the other. The two concepts involved in
metaphor have special names. The concept that one tries to understand is
the target, whereas the concept used for this purpose is the source. Targets are
generally abstract, complex, and difficult to comprehend, whereas sources
represent relatively more concrete, perceptual, and embodied experiences
(e.g., tasting something, seeing something, feeling something’s texture)—
experiences that are easier to comprehend and typically available from the
earliest moments of life (Mandler, 2004). For example, although it is difficult
to understand intimacy, it is easier to experience warmth as a bodily tempera-
ture. A metaphor involving these two concepts is conventionally denoted as

introduction      5

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 intimacy is warmth and is expressed in idioms such as a warm greeting or an icy
stare (devoid of intimacy).
What does it mean to understand a target in terms of a source? According
to CMT, metaphor creates a conceptual mapping, defined as a systematic set of
associations between elements of a target (i.e., features, properties, and rela-
tions) and analogous elements of the source (see Figure 1.1 for a graphical
depiction). In the previous example, intimacy and warmth share elements
because both are experienced as pleasant and in fact co-occur in our inter-
actions with caregivers and romantic partners (Williams, Huang, & Bargh,
2009). In this way, a conceptual metaphor allows people to draw on their
knowledge of the source as a framework for thinking about the target.
To illustrate, consider the conceptual mapping created by the meta-
phor love is a journey, depicted in Figure 1.2. The mapping puts elements of
the two concepts into systematic correspondence, thereby allowing people
to use their knowledge of journeys to inform how they think, feel, and act
during a close relationship marked by love. For example, they can represent
love-related experiences as having a starting point (initial attraction) and an
intended destination (typically matrimony and increased intimacy over time).
The relationship can stall or move in the wrong direction, such as when a part-
ner feels they are headed for a breakup.
The metaphor also entails practical inferences. People generally under-
stand that a person on a journey usually has to pass over difficult terrain to
reach a destination. By understanding a close relationship as a journey,
people can expect to encounter conflicts as their relationships progress. Of
course, conceptual mappings are partial, meaning that not all elements of the

Target concept containing pieces of Source concept containing pieces of

knowledge about characterisc knowledge about characterisc
features, properes, and their relaons features, properes, and their relaons

Figure 1.1.  Graphical depiction of a conceptual mapping.

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 Love Journey
Lovers Travelers

Desnaons
Life Goals

Impediments
Relaonship to Moon
Difficules

Lack of Lack of
Purpose Direction

Figure 1.2.  Graphical depiction of a portion of the conceptual mapping created by

the metaphor love is a journey.

source are used to structure the target. When beginning a new relationship,
for example, people do not usually worry about packing a suitcase.
A corollary of CMT is that the same target can be mapped onto differ-
ent sources. Because mappings are partial, mapping a target onto one source
will highlight (make salient) and downplay (inhibit) some elements, whereas
mapping that same target onto an alternate source will pick out a different
set of elements (see Figure 1.3 for a graphical depiction). For example, think-
ing of love as a journey will highlight the fact that relationships should head
somewhere, whereas thinking of love as a plant that needs to be nurtured will
deemphasize movement but perhaps better capture the idea that relation-
ships can wither to the extent that we do not water them (e.g., by periodic
expressions of kindness).
In this way, alternate conceptual mappings can produce systematic
changes in perceptions, inferences, and attitudes toward the target. For exam-
ple, conceptualizing arguments in terms of war (“I cannot penetrate her defenses”)
should promote a hostile orientation in which one party is the victor and the
other is the vanquished. By contrast, conceptualizing arguments in terms of
locations that are far apart (“Are we on different planets?”) should downplay
hostility and even promote efforts toward finding a ‘common ground,’ or com-
promise, between arguing parties.
What empirical evidence exists in support of CMT? Pioneering research
in the area of cognitive linguistics analyzed speech acts and inferred the
conceptual metaphors that gave rise to them (for a comprehensive review of
this work, see Gibbs, 1994). This research has succeeded in an important
respect: Metaphoric linguistic expressions are not isolated speech acts but
rather are strikingly coherent in supporting a common conceptual metaphor.

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 Source A Source A

Target Target

Source B Source B

Figure 1.3.  Alternate conceptual mappings.

For example, by positing a conceptual metaphor ideas are food, one can
explain why so many linguistic expressions follow from this mapping (you
devour a book, try to digest its raw facts, let the ideas simmer for a while,
regurgitate those ideas when asked, although some ideas may be half-baked).
Novel expressions consistent with such conceptual metaphors (e.g., that
point could use some seasoning) are readily understood, further attesting to
the active operation of a deep, conceptual mapping.
Even so, it must be recognized that this line of evidence is impressionis-
tic and unconvincing to some researchers. There are many idioms (e.g., kick
the bucket) that are often used but do not appear to be meaningful in con-
ceptual terms in the modern day (Gibbs, 1994). Also, expressions that might
have been conceptually motivated at some point in time (e.g., “feeling down”)
are now so conventional that one might doubt whether conceptual metaphors
motivate their expression (McGlone, 2007). Gibbs (Chapter 2, this volume)
sums up this controversy: “People may use metaphoric language as a matter of
convention without necessarily having some underlying cognitive mapping
occur between disparate source and target concepts” (p. 22). Such concerns
have recently been surmounted in an impressive body of evidence for concep-
tual metaphor in social psychology, the focus of the present volume.

Metaphor Research in Social Psychology

By taking advantage of methodological advances in the study of social

cognition, social psychologists have provided extensive, sometimes surprising,
evidence for the role of conceptual metaphors in people’s thought, feeling,
and action. Researchers have primarily adopted one of two broad research

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 strategies, the metaphoric transfer strategy and the alternate source strategy
(Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). The reasoning behind the metaphoric trans-
fer strategy is that if people in fact think of an abstract target (e.g., intimacy) in
terms of a relatively more concrete source (e.g., physical warmth), then manip-
ulating how people understand or experience the source (e.g., inducing physi-
cal warmth) should “transfer” across the conceptual mapping, changing how
they process analogous elements of the target (e.g., heightening felt intimacy).
If, alternatively, metaphor does not shape thought, there would be no reason
to expect such effects, because people’s representations of the target would not
be systematically structured around knowledge of the source.
The alternate source strategy is derived from the idea that the same tar-
get can be understood in terms of different sources (e.g., love is a journey, a plant
that needs to be nurtured, and dozens of other concrete concepts; Kövecses,
2010). This strategy focuses on whether the activation of different conceptual
metaphors for the same target differentially influences target processing in line
with the respective source concepts (Landau et al., 2010).
Let’s first consider research using the metaphoric transfer strategy in
more detail. Researchers adopting this strategy have developed a number of
experimental paradigms. Some have used reaction time and perception tasks
borrowed from cognitive psychology. For example, Meier, Robinson, and Clore
(2004) based their predictions on metaphors linking positive affect to bright-
ness (e.g., a bright future) and negative affect to darkness (e.g., a dark thought).
They randomly assigned positive (e.g., hero) and negative (e.g., liar) affect
words to lighter or darker font colors and asked participants to evaluate them
as quickly as possible. Despite the irrelevance of the font color manipula-
tion, positive affect words were evaluated more quickly when assigned to
the brighter color, and negative affect words were evaluated more quickly
when assigned to the darker color. Meier and Robinson (2004) extended such
results to manipulations of verticality. Positive affect words were evaluated
more quickly when placed high on the computer screen (consistent with
positive affect being up), and negative affect words were evaluated more
quickly when placed low on the computer screen (consistent with nega-
tive affect being down). Other studies using related paradigms have shown
that socially dominant stimuli are categorized faster when presented higher
(Schubert, 2005), moral stimuli are classified faster when in a white font
color (Sherman & Clore, 2009), and positive stimuli seem brighter (Meier,
Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007) and shift attention upward (Meier &
Robinson, 2004).
Other variations on the metaphoric transfer strategy use between-
subject manipulations to examine whether priming a source concept pro-
duces metaphor-consistent changes in target processing. Williams and Bargh
(2008a) used this approach to examine the metaphoric link between physical

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 and interpersonal warmth. They based their hypotheses on studies showing
that people commonly refer to interactions with others by using the concepts
warm and cold (Asch, 1946; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007), such as when one
receives a warm welcome or a cold rejection. To determine whether this meta-
phor influences social perceptions, they had the experimenter, who appar-
ently needed a free hand, ask participants to hold her coffee cup. Depending
on condition, the cup was either warm or cold. Afterward, all participants
were asked to read a brief description of another person and rate that per-
son’s friendliness and trustworthiness—that is, their interpersonal “warmth.”
As predicted, participants who simply held a warm (vs. cold) beverage sub-
sequently perceived a target individual as friendlier and more trustworthy,
suggesting that conceptual metaphors can influence social perceptions even
in contexts in which metaphoric language is absent. Williams and Bargh
(2008b) subsequently showed that priming closeness (vs. distance) leads
people to feel more attached to their hometowns and families.
Theoretically predicted metaphoric transfer effects have now been found
in dozens of published studies. Although this work began in a few labs, the
study of metaphor and social cognition is now an enterprise shared among
independent researchers across the globe, many of whom are contributors to
this book. Subtle manipulations of source-relevant cognition and experience
have been shown to influence how people perceive, remember, and make judg-
ments and decisions related to a wide range of abstract social concepts that, on
the surface, represent different kinds of things. In fact, studies show that source
experiences influence, by means of metaphoric associations, outcomes that are
commonly attributed to fixed personality traits (e.g., agreeableness) or intel-
lectual capacity (e.g., creativity). Here are just a few of the fascinating results
that have been found:
77 Weight manipulations influence perceived importance.
77 Smooth textures promote social coordination.
77 Hard textures result in greater strictness in social judgment.
77 Hot backgrounds bias perceptions of facial anger.
77 Dirty rooms result in less tolerance of moral indiscretions.
77 Fishy smells result in doubts about trustworthiness.
77 Thoughts of body contamination activate anti-immigrant
sentiments.
The success of this strategy is surprising in part because priming research
in social psychology has mostly focused on the activation of knowledge struc-
tures that have a relatively obvious bearing on the target phenomenon (e.g.,
priming hostile thoughts produces hostile behaviors). That manipulating a
perception-related concept would systematically influence processing with
respect to a more abstract social concept represents a major departure from

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 this traditional focus, one in favor of a fundamental role for metaphor in
social cognition (Bargh, 2006; Williams et al., 2009).
A smaller body of research has used the alternate source strategy. A
common method for activating a particular metaphor in people’s minds is to
expose them to a metaphoric framing—a communication (e.g., a newspaper
headline) that compares an abstract target to a superficially unrelated, more
concrete source. Researchers have tested whether situational exposure to a
metaphoric framing guides people to use their knowledge of the source to
think about analogous elements of the target, even those that are not explic-
itly described in the communication.
In one illustrative study, Morris, Sheldon, Ames, and Young (2007)
asked participants to read stock market commentaries that framed a price
trend in terms of either the deliberate action of a living agent (e.g., “This
afternoon the NASDAQ started climbing upward”) or as the activity of an
inanimate object (e.g., “This afternoon the NASDAQ was swept upward”).
Next, participants predicted what would happen to the price trend the next
day. Morris et al. reasoned that because people generally know that living
things move with intention toward destinations, participants exposed to an
agent-metaphoric framing would infer that the price trend would continue
along its current trajectory the following day, whereas those exposed to an
object-metaphoric framing would not make this inference. This is exactly
what they found. Related studies show that even incidental exposure to met-
aphoric framings produces metaphor-consistent changes in how people form
attitudes, regulate their goal pursuit, and even cope with traumatic life events
(Landau et al., 2010).

Overview of This Volume

Evidence for conceptual metaphor and its importance to understanding

social cognition and interpersonal behavior is rapidly expanding (Landau
et al., 2010), and many of the relevant papers have been published in the best
journals in the field (e.g., Science). Nevertheless, there are no edited volumes
bringing such lines of research together, and therefore the present edited vol-
ume is both timely and necessary. Leaders in the field wrote the chapters, and
their topics are diverse, encompassing individual differences, embodiment,
morality, social judgments, decision making, cultural differences, and politics
and persuasion, among others. Each author or set of authors was given a topic
but allowed leeway in its coverage. What resulted from these efforts was a
coherent but diverse consideration of the significance of CMT across many
subdisciplines of psychology. Each chapter presents future research directions
and discusses the practical implications of metaphor research for addressing

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 social problems. The take-home point emerging from the chapters is the
idea that people think, feel, and behave metaphorically to a much greater
extent than has been appreciated in previous edited volumes in social (e.g.,
Kruglanski & Higgins, 2007) and personality (e.g., John, Robins, & Pervin,
2008) psychology.
The edited volume consists of 13 chapters divided into three parts. The
chapters in Part I provide a broad introduction to CMT and its application
within social and personality psychology. Following the present introductory
chapter, Gibbs discusses how experimental research overcomes many of the
empirical limitations confronting linguistic analyses of conceptual metaphor,
and he offers novel suggestions for integrating these heretofore isolated lit-
eratures in future research.
The chapters in Part II examine how and why metaphors matter for a
wide range of phenomena. Meier, Scholer, and Fincher-Kiefer review evidence
that metaphors influence perceptions of other people and the self in realms as
diverse as social status, religiosity, anger, mate value, and personality charac-
teristics such as agreeableness. Crawford reviews studies showing that when
people reconstruct memories of social stimuli, they often rely on metaphors
linking the meaning of those stimuli to perceptual experiences and bodily
activities. Lee and Schwarz highlight metaphors’ role in judgment and deci-
sion making. The evidence reviewed crosses economic, consumer, and social
domains.
In a challenge to traditional objectivist conceptions of morality, Zhong
and House point to mounting evidence that people’s judgments of right and
wrong are influenced by metaphoric associations with superficially irrel-
evant aspects of their environments, particularly physical dirt and cleanli-
ness. Robinson and Fetterman focus on emerging work on metaphor and
individual differences in personality functioning. They present and discuss
multiple lines of research showing that a number of dispositional character-
istics of the individual (e.g., agreeableness) seem to operate in a metaphor-
consistent manner.
Maass, Suitner, and Arcuri discuss how groups of people use metaphors
to think about and relate to members of other groups. Drawing on research
findings and real-world examples, the authors show how metaphors guide
categorization, create and maintain stereotypes, and reinforce dehumanizing
representations of outgroups. Building on theory and research on persuasion,
Ottati, Renstrom, and Price outline a comprehensive model specifying how
exposure to metaphors in mass political communication influences observers’
attitudes toward social and political issues.
The study of metaphor in social psychology is still in its earliest stages,
and we are just beginning to understand how metaphoric thinking structures,
constrains, and guides thought, feeling, and action. Thus, there are many

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 research topics that remain to be addressed. The chapters in Part III explore
these issues.
Sherman and Clore propose that people draw on verticality, brightness,
and size when conceptualizing value but call for new lines of research that
can better support a metaphoric interpretation of such relationships. Schnall
argues that experimental metaphor research would benefit from investigat-
ing which particular metaphors have the most extensive impact on social
thought and behavior, and she suggests what such “basic” metaphors might
be. Casasanto analyzes the origins of some basic conceptual metaphors in
patterns of linguistic, cultural, and bodily experience. In the final chapter,
Landau, Robinson, and Meier outline other directions for future research on
metaphor’s significance in social life.

Intended Audience

This book will benefit four types of readers. The primary audience is
social and personality psychologists who have a broad interest in social cog-
nition. CMT is novel in this context. Its inputs are often perceptual and
nonverbal and cannot be completely captured by canonical social cognition
views of mental representation and priming (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Higgins,
1996). For example, in contrast to schema-based perspectives of social cogni-
tion (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), the results reported in this book will reveal that
people’s mental representations of social concepts are often structured by
metaphoric analogy with knowledge that is not part of that concept per se,
at least as traditionally conceived. In addition, CMT emphasizes processes
that are typically embodied in nature and is therefore consistent with recent
calls for a greater focus on the body’s role in social cognition (Niedenthal,
Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005).
This book will also benefit professional researchers and students whose
interests are in a particular topic, whether defined in process- or content-
related terms. It includes chapters on language, person perception, emotion,
memory, and decision making, topics of undergraduate courses and seminars
that have not typically focused on metaphoric influences. Yet conceptual
metaphors seem to pervade these operations of the human mind, and the
relevant chapters will provide new ways of thinking about these topics. In
terms of content areas, this book includes chapters on morality, personal-
ity, intergroup relations, political psychology, and culture, and again makes
the case that CMT advances understanding of these phenomena. Taken as
a whole, the chapters articulate the scope of CMT in terms of topics that
have not typically been understood from this theoretical perspective but most
decidedly benefit from doing so.

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 Third, researchers in multiple fields outside of psychology (e.g., anthro-
pology, communication, philosophy) now recognize the value of experimen-
tal findings in understanding how human beings think and behave (Gibbs,
2008). Accordingly, metaphor research in social psychology may be valuable
in arbitrating theoretical disputes in these fields that might be otherwise dif-
ficult to arbitrate. For example, many of the empirical results reviewed in
this volume suggest a systematic relation between perception and thought,
a relationship that has been heavily debated in the anthropology literature
(Whorf, 1956/1998). With reference to language and communication, these
results challenge prominent theories (Chomsky, 1995; Fodor, 1983) con-
tending that there is a specialized language “module” that is dissociated from
other modules related to perception and action. Reviewed results are also rel-
evant to an important issue in philosophy—namely, how it is that individuals
“ground” abstract thoughts in a way that can be more easily apprehended by
both the self and others (Johnson, 1987).
Finally, this book might be of interest to curious laypersons as well.
Several psychologists have written popular books whose central conclusions
overlap somewhat with ours—namely, that decision making (Damasio, 1994),
language (Pinker, 2007), and emotion (Goleman, 1995) are embodied in ways
that challenge traditional views of human cognition. We focus on a specific
form of embodiment posited by CMT (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) and review
relevant experimental results (Landau et al., 2010), and it is therefore hoped
that this book will be of interest to thoughtful nonscientists who wish to
apprise themselves of this important set of developments in understanding
some central questions about human nature.

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 2
Conceptual Metaphor in
Thought and Social Action
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.

Metaphoric language has the potential to alter how we think and feel
about various topics. Consider one excerpt from a speech by President Barack
Obama given early on during his first term of office in 2009, in which he
described the nation’s economic challenges:
In this winter of our hardshipâ•–.â•–.â•–.â•–let us brave once more the icy currents,
and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children’s children
that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end that we did not
turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s
grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it
safely to future generations. (as cited in Scacco, 2009, para. 25, italics
added by Scacco)
We can debate the merits of Obama’s vision, but his words convey dif-
ferent images (e.g., “journey,” “did not turn back,” “we carried forth”), the

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-002
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 majority of which center on the basic metaphoric theme of life is a journey and
the more specific idea that our experiences of economic hardship (the target
concept) is a journey (the source concept). Some have argued that Obama,
similar to many other U.S. presidents, used the journey metaphor precisely
because it echoes “the historical frontier motif common in American history
of settlers who traveled westward” (Scacco, 2009).
One major question in contemporary metaphor studies focuses on
whether the presence of metaphoric language, such as the different tropes
seen in Obama’s speech, necessarily reflects enduring patterns of metaphoric
thought. Does Obama really, unconsciously, think of economic hardship as
a kind of journey? Or might his metaphoric phrases be created for their rhe-
torical power to communicate specific beliefs and attitudes to the American
public? The answer to this question leads to very different understandings
of metaphor’s role in thought and language. If we assume that people first
come to think about some, usually abstract, subject in metaphoric terms, then
the presence of metaphoric discourse would be motivated by different kinds
of metaphoric thought. However, if people use linguistic metaphor only on
certain occasions to accomplish particular social goals, then metaphor would
ultimately be seen as less a cognitive phenomenon and more a matter of
communication.
This chapter offers an analysis of this debate on the origins and func-
tions of metaphor in both thought and language. There is plenty of empirical
evidence from linguistics, psychology, and related disciplines to support the
“metaphor is part of thought” (or conceptual metaphor) thesis (Gibbs, 2011b).
However, the move from viewing metaphor as a linguistic entity to a funda-
mental aspect of thought has led to some scholars downplaying metaphor’s
role in social action. My argument is that a broader examination of the ways
people think metaphorically demonstrates how metaphor is a pervasive social
action that allows us to better coordinate with both ourselves and others.
This expanded vision of conceptual metaphor points to a dismantling of tra-
ditional divides between thought, language, and communication and high-
lights the emergence of metaphor as a context-sensitive tool for meeting all
sorts of adaptive challenges in daily life.

Linguistic Analyses of Conceptual Metaphor

The proposal that metaphor is as much a part of ordinary thought as it

is of language has been voiced by rhetoricians, philosophers, and others for
hundreds of years, but it became very prominent in the past 30 years with
the rise of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) starting with the publication of
Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors We Live By (for additional overview of

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 CMT, see Chapter 1, this volume). Lakoff and Johnson provided systematic
linguistic evidence to support the claim that there are indeed metaphors of
thought or conceptual metaphors. Although some linguistic metaphors clearly
present novel conceptualizations of different objects and ideas, many con-
ventional linguistic statements reflect the existence of enduring conceptual
metaphors. For example, consider the following set of expressions about
aspects of people’s lives:
77 “His life took an unexpected turn after he met her.”
77 “John is struggling to get someplace in his career.”
77 “Sally is off to a slow start working on her thesis.”
77 “Their relationship was moving along in a good direction.”
77 “Jack was spinning his wheels trying to solve the math problem.”
Each statement reflects a particular way of thinking about life and more
generally demonstrates the metaphoric concept of a life as a kind of journey.
The life is a journey conceptual metaphor has as its primary function the cog-
nitive role of understanding one concept (life) in terms of another (taking
journeys). Conceptual metaphors arise when we try to understand difficult,
complex, abstract, or less delineated concepts, such as the idea of life, in
terms of familiar ideas, such as the physical taking of journeys. This mapping
of journey onto life gives rise to a range of entailments, as shown in Table 2.1.
Each linguistic expression about life as a kind of journey typically reflects
one or more of these different entailments arising, once more, from the con-
ceptual metaphor of life is a journey. Obama’s earlier statements are clearly
motivated by this same metaphoric concept.
Since 1980, several hundred cognitive linguistic projects have demon-
strated how systematic patterns of conventional expressions reveal the pres-
ence of underlying conceptual metaphors. These studies have explored a large
range of target concepts and domains (e.g., the mind, concepts of the self,

Table 2.1.
The Mapping of Journey Onto Life
Journey Life

Traveler Person leading a life

Journey or motion toward a destination Leading a life (with purpose)
Destinations Life goals
Obstacles in the way of motion Difficulties in life
Distance covered Progress made
Path or way of the journey The manner or way of living
Choices about the path Choices in life
Note. From Language, Mind and Culture (p.116) by Z. Kövecses, 2006, New York, NY: Oxford University
Press. Copyright 2006 by Oxford University Press. Adapted with permission.

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 emotions, science, morality and ethics, economics, legal concepts, politics,
mathematics, illness and death, education, psychoanalysis), within a vast
number of languages (e.g., Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Hungarian, Persian,
Arabic, French, Japanese, Cora, Swedish), including sign languages and
ancient languages (e.g., Latin, Ancient Greek), and have investigated the
role of conceptual metaphors in thinking and speaking/writing within many
academic disciplines (e.g., education, philosophy, mathematics, theater arts,
physics, chemistry, architecture, political science, economics, geography, nurs-
ing, religion, law, business and marketing, and film). Additional cognitive
linguistic studies have revealed the fundamental importance of conceptual
metaphors in other areas of linguistic structure and behavior, including his-
torical language change, polysemy, the creation and interpretation of novel
metaphors, child language acquisition, and even metaphors in Egyptian hiero-
glyphics (Gibbs, 2011b).
The main upshot of this varied research is that recurring patterns of con-
ceptual metaphors have influence in people’s thinking, speaking, and under-
standing. Certain conceptual metaphors, known as primary metaphors have a
greater universal appeal because they reflect pervasive correlations in embod-
ied experience typically shared by all people, such as understanding is seeing (“I
can’t see what you are saying in that article”), intimacy is closeness (e.g., “We
have a close relationship”), important is big (e.g., “Tomorrow is a big day”), more
is up (e.g., “Prices are high”), and causes are physical forces (e.g., “They push
the bill through Congress”; Grady, 1997; see also Chapter 11, this volume).
In this way, basic metaphoric schemes of thought are grounded in embodied
experience, one reason why CMT is often linked to new developments in the
embodied cognition movement in cognitive science (Gibbs, 2006a).

Criticisms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

The claim that one can find metaphor in both language and thought
is highly controversial, despite the large literature in cognitive linguistics on
CMT. Many scholars across several academic disciplines are openly skeptical
about cognitive linguistic arguments in favor of conceptual metaphor (Haser,
2005; McGlone, 2007; Murphy, 1996; Pinker, 2007). The most general ques-
tion voiced by these critics is whether the presence of metaphor in language
necessarily indicates anything about the way people ordinarily think. Most
everyone acknowledges that the production and adoption of novel meta-
phors may indicate that someone is drawing novel connections between dis-
similar knowledge domains, as when the poet Robert Burns created a novel
mapping in his famous line “My love is a red, red, rose.” But the argument
that systematic patterns of conventional expressions, novel metaphors, and

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 polysemy indicate vitally alive metaphoric concepts is far less convincing.
Consider a few of the general criticisms leveled against CMT by scholars from
varying disciplines, especially in regard to the linguistic evidence presumably
supporting this theory.

Isolated Constructed Examples

Many metaphor scholars complain that far too many of the linguistic
analyses presented in favor of CMT are based on isolated examples often con-
structed by the research analyst (e.g., the analysis of life is a journey discussed
earlier). But are these constructed examples representative of how people use
metaphor in real discourse? Some linguists looking at metaphor in naturalistic
texts find both dense clusters of expressions motivated by a single conceptual
metaphor and many instances in which people flip back and forth between
several metaphoric source concepts when talking about some abstract target
concept. It is somewhat unclear how CMT would address this kind of vari-
ability in metaphoric talk. More generally, doubts about the ecological valid-
ity of linguistic analyses lead many to question the scientific basis of CMT,
especially as a psychological account of human concepts.

Limitations of the Individual Analyst

Metaphor scholars, especially in fields such as psychology, suggest that

linguistic analyses of conceptual metaphors, such as arguments are wars, are
based on an individual linguist’s own intuitions that may be theoretically
motivated. More objective evidence is required, using naive research partici-
pants, to confirm the existence of particular conceptual metaphors. Critics
also complain that it is impossible for people, even trained linguists, to intro-
spect about fast-acting cognitive unconscious processes, such as if and when
conceptual metaphors are used in ordinary thinking and metaphoric language
use. Difficulty in introspecting about these rapid unconscious mental processes
demands, once again, that more objective evidence be collected from indi-
viduals who do not hold theory-biased beliefs. There is also a great need for
experimental evidence that tests previous empirical hypotheses about what
people are likely to do when thinking and speaking metaphorically, rather
than trying to explain their linguistic behavior after the fact given the exis-
tence of certain patterns of speech.

Lack of Explicit Criteria for Metaphor Identification

Some psychologists and linguists argue that many conventional expres-

sions that cognitive linguists view as metaphoric are not metaphoric at all

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 and are treated by ordinary speakers and listeners as literal speech (McGlone,
2007; Pinker, 2007). They suggest that simple expressions such as “He attacked
every weak point in my argument” are entirely literal and not motivated by a
conceptual metaphor such as arguments are wars. Most ordinary speakers, as
well as traditional metaphor scholars in literary studies, do not believe that
“Your criticisms were right on target,” for example, is poetic or metaphoric.
People may use metaphoric language as a matter of convention without nec-
essarily having some underlying cognitive mapping occur between disparate
source and target concepts. For instance, the simple phrase “John blew his
stack” may be produced or understood to mean “John got very angry” without
an individual having to access or compute some mapping between anger and
heated fluid in the bodily container, as suggested by traditional cognitive linguis-
tic analyses (Steen, 2006).
In fact, cognitive linguistic analyses on conceptual metaphor rarely pro-
vide explicit criteria about either (a) how to identify what is metaphoric in
language or (b) how to infer what conceptual metaphors motivate different
groupings of metaphoric discourse. Metaphor scholars need to find reliable and
replicable criteria for both identifying metaphors in real discourse and then
provide explicit steps for determining what patterns of language necessarily
imply the existence of a particular conceptual metaphor.

CMT Is Unfalsifiable and Needs Nonlinguistic Evidence

Some psychologists maintain that CMT is unfalsifiable if the only data in

its favor are the systematic groupings of metaphors linked by a common theme
(Vervaeke & Kennedy, 1996). Consider the conceptual metaphor argument
is war, which presumably motivates conventional expressions such as “He
attacked my argument” and “He defended his position.” Cognitive linguistic
research suggests that any expressions about arguments that do not fit the war
theme are really evidence for different conceptual metaphor themes, such as
arguments are weighing, testing, or comparing. This line of reasoning implies
that no linguistic statement can be brought forward as evidence against the
argument is war metaphor, which makes the basic tenet of CMT impossible to
falsify.
In a similar way, critics argue that CMT relies on circular logic. For
example, a traditional analysis may start with an examination of different
conventional expressions that in turn suggest the existence of an underly-
ing conceptual metaphor. However, the final step in making the existence
proof for any conceptual metaphor is to go back to the language to find other
linguistic expressions that fit the same conceptual metaphor schema. This
strategy appears to be circular according to many critics of CMT (Ritchie,
2003). Having nonlinguistic evidence would help eliminate this problem

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 of circularity that may be inherent in most traditional cognitive linguistic
analyses in favor of conceptual metaphor (Murphy, 1996).

CMT Is Vague in Its Claims About Metaphor Processing

What exact role do conceptual metaphors play in verbal metaphor under-

standing? Consider the novel metaphoric expression “My marriage is a rocky
roller-coaster ride from hell.” CMT generally asserts that people understand
this linguistic expression by accessing from memory the underlying concep-
tual metaphor love relationships are journeys. Yet does one first access the con-
ceptual metaphor from memory and only then apply it to infer metaphoric
meaning of expression? If so, does the conceptual metaphor that is accessed
come with a complete set of meaning entailments spelled out, or do these
have to be computed each time given the specific linguistic utterance and
context?
Or might conceptual metaphors only arise as after-the-fact products of
linguistic understanding? For example, people could interpret “John blew his
stack” to mean “John got very angry” and only then, in certain situations,
tacitly recognize that this expression is motivated by the underlying concep-
tual metaphor anger is heated fluid in the bodily container? CMT scholars have
not considered these different possibilities in their articulation of the theory.
Furthermore, cognitive linguistic analyses typically assume that only
complete conceptual metaphors structure our understanding of certain meta-
phoric language. One plausible alternative is that many conceptual meta-
phors offer partial, probabilistic constraints on the interpretation process
(Gibbs & Santa Cruz, 2012). Many psycholinguistic theories of language
processing now adopt a “constraint-satisfaction” view in which many sources
of information combine in, once more, partial, probabilistic ways to produce
satisfactory, in the moment, interpretations of what speakers mean by what
they say. CMT has not yet embraced this newer vision of discourse process-
ing, which may provide a more complete and context-sensitive approach to
linguistic interpretation.

CMT Ignores Other Factors

One of the most persistent criticisms of CMT is that the theory fails
to consider a wide range of other alternative possibilities in its accounts of
metaphoric thought and language. Even scholars working within cognitive
linguistics often note that conceptual metaphors alone are not sufficiently
powerful to enable many of the systematic patterns of metaphoric language
use. For example, many scholars maintain that ideological and cultural forces
shape people’s adoption of particular metaphoric themes in specific discourses

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 (Goatly, 2007). Other scholars detail how CMT ignores specific linguistic
(i.e., lexical and grammatical) factors that lead to people using particular
linguistic forms when speaking and writing metaphorically (e.g., Svanlund,
2007), none of which can be explained simply in terms of conceptual meta-
phor activation.

CMT Is Reductionist

Finally, various metaphor scholars, mostly those working in linguis-

tic poetics and the philosophy of aesthetics, complain that CMT is far too
reductionist in its account of verbal metaphor (Haser, 2005). After all, CMT
reduces the consideration of novel poetic language to static conceptual meta-
phors that are grounded in recurring embodied experiences and even neural
processes.
Many metaphor scholars seek to understand the consciously produced
aesthetic, poetic qualities of metaphors, which they believe have little to do
with the possible embodied and conceptual foundations of metaphor (Steen,
2006). Along this line, much traditional research on metaphor focuses on how
people interpret the novel, emergent meanings of classic “A is B” metaphors,
such as “My love is a red, red rose” and see this activity as being related to artis-
tic intentions and deliberate metaphor use on the part of speakers and writers
(Gibbs, 2011a). CMT rarely considers any of these other possible constraints
on why people produce metaphors in the ways they do or how we interpret
verbal metaphors as having specific, poetic meanings.

Putting CMT on Firmer Empirical Ground

The critical attention given to CMT reflects both the prominence of the
theory in interdisciplinary metaphor studies and some of the limitations the
theory has as a comprehensive account of metaphoric language and thought.
Regardless of one’s opinion of the criticisms of CMT, the various discussions
of the theory have led to several new developments in cognitive linguistics,
cognitive psychology, and elsewhere that now place CMT on firmer empirical
ground. Some of this research also points toward viewing conceptual meta-
phor as social action.

Methods for Metaphoric Language Identification

First, several attempts have been made to offer reliable, replicable proce-
dures for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse (e.g., Pragglejaz
Group, 2007; Steen et al., 2010). These empirical methods have provided

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 researchers with important tools for assessing the idea that metaphor is ubiq-
uitous in language, an idea forwarded early on in the history of CMT. Not
surprisingly, metaphorically used words appear to be make up only about 10%
to 20% of all words in discourse, with different genres having varying rates of
metaphor use (e.g., metaphors are not as frequent in fiction as in other genres;
Steen et al., 2010).

Methods for Determining Conceptual Metaphors

Second, advances in corpus linguistic methodologies and databases

have provided quantitative insights into the identification and counting of
conceptual metaphors in discourse (Deignan, 2006; Stefanowitsch & Gries,
2006). At the same time, different computational schemes have been pro-
posed for inferring the existence of conceptual metaphors in different dis-
course domains (e.g., economics; Martin, 1990; Mason, 2004). Much of this
newer research, it is fair to say, offers confirming evidence for the idea that
certain conceptual metaphors are pervasive in different discourse domains,
as originally proposed by CMT. Still, the corpus linguistic research also high-
lights some of the linguistic factors (e.g., lexical and grammatical informa-
tion) in metaphor use that critics argue CMT too often ignores.

Metaphor in Nonlinguistic Experience

Third, a growing body of research from many academic disciplines sug-

gests the presence of conceptual metaphors in many nonlinguistic domains,
including psychophysical judgments about time and space, gestural systems,
mathematics, music, dance, pictorial advertising and comics, architecture,
material culture, and other aspects of multimodal metaphor (for reviews,
see Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009; Gibbs, 2011b). These different lines
of empirical research lend greater credence to the major claims of CMT
that metaphor is fundamentally part of everyday cognition, not just a lin-
guistic, rhetorical device as presumed by traditional theories of metaphor.
Nonetheless, we still do not have a reliable, agreed on method for examin-
ing some stretch of metaphoric language (or gesture, music, or art) and then
deducing that specific conceptual metaphors necessarily motivate systematic
patterns of behavior.

Experimental Research on Conceptual Metaphor

in Thinking and Verbal Metaphor Use

Perhaps the main development in placing CMT on firmer empirical

ground is seen in the extensive experimental research on conceptual metaphors

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 in psycholinguistics and social psychology. This work addresses some of the
complaints about the purely linguistic evidence on CMT, especially the needs
for studies that do not rely on individual analysts and that provide nonlinguis-
tic data. Testing CMT as a psychological theory of metaphoric thought and
communication requires, at the very least, that one determine (a) whether
different metaphoric meanings are motivated by conceptual metaphors that
are part of people’s long-term memory and (b) whether conceptual metaphors
are automatically recruited during immediate experiences, including people’s
producing and understanding of metaphoric language and gesture.
Numerous experimental studies provide a positive answer to the first
of these questions (Gibbs, 1994, 2006a, 2011b; Gibbs & Colston, 2012).
These include projects showing that conceptual metaphors shape people’s
tacit understandings of why conventional and novel metaphoric expressions
have the meanings they do for idioms (e.g., “John blew his stack” being moti-
vated by anger is heated fluid in the bodily container) and proverbs (e.g., “Don’t
put all your eggs in one basket”); people’s context sensitive judgments about
the meanings of idioms; people’s judgments about the permissible mappings
underlying primary metaphors, such as desire is hunger (e.g., “John hungered
for fame”); people’s answers to questions about temporal events, people’s
answers to questions about metaphorically motivated fictive motion (e.g.,
“The road runs along the coast”); and people’s semantic and episodic memo-
ries for conceptual metaphors, such as life is a journey. These various studies,
using a range of research methodologies, suggest that people’s tacit under-
standings of why many metaphoric words and phrases have the meanings
they do are motivated by enduring conceptual metaphors.
Other studies examined the role of conceptual metaphor in problem
solving. For example, university students read a report about the crime rate in
a fictitious city, named Addison (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011). Some of the
students saw the report in which the crime was early on described as “a beast
preying” on Addison, and the other students saw the crime report with a meta-
phor of “a virus infecting” Addison. Both stories contained identical informa-
tion, presented after the metaphor, about crime statistics. After reading their
respective stories, the students had to propose a solution to the Addison crime
problem. Once again, the specific metaphor people read influenced their pro-
posed crime solutions. The participants reading the “beast preying” metaphor
suggested harsher enforcement be applied to catching and jailing criminals.
In contrast, participants who read the “virus infecting” metaphor proposed
solutions that focused on finding the root causes of the crime and creating
social programs to protect the community. The power that metaphor had on
people’s problem-solving solutions was covert as students did not mention the
metaphors when asked to state what influenced them the most in coming up
with their crime solution (i.e., most people mentioned the crime statistics). In

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 general, reading of metaphoric statements activated conceptual metaphoric
knowledge that constrained people’s subsequent problem-solving abilities.
However, demonstrating that conceptual metaphors motivate the mean-
ings of verbal metaphors does not imply that people always access conceptual
metaphors each time they produce or interpret relevant metaphoric language.
Different types of experiments, using online methodologies, indicate a posi-
tive answer to this possibility (see Gibbs, 2011b, for reviews of this work).
Thus, people find it relatively easy to read verbal metaphors in which mean-
ings are motivated by conceptual metaphors identical to those structuring the
previous text or discourse. Priming tasks revealed that conceptual metaphors
(e.g., anger is heated fluid in a container) are accessed during people’s immediate
processing of idioms motivated by those conceptual metaphors (e.g., “John
blew his stack”). Other studies show that it takes people longer to process
consecutive verbal metaphors in discourse when these are motivated by dif-
ferent underlying conceptual metaphors (Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002).

Experimental Research on Embodied Metaphor in Verbal Metaphor Use

Many psycholinguistic studies also demonstrate how immediate bodily

experience influences metaphor interpretations. For example, in one series of
studies on metaphoric talk about time, students waiting in line at a café were
given the statement “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two
days” and then asked “What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?”
(Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002). Students who were farther along in the line
(i.e., who had thus very recently experienced more forward spatial motion)
were more likely to say that the meeting had been moved to Friday, rather
than to Monday. Similarly, people riding a train were presented the same
ambiguous statement and question about the rescheduled meeting. Passengers
who were at the end of their journey reported that the meeting was moved
to Friday significantly more than did people in the middle of their journey.
Although both groups of passengers were experiencing the same physical
experience of sitting in a moving train, they thought differently about their
journey and consequently responded differently to the rescheduled meeting
question. These results suggest how ongoing sensorimotor experience has an
influence on people’s comprehension of certain metaphoric statements.
One new idea in psycholinguistics is that embodied simulations related
to conceptual metaphors play a role in people’s immediate processing of verbal
metaphors (Gibbs, 2006b). Embodied simulation broadly refers to the reenact-
ment of previous sensorimotor states during immediate processing of linguis-
tic and nonlinguistic stimuli and when imagining different possible actions.
People may create partial embodied simulations of speakers’ metaphoric
messages that involve moment-by-moment “what must it be like” processes

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 that make use of ongoing tactile-kinesthetic experiences (Gibbs, 2006b).
Understanding abstract, metaphoric events, such as grasping the concept, for
example, is constrained by aspects of people’s embodied experience as if they
are immersed in the discourse situation, even when these events can only be
metaphorically and not physically realized (i.e., it is not physically possible to
grasp an abstract entity such as a “concept”).
Several studies provide support for this view of embodied simulation. For
instance, people’s mental imagery for metaphoric phrases, such as “tear apart
the argument,” exhibit significant embodied qualities of the actions referred to
by these phrases (e.g., people conceive of the “argument” as a physical object
that when torn apart no longer persists; Gibbs, Gould, & Andric, 2005–2006).
Furthermore, people’s speeded comprehension of metaphoric phrases, such as
“grasp the concept,” is facilitated when they first make, or imagine making, a
relevant bodily action, such as a grasping motion (N. L. Wilson & Gibbs, 2007).
Finally, a novel study revealed that people walked farther toward a target when
thinking about a metaphoric statement “Your relationship was moving along
in a good direction” when the context ultimately suggested a positive relation-
ship than when the scenario alluded to a negative, unsuccessful relationship
(Gibbs, 2012). This same difference, however, was not obtained when people
read the nonmetaphoric statement “Your relationship was very important” in
the same two scenarios. People appear to partly understand the metaphoric
statement from building an embodied simulation relevant to love relationships
are journeys, such that their bodies simulate taking a longer journey with the
successful relationship than with the unsuccessful one.
These different empirical studies on embodied simulation and meta-
phor understanding offer a view of CMT that differs from how the theory
is typically interpreted within linguistics and psychology. People do not just
access passively encoded conceptual metaphors from long-term memory dur-
ing online metaphor understanding. Understanding a conventional meta-
phoric expression such as Obama’s statement “We did not turn back” may not
just arise from the simple activation of a conceptual metaphor such as life is
a journey, which has been stored within some conceptual network. However,
people may spontaneously create a particular construal of metaphors that
are “soft-assembled” via simulation processes operating during thinking,
speaking, and understanding. This possibility fits in nicely with the proposal,
outlined subsequently, that conceptual metaphors primarily arise in specific
moments of social thought and discourse.

Experimental Research on Conceptual Metaphor in Social Experience

Finally, one of the most exciting lines of empirical research related to

conceptual metaphors comes from a wide variety of studies showing how

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 metaphoric thought shapes social perceptions and cognition, as many of the
chapters in this volume explore. For example, there is the widespread set
of metaphors suggesting that good is up and bad is down. Studies show that
people evaluate positive words faster if these are presented in a higher verti-
cal position on a computer screen and recognize negative words faster if they
appear in the lower part of the screen (Meier & Robinson, 2004). People
judge a group’s social power to be greater when these judgments are made at
the top of a computer screen than when presented in the lower part of the
screen (Schubert, 2005). These findings are consistent with the idea that
people conceive of good and bad as being spatially located along some verti-
cal dimension, a concept that arises from good experiences being upward
(e.g., being alive and healthy) and bad ones being downward (e.g., sickness
and death).
Physically engaging in certain actions often leads people to adopt meta-
phoric concepts that influence their social judgments. Having people hold
warm, as opposed to cold, cups of coffee for a few seconds led them to judge
another person’s interpersonal traits as being warmer (Williams & Bargh,
2008), a finding that is completely consistent with the primary metaphor
affection is warmth. Within a different experiential domain, having people
make judgments about people’s behavior in a dirty work area caused them to
rate the behavior as more immoral than when the same judgments were made
in a clean work area (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008). Asking people to
recall an immoral deed, as opposed to an ethical one, made them more likely
to choose an antiseptic wipe as a free gift after the experiment (Zhong &
Liljenquist, 2006). Both these findings are consistent with the conceptual
metaphors good is clean and bad is dirty. These few examples illustrate how
conceptual metaphors can structure individuals’ nonlinguistic experiences,
including those related to making social judgments about other people and
events. This social psychological research adds significant empirical evidence
in favor of the claim that conceptual metaphors emerge in everyday experi-
ences that are not tied to language or people’s linguistic performances. More
generally, there is a large, diverse body of research within psycholinguistics
and social psychology that overcomes some of the earlier noted difficul-
ties with linguistic analyses of conceptual metaphors. These experimental
studies place CMT on a firmer empirical foundation by demonstrating how
conceptual metaphors are part of how people think, reason, and understand
one another in a variety of experimental tasks.
We must be careful, however, not to assume that embodied conceptual
metaphors are omnipresent in language use and social experience. Some of
the positive evidence on CMT may be dependent on the specific experi-
mental task, and there are also clear individual differences in the extent
to which people recruit conceptual metaphors in thinking, speaking, and

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 understanding. One important challenge for the future is to articulate theo-
ries that can capture some of the empirical regularities and variations asso-
ciated with conceptual metaphor behaviors both seen in the experimental
literature and evident from linguistic analyses of metaphor in discourse (e.g.,
Cameron, 2011; Gibbs & Colston, 2012).

Conceptual Metaphors for Thought

or Communication

The history of empirical research on CMT in linguistics and psychology

has primarily shown how metaphoric mappings are conventional parts of the
human conceptual system. Psychological studies have gone on to demon-
strate that conceptual metaphors are routinely used in many aspects of think-
ing, speaking, and understanding. CMT scholars view this diverse research as
contradicting the traditional idea that metaphor is a purely linguistic device
used for social, communicative purposes.

The Social Nature of Metaphoric Thought

Nonetheless, the emphasis in CMT on metaphor as essential for thought

vastly underplays the social nature of ordinary thinking. My claim, in fact,
is that it may be impossible to disentangle private metaphoric thought from
metaphoric social action. Even if metaphoric concepts are essential for certain
aspects of abstract thought, they typically emerge in specific contexts in which
people attempt to better coordinate their own actions and their interactions
with other persons. In this way, conceptual metaphors are both cognitive, in
the sense of shaping thinking, and social, in the sense of facilitating people’s
social behaviors. There are several possibilities to consider in making this
argument.
First, many of the psycholinguistic studies on conceptual metaphor in
language use have implicit social demands, either through the stimuli partici-
pants read or from the mere fact of being in an experiment in which instruc-
tions must be followed. Cognitive psychologists typically view their findings
as evidence of private mental representations and processes. Yet many of the
experimental effects discussed in the previous section can be readily inter-
preted as having social origins as in cases where participants make judgments
about the contextual sensitive nature of metaphoric meaning or solve social-
oriented problems.
Furthermore, people may think in multiple metaphoric ways depending
on the social context. Imagine, for example, that I am thinking about my
marriage (or past marriages, really). Several metaphoric themes can help me

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 do this, including the cross-domain mappings of marriage is a journey and
marriage is a manufactured building, among many others. Both conceptual
metaphors offer concrete, even embodied, understandings for the abstract
concept of marriage. I may recruit either of these metaphoric concepts
in different contexts depending on my particular needs, such as when I sit
and consider whether I am satisfied with the present state of my marriage.
Thus, one metaphor, marriage is a journey, highlights the changing nature
of marriage over time, with the people facing different obstacles and mak-
ing various choices on how to proceed as the marriage continues, or not.
The journey metaphor also emphasizes how different circumstances shape
the path that any marriage takes. In contrast, the marriage is a manufactured
building metaphor emphasizes the stable nature of marriage and how the
participants need to build a solid foundation for their marriage as a more
static entity. Adopting either of these conceptual metaphors entails rather
different consequences for me as I evaluate the present status of my marriage
and its possible future. In this way, conceptual metaphors serve intrapersonal
needs in enabling me to coordinate my various plans and goals that may be
active at any moment in life. This makes my metaphoric thinking, even when
alone, communicative in the sense of how different conceptual metaphors
help me implicitly understand and communicate with myself and decide my
future actions.
My thinking of different marriage metaphors is also inherently social
given the implied presence of others as I adopt different conceptual meta-
phors. I do not simply think of a specific marriage metaphor, for example, and
then decide whether and how to communicate this view to others. Instead,
my immediate metaphoric thinking about marriage is always relational given
the constraints my adoption of that metaphor places on my marriage actions.
As is the case with private emotional experiences (Fridlund, 1994), people’s
thinking without speaking episodes are implicitly social both for purposes of
communicating with oneself and possibly interacting with others at a later
time. Our tacit imagination of specific and generalized others shapes our
so-called private cognition. This argument is consistent with various other
empirical findings from cognitive psychology showing the context-sensitivity
of how people report their understandings of various conceptual categories
(Barsalou, 2008), where both the explicit task and people’s implicit assump-
tions about what experimenters are looking for directly influence people’s
in-the-moment categorization behaviors. How people think and report the
contents of their thoughts is always constrained by social factors, including
assumptions about other people’s implied expectations. Viewing metaphor as
part of thought should not, therefore, imply that metaphors have little con-
nection with our omnipresent need to better communicate with ourselves
and with others in the social world.

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 Do Verbal Metaphors Give Rise to Conceptual Metaphors?

A related issue to consider in the metaphor for thought versus metaphor for
communication debate is the degree to which conceptual metaphors develop
within social context. Some scholars suggest that conceptual metaphors may
“ultimately derive from the repeated use of linguistic metaphor, and thus
arise from communicative rather than purely cognitive reasons” (D. Wilson,
2011, p. 192). One proposal along this line claims that metaphoric con-
cepts should be understood as “features designed for the situational rhetoric
of talk, rather than for displaying a person’s abstract understanding of the
world” (Edwards, 1991, p. 515). People possess enduring knowledge of cross-
domain mappings, or conceptual metaphors, but these mental mappings
are constructed “in the adoption of rhetorical practices” (Edwards, 1991,
p. 525). Conceptual metaphors may become conceptually salient because
people encounter certain verbal metaphors repeatedly in communicative
situations, which leads them to conceive of some abstract targets in meta-
phoric ways.
For example, recall the empirical research from social psychology show-
ing that people associate unethical or immoral behavior with dirt. Not sur-
prisingly, people use many linguistic statements that refer to this association,
such as seen in the following list (Stefanowitsch, 2011, p. 301):
77 the stain of guilt, sin, illegitimacy
77 impure thoughts, soul, character
77 a dirty mind, look, word, secret
77 an unclean thought, spirit, mind
77 to contaminate a relationship
77 to taint someone’s reputation
77 to pollute someone’s mind, thoughts
The question is, “do we think of disagreeable things as dirty because
there are linguistic metaphors that make this connection, or are the lin-
guistic metaphors simply an expression of a preexisting mental connection,”
(Stefanowitsch, 2011, p. 302) such as the conceptual metaphors good is clean
and bad is dirty? My suggestion is that we need not answer this question one
way or the other. There is no reason to assume that the underlying motivation
for verbal metaphor has to be either (a) embodied-cognitive or (b) social-
communicative. Embodied and linguistic experience may both continu-
ally contribute to the emergence of different verbal metaphors. Thinking of
the correspondences between dirt and immoral actions and then talking about
this relationship mutually enhances the possibility of the other. Looking at
correspondences, and possible differences, between people’s use and expo-
sure to various metaphoric language and their felt embodied experiences of

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 metaphor (e.g., good is clean, affection is warmth) is one place to begin examin-
ing how verbal metaphor may shape metaphoric social action.
In general, people’s bodily actions and their social experiences produc-
ing and interpreting verbal metaphors likely act as multiple, interacting con-
straints on the creation and continued reliance on entrenched conceptual
metaphors. Cognitive linguistic studies and the empirical findings from psy-
chology can easily be interpreted as support for the bidirectional relationship
between metaphoric communication and cognition, not just as metaphoric
concepts serving as the sole causal basis for linguistic metaphor.

Conceptual Metaphors as Emergent

From Metaphoric Speaking in Context

Dissolving the strict divide between metaphor for thought and metaphor
for communication points to a new vision of CMT in which conceptual meta-
phors emerge not as prepackaged ideas from our private minds but from spe-
cific acts of thinking, speaking, and understanding that are always social. One
proposal along this line, called the discourse dynamic approach, emphasizes the
functions that metaphor has in “thinking and talking” rather than seeing ver-
bal metaphors as mere linguistic manifestations of underlying conceptual meta-
phors (Cameron, 2011; Gibbs & Cameron, 2008).
Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a remarkable set of
conversations between a woman, Jo Berry, whose father, Sir Anthony Berry,
was killed by a bomb in 1984, and Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb on
behalf of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during their conflict with the
British government (Cameron, 2011). Jo Berry had asked to meet Pat Magee
after he was released from prison to understand more about why the bomb-
ing happened. This excerpt is taken from the second recorded conversation
between Jo and Pat, about 20 minutes into their talk. The words and phrases
underlined are the source terms of the metaphors (i.e., those used metaphori-
cally in this context). Up to this point, both Jo and Pat had talked about
how the two of them came to be together in a reconciliation meeting, using
similar journey metaphors to those seen below.
644 Pat  . . . (1.0) 1984,
645 when your father was killed,
646 or when I killed your father,
647 .. when the republican movement killed your father.
648 . . . (3.0) er,
649 my journey,
650  . . . (1.0) preceded that you were catapulted into this
struggle.

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 651 .. I think,
652 er,
653  . . . (1.0) my journey preceded that.
654  . . . (1.0) but,
655  . . . (1.0) our journey began that moment.
656  . . . and here we are.
657 .. today.
658 sixteen years later.
659 seventeen years later.
660  . . . (1.0) it’s quite a remarkable journey.
661 I think.
662 er,
663 Jo  . . . (2.0) you —
664 Pat [er]
665 Jo [you] said that,
666  . . . (2.0) the price that er —
667  . . . you paid,
668 for taking up violence,
669 was part —
670  . . . partly losing some of your humanity.
671 Pat .. hmh
672 Jo  . . . and that now you’re .. refinding that.
673  . . . (1.0) through .. other meetings with —
674  . . . (1.0) ehm,
675 other victims,
676 and loyalists,
Metaphor performance is typically manifested through successive meta-
phor sources that shift and develop as people negotiate meaning, extend their
ideas, or exploit potential opened up by the use of a source term. For instance,
the journey source was used previously in the talk to refer to Jo’s effort to under-
stand her father’s murder and, in the preceding excerpt, is successively reused
and adapted to refer to two additional targets:
Pat’s early history of politicization “my journey”  649, 653
the process of meeting and reconciliation “our journey”  655, 660
These microlevel shifts and changes in the dynamics of linguistic meta-
phor concretely demonstrate the emergence of metaphor in discourse inter-
action as an inherently social affair.
Of course, source terms such as came, went, and my journey are highly
conventional instances of metaphor. The question, however, is whether these
varied uses of metaphor sources, in this case revolving around the idea of

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 journey are driven by the activation of some prestored conceptual metaphor,
such as life is a journey. Cameron (2011) argued that the microlevel shifts
and changes in the dynamics of linguistic metaphor, as seen in the excerpt,
concretely demonstrate the emergence of metaphor in discourse interaction
as an inherently social affair. Conventional metaphors do not have similar
meanings in different contexts but are dynamically recreated depending on
the specific histories of the participants at the very points in which their
talk unfolds. There is never a neutral position to which the cognitive sys-
tem retreats after each use of a metaphor source, because each word is spo-
ken in an always changing dynamic context that constrains what words,
and metaphors, will come next. For this reason, conceptual metaphors may
be better characterized as emergent stabilities that become “actualized” as
people solve different problems for themselves and coordinate their actions
with others.
My earlier discussion of metaphor use as embodied simulation is con-
sistent with this dynamic perspective in that metaphoric thoughts and lan-
guage are created, and not retrieved, via simulation processes that are shaped
by specific bodily, cognitive, and social contexts. For instance, when Jo and
Pat are using different metaphoric source terms related to the idea of “jour-
ney,” they are imagining that they are physically engaged in different kinds
of journeys, starting at some point, moving along a path, and attempting to
reach particular destinations. Yet the imaginative simulation here truly dif-
fers depending on the exact moments in their conversational interaction,
including factors such as their felt experience of the journeys from their ear-
lier discourse and the particular source terms used (e.g., journey’s beginning,
proceeding, the IRA movement, being catapulted into a struggle, looking
back at the distance traveled, or looking back at the remarkable journey).
These instances of metaphoric thinking may from a distance all seem rel-
evant to the life is a journey concept, but the actual living of the conceptual
metaphor is far more specific, has an embodied feel to it, and is truly created
according to the social circumstances of the discourse.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The long history of metaphor scholarship has evolved from claims that
metaphor was only a deviant, at best ornamental, use of language to the con-
temporary view that metaphors are fundamental to human thought. CMT
continues to be the dominant, but by no means uncontroversial, theory in
metaphor studies because it provides a detailed explanation for why people
use metaphors in the ways they do and how many metaphors of thought arise
from recurring embodied experiences.

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 Yet much of the linguistic and psychological evidence on conceptual
metaphor originates in contexts in which people are participating in some
kind of social action. Even when individuals are alone or engaged in some
solitary experimental task, there is always an implicit sociality that signifi-
cantly constrains behavior. Viewing conceptual metaphors as primarily sit-
uated in thought and arising from bodily experiences misses the dynamic
coupling that all cognitive acts have with communicative, social actions.
This claim about the social foundation of cognition is by no means novel and
has a long history in psychology going back to the work of Mead (1934) and
Vygotsky (1978), who emphasized how thinking takes its form from socially
shared cognitive activities. In more recent years, psychologists and others
have argued for situated and distributed cognition in which knowledge is situ-
ated in activity bound to social, cultural, and physical contexts (Robbins &
Aydede, 2008). My argument is that conceptual metaphors are also inher-
ently situated and must be studied in terms of the dynamic couplings between
language and social actions, not just as pure cognitive entities passively stored
in individual minds.
There are several concrete recommendations that follow from this revised
perspective on the social nature of conceptual metaphor. First, metaphor
scholars, regardless of their disciplinary orientation, must acknowledge the
multiple constraints that shape metaphoric performance. Frankly, the world
of metaphor research is too sharply divided into those embracing the belief
that metaphors are primarily linguistic, cognitive (and even neural), social,
or cultural, respectively, with some scholars denying the influence of other
factors when they privilege the dimension of metaphor they personally study.
It may be impossible to study, within the context of any individual research
project, experimentally or otherwise, all of the factors that constrains when
and how metaphoric actions come into being. However, metaphor researchers
can acknowledge the complex, dynamical nature of human metaphoric action
(e.g., language, gesture, art, social behaviors), and seek out correspondences
between variables that they specifically examine and those studied by other
metaphor scholars (e.g., between cognitive and sociocultural factors). Doing
this would point the way to critical interactions among neural, cognitive, lin-
guistic, and social forces that truly make up any set of human behaviors, includ-
ing different metaphor performances.
Second, cognitive linguists who support CMT need to study the empiri-
cal results from social psychology and integrate these findings within their own
theoretical explanations of metaphor in language and thought. The social psy-
chological literature on conceptual metaphor that has emerged in recent years
should not simply be seen as confirming hypotheses on “metaphors we live by”
but as highlighting the distinctive social and embodied nature of metaphor.
Furthermore, as is the case within psycholinguistics, a closer reading of the

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 social psychological research on metaphoric action suggests that there are
important boundary conditions under which embodied metaphoric effects are
likely to be found, many of which relate to the particular experimental task
used in some specific study. Metaphors may, once more, be a major part of how
we live, yet metaphoric thinking and action, including language, may only
emerge in particular contexts and given different adaptive goals. Rather than
simply asserting that metaphor is or is not essential for thought and social life,
which is how too much of the debate in the literature goes, it may be far more
realistic to explore the circumstances under which metaphoric effects arise in
human experience. Having some knowledge of the experimental literature on
metaphor in social life should be helpful to linguists and others in understand-
ing the true adaptive purposes that metaphor serves.
At the same time, as much as there is a continual need for further
experimental studies on metaphor in thought and social life, psychologists,
linguists, and others must examine the way metaphor emerges in discourse.
As noted earlier, there have been major criticisms of linguistic studies on
conceptual metaphor. Still, there is increasing attention to metaphor in real-
istic discourse, as illustrated by the discourse dynamics approach. One lesson,
as noted earlier, is that some aspects of conceptual metaphor may arise from
people’s exposure to metaphoric language, not just from embodied experi-
ence alone. Linking experimental effects from social psychological studies
with corpus linguistic studies on metaphoric word occurrence is surely one
future empirical challenge to explore possible verbal metaphor influences
on metaphoric thinking and social action. However, as mentioned earlier,
both linguists and psychologists need to address the remarkable variability
seen in metaphoric behaviors, evidenced in both discourse studies and exper-
imental investigations. Part of this variability involves people using multiple,
sometimes contradictory, source domains in their metaphoric talk. Moreover,
metaphoric social action is likely shaped by multiple metaphoric constraints
not yet studied by social psychologists. For example, people’s social evalua-
tions of another person may not simply be attributed to whether they hold a
warm cup of coffee beforehand but by other metaphoric related factors such
as the cleanliness of the room in which these judgments are made, the weight
of the clipboard held, the upward position in which they may sit or stand as
they participate in the experiment, to note just a few other variables. These
different embodied metaphoric influences may be partial, and not all or none,
and they may interact in complex, nonlinear ways that is the hallmark of
much human behavior. We need to study not just single metaphoric behav-
iors but complex ones as well.
Another potential lesson of discourse studies is that metaphor need not
be stored in minds as passively listed entities in memory for metaphor to really
be seen as conceptual. This work documents the ways that metaphor comes

conceptual metaphor in thought and social action      37

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 and goes in discourse and suggests the strong possibility that metaphoric con-
cepts dynamically emerge from conversational interaction as much as being
retrieved from conceptual memory. Fans of CMT, and psychologists more
generally, too often find empirical evidence that certain metaphoric concepts
seem to shape human language or behavior but then immediately assume
that these conceptual metaphors must be internal, mental, cognitive (and less
social) representations. Examining real-life discourse offers significant insights
into the dynamics of metaphor in social life that may also lead to a more social,
discursive view of metaphor, one that still sees metaphor as part of thought,
but as socially emergent cognition, not just as private concepts buried inside
people’s heads.

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 II
Metaphor’s Role in
Social and Personality
Psychology Phenomena

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13439-03_PT2_CH03-2ndPgs.indd 42 9/13/13 1:48 PM
 3
Conceptual Metaphor Theory
and Person Perception
Brian P. Meier, Abigail A. Scholer,
and Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer

Fictional characters are typically portrayed with exaggerated personal

qualities. These portrayals create interest for characters that may otherwise be
mundane and unappealing. For example, Homer Simpson from the TV show
The Simpsons has particular difficulty interpreting other people’s emotions,
leaving him at times unsure whether his wife and boss are happy or angry with
him. Furthermore, his ability to attend to the present moment and reflect on
the self is easily interrupted by the presence of donuts, beer, or television. The
legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, in contrast, has an uncanny
ability to accurately interpret people’s emotions, the causes of their actions,
and the truthfulness of their statements.
As real people interact with others in their social environment, their abil-
ity to accurately perceive themselves and others falls somewhere in between
that of Homer Simpson and Sherlock Holmes. This is because our perception
of self and others is influenced by a host of variables that can bias our thoughts,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-003
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

43

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 feelings, and behavior. For example, upon learning that a new acquaintance
is an atheist, subsequent interactions with that person might be biased by our
expectations and experiences with atheism (e.g., we may expect that person
to be more confrontational or dogmatic). Other variables influence our inter-
pretation of self and others in more subtle ways. Significant research has dem-
onstrated the powerful nature of stereotypes in guiding perceptions of others
(e.g., Devine, 1989; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). We often project on others what
we see in ourselves (e.g., Waytz & Mitchell, 2011) and evaluate others on the
basis of our own goals and desires (e.g., Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003; Fitzsimons
& Shah, 2009). Past relationships color new ones, even without our awareness
(e.g., Andersen & Chen, 2002; Andersen, Glassman, Chen, & Cole, 1995).
The perception of people is typically examined within the area of social
cognition and is sometimes more specifically labeled person perception (Fiske
& Taylor, 2008; Kunda, 1999). Here, we use the term person perception to
include the perception of both self and others. Perception involves gather-
ing information from our senses to interpret and act on our environments
(Goldstein, 2010). Such information can be acted on directly or combined
with preexisting knowledge. Person perception more specifically focuses on
how we perceive self and others on the basis of sensory inputs as well as our
accumulated knowledge.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how conceptual metaphor
theory (CMT) can enhance our understanding of the factors that influence
person perception. First, we briefly review a common theory in social cogni-
tion that is used to explain person perception in terms of schemas and con-
cept accessibility. Next, we examine research that highlights how CMT can
be used to enhance our understanding of person perception processes. Finally,
we present a research agenda that more fully integrates CMT into the study
of person perception.

Schemas and Person Perception

Social cognition research is dominated by a common theory that con-

tends that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the social realm are guided
by schemas (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Kunda, 1999). A schema is generally
considered to be a representation in memory of a particular concept, category,
or situation. Schemas contain general information about something that is
typically true across situations. For instance, our schema for cats may contain
information about legs, fur, temperament, and sounds such as “meow.” The
components of our schemas can influence person perception. For example,
the decision to vote for someone in a political election may be influenced by
the fact that one candidate is a lawyer. A person’s lawyer schema can guide his

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 or her perception of that individual and subsequent voting behavior (Fiske &
Taylor, 2008; Wyer & Srull, 1986). Indeed, depending on the nature of one’s
lawyer schema, a voter may think the candidate is logical, wealthy, and smart
versus egotistical, unethical, and boring. One’s previous experiences with law-
yers help define the content of this schema.
Decades of research have revealed that our perception of self and others
is guided by the accessibility or heightened activation of schemas and their
related concepts (Bargh, 2006; Higgins, 1996), a process sometimes referred
to as priming or spreading activation. In a classic study that has been cited some
1,000 times (Harzing, 2007) since it was first published in 1977, Higgins,
Rholes, and Jones found that unobtrusive exposure or priming of words (as part
of a study on reading comprehension) naming trait concepts such as adventur-
ous or reckless later affected participants’ interpretation of a person they read
about in a descriptive essay. Higgins et al. (1977) found that participants who
were first exposed to words such as adventurous or independent later perceived
a fictional person described in ambiguous terms to be an adventurous and
independent person as well (also see Srull & Wyer, 1979). This initial research
revealed that accessible trait-related concepts can bias people’s perception
of the personality of an unrelated target individual by priming related traits.
Such findings were extremely important because people’s interpretation of the
personality of others can affect how they interact with them.
Since these seminal publications, numerous research findings have
revealed the multitude of ways in which concept or knowledge accessibil-
ity affects person perception processes (Bargh, 2006; Förster & Liberman,
2007) and other cognitive judgments that affect social cognition. For exam-
ple, priming the concept of African Americans versus Caucasians increases
people’s propensity to misidentify a tool as a weapon (Correll, Park, Judd, &
Wittenbrink, 2002; Payne, 2001), exposure to one’s national flag increases
feelings of unity because it causes people to report less extreme political
views (Hassin, Ferguson, Shidlovsky, & Gross, 2007), and exposure to weap-
ons increases people’s aggressive behavior toward a provoking individual
(Bartholow, Anderson, Carnagey, & Benjamin, 2005; Klinesmith, Kasser, &
McAndrew, 2006).
Although the foregoing description of research on the impact of sche-
mas on person perception is admittedly simplistic (e.g., years of research have
revealed several moderating variables: Bargh, 2006), the important point is
that schemas are considered to be a major influence on social cognition and
person perception across social psychology areas as well as other psycho-
logical disciplines. Schemas afford us the opportunity to use our cognitive
resources for more pressing concerns and to offload more basic information
processing to our representation of previous experiences. We would not have
survived as a species if we had to continuously relearn how to act and respond

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 to everyday social situations. One of the hallmarks of human consciousness
is that we have the ability to predict the outcome of a situation given our
previous experiences. We know what to expect and how to conduct ourselves
when standing in line at the grocery store, trick-or-treating with our children,
or attending a wedding ceremony.
Although schemas are likely essential, the research on schemas and con-
cept accessibility has tended to focus on social judgments that are made on the
basis of accessible knowledge that is typically directly related to the dependent
measure at hand. For example, priming the concept elderly leads individuals to
walk more slowly across a hallway (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) because
slow is a central characteristic of our schema of the elderly. In other words,
a schema view focuses on knowledge activation elements that are typically
part of a given concept or category. Recent work related to CMT, however,
has revealed that our perception of self and others can be driven by relations
between categories or concepts that are subtle and more indirect than has
previously been documented in social cognition research. In the next section,
we contend that CMT can enrich the schema view and enhance our under-
standing of person perception processes.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

The general contention of CMT is that people use metaphor to under-

stand and not just talk about abstract concepts (see Gibbs, 1994, 2006; see
also Chapters 1 and 2, this volume). CMT asserts that metaphors provide con-
ceptual mappings between more concrete and common source concepts and
more abstract and less perceptual target concepts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980,
1999; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). In specific relation to person percep-
tion processes, it is clear that people use metaphors in their everyday discourse
to define and explain attributes of the self and others (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;
Landau et al., 2010). Asch (1946, 1958) is frequently cited as being one of the
first social psychologists to write about person perception in metaphoric terms.
He stated that people use descriptors that relate to perceptual experiences to
examine and understand more abstract ideas about the self and others. For
example, we may label people as warm or cold, rigid or flexible, bright or dull,
and straight or crooked. We likely use such metaphoric descriptions because it
is difficult to conceptualize abstract person qualities without linking them to
more easily understood concrete experiences familiar to beings with sensory
apparatuses.
Many linguistic metaphors involving person perception likely develop
from physical experiences in early childhood that consistently pair the physi-
cal and the abstract. For example, the feeling of physical warmth occurs when

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 people hug and hold others. Typically, we hug or hold someone as a display of
affection and belonging. In adulthood, such experiences are described through
metaphors that pair warmth (the physical source concept) with likeability or
affection (the abstract target concept), such as when we use metaphors that
suggest a warm person is an affectionate person. CMT predicts that such map-
pings actually influence the representation of self and others through a type
of scaffolding or embodiment in which early perceptual experiences are used
to eventually ground conceptual knowledge (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Williams,
Huang, & Bargh, 2009). In other words, individuals use more concrete and
familiar experiences (e.g., physical warmth) to later conceptualize and think
about more abstract concepts and experiences (e.g., psychological warmth).
Glenberg (2010) contended that past bodily interaction with the environ-
ment provides the grounding for conceptual metaphors. For example, when
we are sad, we lie down; when we are happy, we jump up (often literally).
Therefore, it is not surprising that we talk and think about happiness and
sadness in terms of high and low positions in vertical space, respectively (see
Chapter 7, this volume).
It is important to point out that CMT is not an alternative to the schema-
based theory discussed earlier. Schemas are essential for understanding how
people interpret and navigate their social world. CMT significantly enriches a
schema view by predicting that links between physical source concepts (e.g.,
physical cleanliness) and abstract target concepts (e.g., moral judgments)
influence person perception through metaphoric mappings even though the
concepts in question can be dissimilar in a prior sense. In other words, CMT
allows researchers to examine person perception processes in domains that a
typical schema view (e.g., thinking of the word doctor primes or activates the
concept of nurse) would simply not predict. Furthermore, a conceptual meta-
phor view can explain priming or accessibility findings involving dissimilar
concepts because it focuses on early embodied experiences as an important
impetus. In the sections that follow, we discuss a number of relevant findings
that illustrate the contribution of CMT to the person perception literature.

Vertical Orientation and Person Perception

Efficient spatial perception was a crucial ability for survival as early

humans evolved in a three-dimensional world replete with dangers and
rewards (Chatterjee, 2001; Coslett, 1999; Mirabile, Glueck, & Stroebel,
1976; Previc, 1998). The ability to perceive space and spatial orientation
often requires input from multiple sensory modalities, such as vision, audi-
tion, and touch. Spatial orientation was thus a prime candidate for eventually
lending meaning to the abstract aspects of a person’s social world. It is per-
haps no surprise, then, that linguistic metaphors commonly link locations in

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 space to social dimensions such as interpersonal power, evaluative behavior,
and religiosity (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Landau et al., 2010; Tolaas, 1991).
A person’s action can be low, whereas another person can be feeling on top of
the world or have a corporate position that places her high in the hierarchy. We
review research that suggests that these linguistic metaphors do indeed reflect
representation processes in person perception.
Meier and Robinson (2004) showed that implicit associations between
good–up and bad–down exist in people’s memory. They found that people are
faster to determine whether a word has a positive meaning if it is shown in a
higher location on a computer screen, whereas people are faster to determine
whether a word has a negative meaning if it is shown in a lower location on
a computer screen (see also Crawford, Margolies, Drake, & Murphy, 2006;
Palma, Garrido, & Semin, 2011). Meier, Moller, Chen, and Riemer-Peltz
(2011) found that this metaphoric association can affect person perception.
They examined map coordinates and housing location. Maps in many coun-
tries are typically drawn so that north is on top and south is on the bottom.
In their Study 3, they found that people preferred to live in the northern half
of a hypothetical city, but only when the city map was presented with north
on the top (i.e., this north preference disappeared when a map was presented
with north on the bottom and south on the top). Their Study 4 has implica-
tions for person perception. Meier et al. (2011) randomly assigned partici-
pants to read about a high or low socioeconomic status (SES) person named
“Bennett.” In the low SES condition, Mr. Bennett was an unemployed high
school dropout who struggled to pay the rent each month. In the high SES
condition, Dr. Bennett was a wealthy businessman who inherited money.
Participants were asked to choose a location on a map (see Figure 3.1) of a fic-
titious city where they thought Bennett lived. The map boundaries measured
11.60 centimeters in both the north–south (up–down) and west–east (left–
right) directions. As shown in Figure 3.2, participants believed the low SES
Bennett lived in the southern or lower half of the city, whereas they believed
the high SES Bennett lived in the northern or upper half of the city.
Research has also has examined the implications of power–vertical
position metaphors. Giessner and Schubert (2007) showed participants an
organizational chart of a company with five “subordinate” boxes at the bot-
tom connected by a horizontal line, with the middle box connected by a
vertical line to a box on top that was labeled “Manager A.” The length of
this line was manipulated so that it was 2 or 7 centimeters in height, which
placed “Manager A” at a higher or lower location on the paper. Participants
were given information about Manager A and were asked to rate him on per-
ceived power (e.g., “I think that Manager A is dominant”). Participants who
viewed the long line gave higher power ratings than participants who viewed
the short line. Thus, higher locations in vertical space were predictive of

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 Figure 3.1.  Map used in Study 4. From “Spatial Metaphor and Real Estate:
North-South Location Biases Housing Preference,” by B. P. Meier, A. C. Moller,
J. Chen, and M. Riemer-Peltz, 2011, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2,
p. 551. Copyright 2011 by Sage Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

increased interpersonal power perceptions (see also Lakens, Semin, & Foroni,
2011; Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007; Schubert, 2005;
Schwartz, Tesser, & Powell, 1982).
Meier and Dionne (2009) built on the findings of Giessner and Schubert
(2007) in the domain of physical attraction. Evolutionary views of human
mating strategy focus on the preference for dominant or powerful males and
submissive or powerless females as potential mates (Buss, 1989, 1994). Meier
and Dionne found that people appear to use verticality as an implicit cue to
power when rating the attractiveness of opposite-sex individuals. Their male
participants rated pictures of females as more attractive when their images
were presented near the bottom of a computer screen, whereas their female

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 2.25
1.75

Mean Centimeters from North-

1.25
0.75

South Midpoint 0.25

-0.25
-0.75
-1.25
-1.75
-2.25
High SES Low SES

Figure 3.2.  Mean location chosen in Study 4. The numbers reflect the mean distance
in centimeters from the north–south map midpoint (i.e., positive numbers = northern/
upper location; negative numbers = southern/lower location). From “Spatial Metaphor
and Real Estate: North-South Location Biases Housing Preference,” by B. P. Meier,
A. C. Moller, J. Chen, and M. Riemer-Peltz, 2011, Social Psychological and Personality
Science, 2, p. 552. Copyright 2011 by Sage Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

participants rated pictures of males as more attractive when their images were
presented near the top of a computer screen.
Other research has shown that power–vertical position metaphors are
implicated in more practical social settings. For example, researchers have
shown that taller people have higher incomes (Frieze, Olson, & Good, 1990;
Judge & Cable, 2004; Loh, 1993) and better health-related quality of life
(Christensen, Djurhus, Clayton, & Christiansen, 2007) than shorter people.
Individuals randomly assigned to complete a general knowledge test on a higher
(eighth floor) versus lower (second floor) location in an office building had
more confidence in their ability (Sun, Wang, & Li, 2011). Van Quaquebeke
and Giessner (2010) conducted a fascinating series of studies on soccer fouls
in actual soccer games and in a laboratory setting. Using data from German
Bundesliga seasons, UEFA Champions League seasons, and FIFA World Cup
tournaments, the authors found that players who were called for fouls were, on
average, taller than the alleged victims. To address the fact that taller players
may simply be more dominant, a laboratory study was conducted. It was found
that participants expected a taller versus shorter player to be more likely to
commit a foul when both players were presented in pictures chasing a soccer
ball. These data confirm that height is an implicit cue to social dominance.
Although these additional findings could be due to a variety of factors, they
are similar to the aforementioned studies that found a consistent link between
power and vertical space. In summary, power–vertical position metaphoric
links play a real but subtle role in person perception.

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 Vertical orientation is also commonly used in metaphors that describe
religious concepts. Jesus and God are considered the “most high,” whereas
the antithesis of God, Satan, is considered to be a “lowly” being. Such meta-
phors likely develop through the historical belief that God resides high in
the heavens, whereas Satan resides deep in the underworld (Favazza, 2004).
Even nonreligious individuals are likely to encounter such metaphors in
cultures in which Christianity is prevalent (e.g., the United States). This
metaphoric link between the physical and abstract has been shown to influ-
ence person perception. Meier, Hauser, et al. (2007) showed that people
have implicit associations between God–Up and Devil–Down. Chasteen,
Burdzy, and Pratt (2010) extended these findings by showing that thinking
about God versus Satan biases people’s visual attention to a higher location
in space. Meier, Hauser, et al. (2007) revealed the implications such associa-
tions have for person perception as they found that people believed strangers
had a stronger belief in God if their images appeared higher versus lower in
visual space.

Brightness and Person Perception

Brightness is another perceptual characteristic that is invoked in meta-

phors to describe the social world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Meier & Robinson,
2005). Brightness perception is a physical experience that developing humans
engage in at birth. Young infants quickly learn that brightness is predictive of
the presence of loved ones and darkness is predictive of the absence of loved
ones. It is probably no surprise that brightness eventually comes to represent
aspects related to the social world. Indeed, one can have a bright day, a dark
time, or a shady disposition. In a general sense, dark things are described as
bad, and light things are described as good. Terms related to brightness and
darkness have been used throughout history to portray positivity and nega-
tivity, especially in religious texts (Meier & Robinson, 2005). Furthermore,
common media portrayals borrow this visual characteristic to present heroes
(in white) and villains (in black), such as in classic movies like Star Wars and
The Wizard of Oz.
Do affect–brightness metaphors have relevance for person perception
processes that move beyond language? The first step in such work is to deter-
mine whether associations between good–light and bad–dark exist in non-
linguistic tasks. Meier, Robinson, and Clore (2004) and Meier, Robinson,
Crawford, and Ahlvers (2007) showed that people do indeed have strong
associations in memory between brightness perception and valence in a
metaphor-consistent fashion (see also related work by Banerjee, Chatterjee,
& Sinha, 2012; Sherman & Clore, 2009). Other work has revealed that
these metaphoric associations bias person perception. For example, in an

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 illuminating series of studies by Frank and Gilovich (1988), sports teams in
darker uniforms were rated as more malevolent and were more likely to be
called for penalties than sports teams in lighter uniforms. Furthermore, partici-
pants who wore darker versus lighter uniforms in an experimental laboratory
study chose more aggressive forms of game play (e.g., a fun darts duel) in an
ostensible study on the psychology of competition. The studies by Frank and
Gilovich reveal that brightness biases the judgments of others (i.e., teams
in darker uniforms received more penalties from referees) as well as the self-
concept (i.e., individuals wearing darker uniforms chose to play more aggres-
sive games). Similar results were found in a study by Webster, Urland, and
Correll (2012) with data from the National Hockey League and in a labora-
tory study that examined participants behavior and expectations in an online
game in which their avatars wore black or white cloaks (Peña, Hancock, &
Merola, 2009).
A large amount of work in social psychology has shown that people have
strong automatic associations between race and valence. Specifically, African
Americans are more strongly associated with negativity and Caucasians are
more strongly associated with positivity (Fazio & Olson, 2003; Nosek et al.,
2007). The typical study reveals that people are faster to recognize stereo­
typical Caucasian names when they are paired with positive words and
stereo­typical African American names when they are paired with nega-
tive words (the Implicit Associations Test or IAT; Greenwald, McGhee,
& Schwartz, 1998). Although automatic negative stereotypes for African
Americans likely have a host of causes (e.g., a history of slavery, ingroup–
outgroup differences, categorization processes), it appears that at least part
of the effect is due to a more basic association between affect and bright-
ness and to the metaphors that reinforce such associations. For example,
Smith-McLallen, Johnson, Dovidio, and Pearson (2006) showed that the
typical IAT effect mentioned above (Greenwald et al., 1998) is signifi-
cantly reduced when the extent to which people associate the colors white
and black with positive and negative valence, respectively, is statistically
controlled. In a related study, Ronquillo et al. (2007) examined activation
in the amygdala, an area of the brain that becomes active when people are
exposed to a potential threat. They found that participants had greater
amygdala activation when people were shown pictures of darker versus
lighter skinned Caucasians (i.e., suggesting a deeper neurological connec-
tion between affect and brightness).
The results of the research on stereotypes suggest that darker skinned
individuals are at a disadvantage compared with their lighter skinned
counter­parts. The metaphoric association between brightness and valence
may partially drive such effects. Although conceptual metaphors may be
involved in inducing stereotypical thinking about race, it may also allow

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 one to understand how to reduce it. Song, Vonasch, Meier, and Bargh (2012)
used CMT to predict that smiling faces would be judged as perceptually
brighter or lighter than frowning faces. They found that people perceived
different colored schematic and real faces as lighter in color when the faces
were presented with a smile versus a frown and the actual luminance was
held constant across stimuli. Such effects were found in a two-choice forced
judgment task (judging which of two faces is brighter) and when smiling
and frowning faces were independently shown to different participants
and the task was to select a color shade on a scale that reflected their judg-
ment of the face’s brightness. Although speculative, such findings suggest
that emotional expressions could reduce automatic stereotypes based on
facial brightness.

Other Source Domains Involved in Person Perception

A host of other physical factors are used in metaphors to help people

make sense of social concepts in terms of more concrete experiences. Such
links have been shown to have an impact on person perception. The nature of
the relationships cannot be fully discussed here, but there are many examples.
Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012) found that taste-related
metaphors (e.g., “she’s a sweetie”) have implications for people’s personality
as well as their perception of others. They found that sweet taste preferences
and experiences were associated with agreeable personalities, perceptions,
and behavior. For example, in their Study 1, individuals rated strangers as
more agreeable if they were said to like sweet foods (e.g., candy, chocolate
cake) compared with other food types (e.g., salty peanuts, peppers).
Several researchers have found that physical warmth or high tempera-
ture stimuli affect the perception of others (Bargh & Shalev, 2012; IJzerman &
Semin, 2009; Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter, & Feltman, 2009; Williams
& Bargh, 2008a; Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). For example, Williams and
Bargh (2008a) found that holding a warm versus cold coffee cup caused par-
ticipants to perceive another person as more psychologically warm or friendly.
This research is being published at a quickening pace. Recent papers have
shown metaphor-related effects on person perception in a number of diverse
areas, such as physical distance and emotional closeness (Williams & Bargh,
2008b), left–right bodily sway and political attitudes (Oppenheimer & Trail,
2010), the perception of soft versus hard objects, judgments of a person’s gender
and personality (Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh, 2010; Slepian, Weisbuch, Rule,
& Ambady, 2011), and physical cleanliness and morality (Lee & Schwarz,
2011; Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), to
name a few.

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 Pitfalls and Promises of Conceptual Metaphor
Theory and Person Perception

The research reviewed in this chapter represents only a portion of

the conceptual metaphor work that is relevant for person perception. Even
though our review of the literature is not exhaustive, the amount and breadth
of the work discussed reveal that CMT should not be overlooked in the realm
of person perception. Some writers have even gone as far as to suggest that
a general embodiment view could be a unifying perspective in psychology
because it provides a similar explanation of human behavior regardless of the
psychological subdiscipline in question (Glenberg, 2010; Schubert & Semin,
2009). At the same time, however, the upsurge of research in this area has led
to interesting findings that seem to be outpacing the focus on theory develop-
ment. In the sections that follow, we discuss some of the pitfalls and promises
that conceptual metaphor holds for understanding person perception.

Pitfalls

Our review suggests that conceptual metaphor research in person per-

ception is in its infancy. The existing work has typically focused on dem-
onstration effects, which are certainly essential for any new area of inquiry
because they identify whether there is indeed an area worthy of empirical
interest (Meier, Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, 2012; Rozin, 2009). The excite-
ment generated by this area has likely led to the increasing number of stud-
ies. That excitement may also be a pitfall unless the research begins to move
beyond the beginning stages. Ideally, new research would begin to examine
process variables in addition to demonstration work.
Landau et al. (2010) suggested that one way research can move beyond
an initial phase is for researchers to develop questions using a phenomenon-
based focus, which is an approach that centers on particular behaviors (e.g.,
aggression, helping, loving) and then examines how CMT can be used to
explain and modify the behavior in predictable ways. Such an approach builds
on existing theories while examining the potential for CMT to enrich present
viewpoints. For example, consider the research on physical and psychological
warmth. Williams and Bargh (2008a) found that feelings of physical warmth
caused people to rate a stranger as more psychologically warm or friendly.
Furthermore, feelings of physical warmth caused people to act in a more agree-
able manner. This initial work showed that metaphoric mappings between
physical warmth and psychological warmth have implications for person per-
ception in areas other than metaphoric language. Bargh and Shalev (2012)
extended this work by revealing that individual differences in the desire
for physical warmth (i.e., bath taking behavior) correlated positively with

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 individual differences in the experience of loneliness. That is, lonelier people
bathed more frequently and for longer durations. Bargh and Shalev’s research
moves beyond demonstration because it enriches existing theories in person
perception and self-regulation. Furthermore, it invites intriguing new research
questions in such diverse areas as clinical interventions for mental health,
techniques for persuasive appeals, and even industrial organizational research
that focuses on environmental factors in the workplace (e.g., temperature).
Another pitfall in the existing research on CMT in person perception
is the absence of work that examines theoretical boundary conditions, mod-
erators, and mediators. We know little about whether conceptual metaphors
shape, constrain, or reflect the body’s influence on person perception. Much of
the existing work has led to fascinating findings of everyday interest. However,
CMT will become less viable for new researchers unless more is known about
the factors that moderate and mediate the effects. It is likely that concept
accessibility processes suggested earlier (Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Kunda, 1999)
are involved in many of the effects discussed in this chapter, but few research-
ers have examined such possibilities. Landau et al. (2011), however, provided
one example of how a mediation study elucidates the factor involved. They
examined self-perception in terms of physical expansion by focusing on lin-
guistic metaphors that describe the self in terms of an expanding or contract-
ing entity (e.g., “he needs to grow”). Landau et al. (2011) hypothesized that
exposing people to an image of an expanding figure versus a static or frag-
mented figure would cause people to report feeling more self-actualized. They
further predicted that accessibility of the concept of expansion (e.g., thoughts
like “grow” or “broaden”) would mediate the effect. They found that partici-
pants exposed to an expanding (vs. a static or fragmented) figure perceived
themselves as more self-actualized, and this effect was mediated by accessible
thoughts related to the concept of expansion.
Landau et al. (2011) provided an example of how to test for a mediating
variable that relies on the explanatory process of schema theories. Sun et al.
(2011) examined a moderating variable in their search for explanations of
conceptual metaphors’ impact on person perception. Recall that they found
people believed they were better than others on a general knowledge test
when presented with the test in a higher versus lower location in space (i.e.,
a high vs. low floor in an office building). In a follow-up study, the effect dis-
appeared when these researchers presented the ranking question (i.e., what
percentage of people would have fewer correct answers than you) in a vertical
manner such that higher percentages were at the bottom rather than top of a
piece of paper. Thus, verticality’s influence on power or ability was eliminated
when participants were presented with a “power is down” figure, which likely
interrupted one’s chronic “power is up” representation (for related work, see
Meier et al., 2011; Chapter 7, this volume).

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 Process-oriented research like the studies by Landau et al. (2011) and
Sun et al. (2011) are a welcome addition to this literature. Nevertheless, sev-
eral additional interesting questions remain. For example, the results of the
study by Sun et al. may lead one to wonder when and how contextual factors
play a role in verticality’s effect on person perception processes. Whereas Sun
et al. found that verticality increased one’s own judgment of ability compared
to similar others, Meier and Dionne (2009) found that a verticality manipu-
lation affected people’s attractiveness ratings of strangers. What promotes
the likelihood of a source concept like verticality prompting one metaphor-
related behavior (ability) versus another (attraction)? Answers to questions
like these are necessary for a more thorough understanding of the pathways
that lead from metaphoric manipulations to cognitive, affective, or behav-
ioral effects on person perception.

Promises

Existing conceptual metaphor research in person perception is associ-

ated with some potential pitfalls. These pitfalls, however, do not yet over-
shadow the promise CMT has for social cognition. The key promise is its
potential breadth in terms of explanation and application. This potential is
based on the simple fact that humans are body-based beings. As far as we can
tell from contemporary scientific inquiry, our minds cannot exist apart from
our bodies. Therefore, our thinking, acting, and feeling occur within the con-
fines of our bodies. This is true regardless of whether we play a slot machine,
partake in a provocative debate, or vote for a political candidate. This deep
connection between body and mind suggests that propositions about the
operation of schemas in ways that are devoid of the body fail to capture life as
it is lived. Metaphor and embodiment research has led some to suggest that
current models of artificial intelligence will never truly mimic human intel-
ligence because they do not have the ability to consider information from
sensorimotor systems (Barsalou, 1999). The mind–body connection has deep
implications for the potentially widespread influence of CMT in psychology
in general and person perception in particular.
Metaphoric descriptions of self and others had once been examined
under the umbrella of folk theories of personality. Folk views are based on
commonsense ideas of how people perceive others in everyday naturalistic
settings. Such folk views, however, have been shown to have considerable
merit (Gibbs & Beitel, 1995; Haas, 2002; Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker,
2006). CMT adds novel predictive power to folk views because it provides
an underlying framework for why common perceptual-based descriptions
of people often ring true. For example, consider two very different sets of
studies. Meier, Moeller, et al. (2012) found that people who have a stronger
liking for sweet foods were also higher in the prosocial personality trait of

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 agreeableness. Bargh and Shalev (2012) found that people who prefer tak-
ing more and longer baths were also higher in loneliness. Thus, both sets of
studies found that individual differences in source domain preferences (i.e.,
sweet taste and physical warmth) were associated with related personality
traits in ways consistent with everyday linguistic metaphors for describing
others (e.g., “sweetie” or “cold”).
Work in neuroscience may eventually be able to partially explain some
of the work discussed in this chapter. Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti (2004),
Gallese and Sinigaglia (2011), and Glenberg (2010) have suggested that the
human brain, like those of primates, has developed a mirror mechanism that
allows experiential insight into others’ minds. This mirror mechanism (a col-
lection of mirror neurons) maps a sensory representation of another’s sen-
sation, action, or emotion, onto the observer’s own mental representation
of that same sensation, action, or emotion. This mapping, or simulation of
another’s experience, allows for the perceiver to make accurate inferences and
predictions of behavior. Lakoff (2008) contended that such mirror neurons
are multimodal and allow us to simulate actions or behaviors without actually
engaging in them. The discovery of mirror neurons provides another advance
in the mechanisms that may help explain not just why language is metaphoric
but also how abstract concepts in areas such as person perception are literally
grounded in neural activity representing bodily experiences.
CMT, then, holds considerable promise for deriving accurate person per-
ceptions because metaphors abound in describing self and others. Asch (1946,
1958) pointed out the extensive use of metaphor in person description decades
ago, but even he would likely be surprised by the manner in which such descrip-
tions are being used to study and understand actual social behavior.

Summary and Conclusion

A necessary aspect of human interaction is the perception of self and

others. Person perceptions are not always accurate and are subject to internal
and external influences. An influential view reveals that person perception
judgments are often made on the basis of accessible knowledge related to the
judgment at hand (e.g., priming hostility may lead individuals to perceive
others as hostile). Common metaphors (e.g., “she’s a sweetheart”) suggest that
person perception may be influenced by less direct, yet broader, conceptual
mappings. Our chapter reveals just how widespread conceptual metaphor
influences are on the perception of self and others. Indeed, evidence exists
in diverse realms such as social status, evaluation, religiosity, anger, mate
value, and personality characteristics such as agreeableness and psychological
warmth. CMT offers considerable promise for widening the understanding of
the factors that influence person perception. The current literature, however,

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 is in its infancy, and we contend that future work should more readily focus
on the identification of the mediators and moderators that cause people to be
more or less likely to use conceptual metaphor to understand themselves and
others. Even though there are some shortcomings in the existing literature,
this burgeoning area holds considerable promise for what is likely to be a major
addition to the study of person perception.

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 4
The Role of Conceptual
Metaphor in Memory
L. Elizabeth Crawford

In recent years, psychology has shifted away from viewing minds as dis-
embodied information processors and has come to embrace the role of the body
in cognition. The general labels of embodied or grounded cognition encompass
several related lines of research. Some focus on the role of perceptual and
motoric simulation in representation and information processing or on the
ways that physical action supports thinking and remembering. Others address
how cognition is situated in an environment that imposes physical and tempo-
ral constraints and that can be used to externalize information, “off loading”
it from the mind to reduce demands on cognition. Another thread, and the
focus of this volume, is conceptual metaphor: how we capitalize on concrete,
physically embodied domains of experience to conceptualize abstractions.

This work was supported by a grant from the University of Richmond’s Faculty Research Committee.
I thank James Blair, Cindy Bukach, and Matthew Crawford for their helpful comments.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-004
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 Early work sought evidence for metaphoric representation by examining lan-
guage use (Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), but recent investigations
have applied the approaches of experimental psychology (for reviews, see
Crawford, 2009; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Meier & Robinson, 2005).
These studies have provided new evidence that metaphors can structure cog-
nition. In particular, there is growing evidence that metaphors are used to
conceptualize many social constructs, such as emotion, relationships, and
morality.
The majority of these experiment-based studies of metaphor focus on
immediate judgments about stimuli that are currently available. There is
relatively little work on the role of conceptual metaphors in memory. Here I
argue that studying the impact of metaphor on memory can enrich our under-
standing of how metaphors structure cognition. I consider how metaphors
relate to other kinds of knowledge structures, such as schemas and categories,
that are known to influence remembering. Finally, I address how memory
research from other areas of embodied cognition suggests new directions for
the study of conceptual metaphor.

Background: Conceptual Metaphor

The idea of conceptual metaphor is that abstract concepts are represented

in terms of more concrete, physically embodied ones. In their seminal work,
Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that there are rela-
tively few concepts that are understood directly, on their own terms. For
example, containment and vertical position are primary concepts that come
to be understood through direct, physical experiences. In contrast, our more
abstract concepts are not understood directly; instead, they repurpose our
understanding of primary domains. Thus, the notions of containment and
verticality structure the way we think about emotional experience, which
is reflected in expressions such as “overflowing with joy” or “lifted spirits.”
The conceptual metaphor view addresses the conceptualization of emo-
tion rather than the immediate experience of it. This distinction can be
seen in development, as infants experience positive and negative affect
long before they can control the spatial orientation of their bodies, but
they learn to communicate about up and down before they can communi-
cate about happy and sad (Bloom, 2001; Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler,
& Ridgeway, 1986).
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) distinguished between structural metaphors
and orientational metaphors. Structural metaphors describe one concept in
terms of another concept (e.g., love is a journey), whereas orientational meta-
phors are used to organize a system of concepts with respect to one another.

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 The most prominent of the orientational metaphors is good is up, which
underlies expressions such as feeling up, down, or under the weather; climbing
the corporate ladder; falling from grace; and taking the moral high ground. As those
examples illustrate, we use the vertical dimension of space to localize valenced
dimensions such as happiness, health, power, success, holiness, and morality.
Because this metaphor orients several positive and negative concepts in the
same way, it is coherent and systematic. It is also pervasive. Because this is
the metaphor that has produced the most empirical work, and the only one
to be examined with respect to memory processes, it is the primary focus of
this chapter.
Metaphors such as good is up are not arbitrary. They depend on the
workings of the body and its relation to the physical environment and affec-
tive experience. For example, given that we are subject to gravity, we cannot
be upright without some degree of health and vitality. Physical power often
means being literally on top, and happiness and sadness are associated with
upright or downturned physical posture (LaFrance & Mayo, 1978). Many
such bodily experiences are universal, which may account for the similarities
in this spatial ordering of valence across languages (Gibbs, 1994; Kövecses,
2000, 2002). Although the original work on conceptual metaphor examined
language, the theory is not about language so much as conceptual structure.
Concepts are the building blocks of cognition, and any claim about their
nature has implications not only for language but also for attention, judg-
ment, and remembering.

Why Investigate Memory?

The majority of experiment-based studies of conceptual metaphor

focus on immediate, online judgments about stimuli that are currently avail-
able. This focus is consistent with the current emphasis on cognition that
is embedded in an immediate spatial and temporal context (Wilson, 2002).
Many studies use reaction time as a dependent measure. For example, after
evaluating a positive or negative word, participants are faster to shift atten-
tion to regions of space that are congruent with the good is up metaphor
(for examples of similar reaction-time effects, see Meier, Hauser, Robinson,
Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007; Meier & Robinson, 2004; Meier, Sellbom, &
Wygant, 2007). Other studies demonstrate how various metaphors influence
judgments. For example, individuals appearing high in space are judged as
having stronger faith in God (congruent with the metaphor divinity is up;
Meier, Hauser, et al., 2007), the font color of positively valenced words is
judged to be brighter than that of negatively valenced words (good is bright;
Meier, Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007), and a social issue is judged

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 to be more important when participants hold a heavy rather than a light
clipboard (importance is heavy; Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). These
studies indicate that when making judgments about available stimuli, we
refer to physically embodied experiences. It may be the case that such embod-
ied domains are especially relevant for immediate judgments because action
is tightly coupled with triggering stimuli in the environment (Noë, 2004;
Norman, 1988). However, memory is, by its nature, partially dissociated from
the immediate environment. When information is available in the environ-
ment, we need not bother to store it in memory, and knowing this, people
often arrange information in their environments to reduce the burden on
memory (Kirsh, 1995). Although environmental cues guide behavior, we
are not completely subject to them. One of the hallmarks of human cogni-
tion is our ability to deliberate about, plan for, and remember that which is
not immediately present (e.g., Donald, 1993). These forms of mental time
travel require us to suppress information coming in from the environment in
order to imagine alternatives (Glenberg, 1997). When we disengage from the
immediate environment and recall things that are no longer available to be
acted on, does embodiment matter?
Given what is known about memory, it makes sense that it would be influ-
enced by embodied associations and metaphorically related content. Memory
is reconstructive. When trying to retrieve an experience from memory, par-
ticipants do not just rewind and play back a mental recording. Instead, they
piece together a memory that includes traces of the original event along with
other sources of information such as prior knowledge, expectations, and infor-
mation acquired after the original memory trace was laid (Loftus, Feldman, &
Dashiell, 1995; Schacter, Guerin, & St. Jacques, 2011). Given the growing
evidence that some concepts are understood metaphorically, metaphorically
related information may be another ingredient in reconstructive memory. If
so, metaphors would be expected to influence how information is encoded
into and retrieved from memory. If metaphors are as cognitively pervasive
as theorists have claimed (Gibbs, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), then they
should influence offline cognition as well.
Furthermore, it is valuable to examine memory in addition to imme-
diate stimulus processing because the conditions that are known to facili-
tate attention and judgment sometimes have the opposite effect on memory
(e.g., Mulligan, 1996; Nairne, 1988; Stangor & McMillan, 1992). As the
following review of the literature reveals, memory for spatial location and
autobiographical events shows biases in favor of metaphor congruence, but
memory for recently encountered stimulus content produces a less consistent
pattern of findings. Without examining a range of cognitive processes, we
risk drawing an overly simplistic conclusion that cognition favors metaphor-
congruent information.

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 Spatial Memory

A few studies have examined the impact of the good is up metaphor on

memory for the spatial locations of emotionally evocative stimuli. Crawford,
Margolies, Drake, and Murphy (2006) conducted a series of studies in which
positive and negative images from the International Affect Picture System
(IAPS; Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention, 1999) were presented
in various locations on a screen. After viewing all of the images (Experiment 1),
participants saw each image again and moved it to the location where they
remembered having seen it previously. Although the task was challenging
and the responses rather inaccurate, there was a significant effect of image
valence, with positive pictures were biased upward relative to comparably
located negative images. In a subsequent experiment, participants reproduced
the location of each picture immediately after viewing it. This immediate
memory task creates different processing demands. Not only is the task much
easier, it does not require participants to use the image content as a retrieval
cue for location, and thus the emotional content of the stimuli are incidental
to the task. In fact, participants can do this task by attending only to location
and not even encoding the images, as they would if their vision were blurry.
Despite deemphasizing the image content, this experiment showed a similar
effect of valence on memory for location.
An advantage of using images such as the IAPS is that they are vivid and
well known to evoke affective responses (e.g., Larsen, Norris, & Cacioppo,
2003). A disadvantage is that it is difficult to control for other features of the
stimuli that could affect spatial memory, such as brightness and coloration,
the direction of a pictured person’s eye gaze, or the location of the main con-
tent within the picture. Because such variables could confound the effects of
valence, we conducted another experiment in which we manipulated how
participants felt about a set of stimuli. We presented participants with year-
book photos of high school girls who appeared in various locations. Each
photograph was randomly paired with a positive or negative vignette about
the pictured girl. Positive vignettes described behaviors that demonstrate
kindness, loyalty to friends, leadership, or success, such as, “She was captain
of her school’s soccer team and was respected by all of her teammates. In the
state championship game, she scored the winning goal and was voted most
valuable player.” Negative vignettes demonstrated disloyalty, dishonesty,
failure, or meanness, such as, “She comes from a wealthy family and always
wears fashionable and expensive clothes. During high school, she and her
friends used to make fun of the poorer girls’ outfits.” In a subsequent block,
each photo was shown again, and participants moved it back to its previous
position and then rated how they felt about the target. Those whom they
evaluated positively were biased upward in memory compared with those

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 who were evaluated negatively. Additional studies using single-word stimuli
instead of images find a similar pattern of results (Crawford & Drake, 2012).
Thus, the results suggest that the good is up bias in memory for spatial location
generalizes beyond the IAPS pictures.
Because we were interested in the general orientational metaphor good is
up, our studies did not address more specific valenced concepts that are mapped
to the vertical dimension. Meier, Hauser, and colleagues (2007) focused on
the metaphoric mapping of God and the devil to up and down, respectively.
This metaphor is reflected in the language and iconography of many religions
and is especially salient in the Christian tradition. Meier, Hauser, et al. found
that not only were people faster to recognize words related to God or the
devil when they appeared in metaphor-congruent spatial locations, they also
tended to bias their memory of location. Memories of picture locations were
biased upward when the pictures depicted God and downward when they
depicted the devil. The God is up metaphor is coherent with good is up, and
this study provides additional evidence that such spatial metaphors play a
role in remembering locations of objects.
Do these biases emerge during perceptual encoding or later on, when
the item is retrieved from memory? The question is important because if these
results reflect only biases in perception, then they tell us little about whether
and how metaphors may operate in memory. The biases observed in the
Crawford et al. (2006) studies cannot be attributed to perceptual encoding
alone because the same stimuli were shown at initial presentation and again
at test, when participants returned each to its previous position. If perception
of location were biased, this bias would apply both during study and at test and
so would cancel out in estimation, producing no net bias in responses. The
results observed in these studies would only emerge if retaining the stimulus
in memory introduced bias in addition to any that might occur in perception.
This account is in keeping with other findings from the literature on spa-
tial memory. It is well known that when participants recall locations of objects,
they reconstruct those memories by combining information about the object’s
specific location with other sources of information. For example, estimates
of a point location integrate information about the geographic category or
larger spatial region in which a stimulus appeared (Friedman & Brown, 2000;
Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan, 1991) as well as participants’ expectations
about stimulus movement (Freyd & Finke, 1984). These sources of informa-
tion lead to systematic biases in memories of location, biases that become
more extreme the longer the stimulus is held in memory. It may be the case
that people integrate metaphor-activated spatial regions into their location
memories in a similar way. That is, when people view an emotionally charged
stimulus, their own affective response activates metaphorically related areas of
space. When asked to retrieve the location, that spatial area is blended with

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 memory for the particular location. Integrating these two sources of informa-
tion will lead items to be biased in the direction of the metaphor—good things
upward, bad things downward.

Autobiographical Memory

One of the many possible physical bases for the good is up metaphor
may be the connection between affective state and posture. As noted earlier,
health and liveliness are necessary to remain upright in the face of gravity.
When sad, people tend to hold a stooped posture in which the head tilts
downward, whereas happy people are more erect (LaFrance & Mayo, 1978).
Such bodily associations with emotional states may constrain the range of
possible metaphors for affective experience, making it more felicitous to
conceptualize good as up than as down.
Some research suggests that the posture one adopts can affect retrieval
of autobiographical memories. Riskind (1983) had participants adopt the
posture and facial expression commensurate with happiness or sadness and
then, as they maintained this, to recall positive or negative experiences from
their lives. They found that participants retrieved memories faster when their
posture and the valence prompt were congruent, suggesting that the congru-
ency produced a more efficient search. As Casasanto and Dijkstra (2010)
noted, this effect could be due to the activation of the good is up metaphor,
but it could also be attributed to the well-known phenomenon of encod-
ing specificity (Godden & Baddeley, 1975; Tulving, 1986) through which
memory is facilitated when encoding and retrieval conditions are similar.
Specifically, if people were smiling and upright when the memory was origi-
nally encoded, then taking that position at retrieval is likely to have a facili-
tating effect. This facilitation would be expected whether or not emotions
were conceptualized via spatial metaphor.
These accounts are teased apart in a study by Casasanto and Dijkstra
(2010). Rather than manipulate posture, they had participants move mar-
bles upward or downward while retrieving autobiographical memories. In
one experiment, participants were asked to retrieve a memory with a posi-
tive or negative valence, such as a time when they felt proud or ashamed.
The results showed that participants were faster to respond when the move-
ment of the marbles was congruent with the valence of the memory, suggest-
ing that retrieval was more efficient when the valence of the memory and
movement of the marbles were congruent with the good is up metaphor. In
another experiment, participants were given neutral memory prompts (e.g.,
something that happened yesterday) and asked to respond while moving mar-
bles upward or downward. They retrieved a greater number of positive than

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 negative memories in the upward condition, but the opposite occurred in the
downward condition. Because it is highly unlikely that people were moving
objects upward or downward during the original encoding of these memories,
the results are not consistent with an encoding specificity account. Rather, it
seems that upward or downward goal-directed actions activated associations
of positive and negative valence, thus influencing the efficiency with which
people retrieved valenced memories as well as the likelihood that they would
recall metaphor-congruent as opposed to incongruent content.
Autobiographical memory and metaphor were examined using a dif-
ferent approach by Keefer, Landau, Sullivan, and Rothschild (2011). Rather
than examine how spatial behavior affects what is retrieved, they examined
how spatial behavior during retrieval affects judgments about the present.
In one condition, college students were asked to focus on uncertainties they
felt about their lives and then asked to remember and list the factors that
influenced their decision to attend their university in order from earliest to
most recent. Finally, they rated their satisfaction with their decision. The key
spatial manipulation was that they ordered their reasons in an upward direc-
tion (i.e., entering text starting at the bottom and moving upward with each
item) or in the opposite direction. As predicted, those who listed the reasons
for their choice in the upward direction rated themselves as more satisfied
with their university decision than those that listed them in the downward
direction. Most important, this metaphor effect only emerged when partici-
pants initially focused on uncertainty and not when they instead focused on
pain or the shelving of books. As Keefer et al. noted, the results support the
idea that metaphors serve the epistemic function of managing uncertainty
(see also Landau et al., 2010).

Memory for Stimulus Content

An alternative approach to the study of metaphor and memory is to

examine memory for the content of recently encountered stimuli. Palma,
Garrido, and Semin (2011) did this in a study of impression formation and
memory. They gave participants a description of someone who belonged to
a positively stereotyped group (a child-care worker) or a negatively stereo-
typed group (a skinhead). Participants then read behavioral descriptions,
some of which were consistent with the valence of the group membership
and some of which were neutral. The critical variable was the spatial location
in which these behavioral descriptions were shown: Some appeared at the
top and others at the bottom of a screen. After doing a filler task and then
rating how they felt about the target, participants were given a surprise free-
recall task in which they were asked to remember as many of the behaviors

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 as possible. Participants recalled more behaviors that had been presented in
the metaphor-compatible positions (for the child-care worker, positive in the
upper region of space; for the skinhead, negative in the lower region) than in
the opposite pairing of valence and location. The same pattern of results was
found in an experiment that manipulated location by printing the behavioral
descriptions on cards that participants placed on either high or low shelves.
These results are in keeping with other studies of physical compatibility and
memory. For example, Förster and Strack (1996) had people hear a list of
positive and negative words while doing a nodding or head-shaking motion
(ostensibly as a marketing test for the headphones they were wearing) and
found an interaction between action and valence such that positive words
were better remembered when nodding than when shaking and the opposite
was true for negative words. Metaphor compatibility with respect to valenced
stimuli may operate like other kinds of action compatibility, benefiting mem-
ory performance.
Crawford and Cohn (2012) reached a different conclusion in their study
of spatial location and memory for text. In these experiments, stimuli were
individual positive and negative words, each of which was randomly assigned
to appear at the top or bottom of a screen. In a subsequent free-recall task,
participants remembered more of the words that had been presented in meta-
phor incongruent locations than in congruent ones, an effect that was mostly
driven by responses to negative words. In another study, they used a recogni-
tion test in which the vertical position of words varied during initial stimulus
presentation but was constant and centered at the testing stage. As with
the free-recall results, negative words were better recognized when they had
previously appeared at the top of the screen than at the bottom. This study
suggests that at least under certain conditions, there is a memory advantage
for material that was studied in metaphor-incongruent locations.
The results of the Crawford and Cohn (2012) study are in keeping with
previous work showing a memory advantage for information that violates
expectation (e.g., Graesser, 1981; Stangor & McMillan, 1992), but they con-
flict with the congruency advantage that Palma et al. (2011) found. The
reason for these disparate outcomes cannot be discerned because there were
many methodological differences between the studies. Palma et al.’s partici-
pants read behavioral descriptions, were instructed to form an impression
of a stereotyped person, and viewed stimuli drawn from half of the valence
continuum (i.e., neutral to positive or neutral to negative). Crawford and
Cohn’s (2012) participants read individually presented words, were not told
to think of them as person descriptions, and encountered a wider range of
valence. Compared with Crawford and Cohn’s procedures, it seems likely
that Palma et al.’s (2011) would lead participants to form a more cohesive,
entitative representation of the presented material. It is possible that this

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 produces a strong expectation of, and preference for, stimulus compatibility
that extends to spatial location. Crawford and Cohn’s results suggest that the
effects of metaphors on memory may be complex. They also suggest ways in
which metaphors may relate to other kinds of knowledge structures, as dis-
cussed in what follows.

Metaphors and Schemas

In a review article, Landau et al. (2010) called for researchers to consider

how conceptual metaphors can enrich our understanding of social cognition.
They acknowledged that we already have a powerful account of how people
make sense of social stimuli: schemas. According to the extensive literature
on schemas, people interpret individual stimuli by relating them to what is
already known about stimuli of the same kind. Conceptual metaphor is similar
in that previously existing knowledge structures are used to understand newly
encountered stimuli, but it differs in that this knowledge is pulled from an
alternate domain rather than from similar instances within the same domain.1
Conceptual metaphor theory makes the additional claim that we tend to do
this when trying to interpret, reason, or remember things that are relatively
abstract. On the basis of these differences, Landau et al. (2010) proposed that
metaphor should be viewed as a unique mechanism that operates in addition
to schemas.
An important difference between metaphor theory and schemas is that
schemas are traditionally assumed to be abstracted, amodally represented
knowledge that is dissociated from sensory systems (IJzerman & Koole, 2011;
Landau, Keefer, & Meier, 2011; Landau et al., 2010). The growing evidence
for conceptual metaphor indicates that the schema account of social cog-
nition is incomplete. It may be the case that we need to treat metaphor
as an additional, unique mechanism that operates in addition to schemas.
Alternatively, we may need to expand our notion of schema so that it includes
metaphor-based components. That is, rather than posit two separate kinds
of knowledge structures, we assume one that has embodied, metaphor-based
aspects. This is happening in the study of concepts. Like schemas, concepts
were traditionally viewed as abstracted and disembodied, but recent work
argues that concepts include modality-specific, embodied elements (Barsalou,
1999; Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, &Wilson, 2003). Expanding schemas to

1Both schemas and metaphors exert what psychology has traditionally referred to as top-down effects in

which prior knowledge influences how we process information coming in through the senses. The top-
down/bottom-up terminology reflects the underlying conceptual metaphor abstract is up, concrete is down.
The terms are awkwardly incoherent when applied to conceptual metaphor theory, according to which
cognitive structures (i.e., the top) are structured by concrete, physical experience.

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 encompass metaphors might provide a parsimonious way to account for the
commonalities in how schemas and metaphors affect cognition.
One hallmark of schemas and categories is that whereas facilitation is
seen for initial processing of information that fits the schema, the effects in
memory are more variable. Although memory is sometimes better for infor-
mation that is congruent with prior knowledge (e.g., Cantor & Mischel,
1979; Rothbart, Evans, & Fulero, 1979), many studies find the opposite effect.
In their meta-analysis of studies that examined memory for expectancy-
congruent and expectancy-incongruent social information, Stangor and
McMillan (1992) concluded that recall and recognition measures that are
corrected for response bias show an overall advantage for incongruent over
congruent information. This conclusion is consistent with Srull and Wyer’s
(1989) associative network model, which proposed that when information
about a person violates expectations, it prompts people to think more elabo-
rately to resolve the incongruency, leaving a stronger memory trace. It is also
consistent with Graesser’s (1981) schema-pointer plus tag model, which posits
that incongruent information is stored separately from congruent informa-
tion, supporting memory for the discrepancies (see also Sakamoto & Love,
2004, for a similar account in nonsocial categorization).
It is also possible that metaphor incongruency garners memory advan-
tages during encoding, regardless of deliberate attempts to reconcile incon-
gruent information after encoding. Previous studies have shown that making
perceptual encoding of items more difficult can lead to better memory for the
studied material. For example, words that are immediately followed by an
interfering perceptual mask are harder to read but better remembered than
unmasked words (Mulligan, 1996; Nairne, 1988). When perceptual disflu-
ency is increased by showing words printed in difficult-to-read fonts, memory
for those items is enhanced (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan,
2011). The fact that metaphor incongruent information takes longer to pro-
cess initially (as in Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004) suggests that meta-
phor incongruency may pose the kind of encoding challenge that leads to
enhanced memory.

Cognitive Functions of Metaphors

A functional approach to cognition suggests that we use mechanisms

such as metaphor because they confer some cognitive benefit. Landau et al.
(2010) suggested that we are averse to abstraction, presumably because we
are cognitive misers and abstractions require more cognitive effort. In general
terms, metaphors may operate like other kinds of cognitive structures in that
they enable us to draw inferences, reconstruct memories, and make sense of

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 what would otherwise be the “blooming and buzzing confusion” of sensory
input (James, 1890, p. 462). Thus, they enable us to reduce uncertainty not
only about major life events (Keefer et al., 2011) but also about basic cogni-
tive operations. However, is there reason to believe that cognitive structures
that are metaphorical are particularly useful in ways that are not addressed by
traditional accounts of categories and schemas?
Studies of recoding (or re-representation) suggest that there is. There
is good evidence that memory is improved when information can be repre-
sented in formats that have a spatial component. For example, Paivio’s (1971)
work on dual coding shows that words are better remembered when presented
along with visual representations and that words referring to concrete objects
are better remembered than abstract ones because they can be visualized.
Watson and Rubin (1996) showed that memory for a sequence of events was
enhanced when those events were presented in consecutive locations rather
than in a single central location, indicating that mapping the nonspatial
dimension of sequential order to space is beneficial for memory. Relatedly,
Casasanto and Boroditzky (2008) showed that people integrate information
about the spatial extent of an object when reproducing the object’s duration
but do not use duration to reproduce spatial extent. They concluded that we
build representations of “things we can never see or touch” out of experience
with perception and action (p. 591).
In addition, a number of studies have shown that physical actions,
which are both spatial and motoric, support memory. For example, memory
for a string of digits is enhanced when participants are taught to rehearse
them both verbally and with a sequence of corresponding finger movements
(Reisberg, Rappaport, & O’Shaughnessy, 1984). Memory for verbal mate-
rial is enhanced when people enact the studied content than when they do
not (Engelkamp, 1998; Hornstein & Mulligan, 2001). In addition, gesturing
while verbally describing video vignettes leads to better subsequent recall
of the presented events than not gesturing (Cook, Yip, & Goldin-Meadow,
2010). Physical action produces detailed sensory information, including spa-
tial information, that may provide for more detailed encoding as well as a
richer set of retrieval cues.
Conceptual metaphors may be beneficial because they allow for infor-
mation to be re-represented into domains that our brains handle especially
well. This is especially plausible with respect to spatial metaphors. Spatial
location is encoded relatively automatically, regardless of task instructions or
cognitive load (Hasher & Zacks, 1979). Mnemonic devices such as the method
of loci work by recruiting spatial memory to support memory for other kinds of
information that is not easily retained (Yates, 1966/2001). In addition, space
is inherently relational, which makes it an especially useful representational
format for relational concepts. When two objects are shown simultaneously,

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 the spatial relations are available in the world and do not need to be com-
puted and maintained in memory, as they would be if the same information
were presented verbally. Thus, serial logic and class-inclusion problems are
made easier when they can be recoded in a spatial format, such as a Venn
diagram (Bryant & Squire, 2001; Gattis, 2001). By locating abstract concepts
in space, orientational metaphors such as good is up may take advantage of a
representational format that reduces computational complexity.
So far, the good is up metaphor has received the most attention, but
metaphors involving other spatial dimensions may function similarly. For
example, one way to conceptualize time is in terms of movement through
space (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Margolies & Crawford, 2008; Miles,
Nind, & Macrae, 2010), and one way to conceptualize social relationships
is through distance (e.g., Williams & Bargh, 2008). By examining a greater
variety of metaphors, researchers will build a more complete understanding
of the role of metaphors in memory.

Future Directions

As this volume shows, we now have a convincing body of evidence that

when evaluating, interpreting, or remembering information, people make use
of knowledge from metaphorically related domains. Having established that,
we are now poised to test hypotheses generated by theoretical accounts of
how metaphors are used and what functions they serve. To do so, future stud-
ies will need to examine variability in metaphor use. If we can manipulate
people’s reliance on metaphors or take advantage of natural variation in it,
we can examine the consequences of their use.
Keefer et al. (2011) argued that metaphor may serve the epistemic func-
tion of reducing uncertainty. As evidence for this, they found that people
relied more on metaphor when they were primed with uncertainties about
significant aspects of their lives (e.g., the value of their college experience). It
may also be the case that metaphors are integrated into memories because
they reduce uncertainty about the past. If so, then we would expect that
conditions under which people are less certain about previously experienced
stimuli or events would produce greater reliance on metaphor. One way to
examine this would be to manipulate conditions that are known to affect
memory performance, such as the quantity of information to be remembered,
the amount of delay or interference after the information has been encoded,
or the correspondence between encoding and retrieval context. An alterna-
tive approach, akin to Keefer et al.’s, would be to manipulate subjects’ confi-
dence in their own memory ability. In addition, we might expect that natural
variation in memory ability (or memory self-efficacy) would correlate with

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 metaphor use. That is, if we assume that access to conceptual metaphors is
more or less constant but that memory competence varies, then those with
worse memory may rely more heavily on metaphor. Such findings would pro-
vide strong additional support that metaphors serve the epistemic function
of reducing uncertainty.
The function of reducing uncertainty is not essentially different from the
function of other knowledge structures, such as categories, stereotypes, traits,
and schemas. We know that these conceptual structures can be activated, even
outside of conscious awareness, and lead to changes in subsequent judgments
and behavior (reviewed in Bargh, 1997). It seems likely that metaphors can
be differentially activated as well. There is evidence that spatial experience
can achieve this. For example, Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002) showed that
traversing a spatial distance can make people more likely to think of themselves
as moving through time rather than as being stationary as time passes by. Keefer
et al. (2011) showed that having participants spatially arrange textual descrip-
tions of life events as if along a path increases the salience of the metaphor
life course is a path. There are likely to be many ways that metaphors can be
activated, and more work is needed to establish the most effective approaches.
Manipulating the application of metaphors is a potentially powerful
tool for understanding their role in cognition. As work in this area progresses,
it will allow us to investigate the consequences of using metaphors, informing
our understanding of what functions they serve. For example, if using the good
is up metaphor supports reasoning and memory about affective experiences,
then making that metaphor less available could have several effects. A simple
prediction would be that it would decrease performance on tasks that depend
on reasoning and memory about emotional content. A more nuanced predic-
tion would be that it would increase reliance on other cognitive structures
with which metaphor probably works in concert.
As noted earlier (see also IJzerman & Koole, 2011; Landau et al., 2010),
metaphors are similar to schemas but differ in that they cross knowledge
domains. Interestingly, many metaphors cross domains that are thought to be
cognitively and neurologically separable, such as emotion, language, and spa-
tial cognition. Thus, although metaphors may operate like schemas in many
respects, conceptual metaphor theory also generates new hypotheses that
traditional schema theory does not. For example, if we use spatial representa-
tions to support conceptualization of nonspatial content, then we might be
able to decrease metaphor effects by selectively interfering with spatial (but
not verbal) working memory. Using a similar logic, patients who have selec-
tive deficits in spatial cognition would be expected to show less reliance on
spatial metaphors. For example, due to damage in the parietal lobes, patients
with Balint’s syndrome can identify individual objects without being able to
locate them in space and, in some cases, can perceive only one object at a

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 time (Robertson, 2004). Although such patients may still speak using com-
mon, practiced spatial metaphors, they may not use spatial representations to
conceptualize emotion, time, or other abstractions.
Another topic for future research is to consider differences between types
of metaphors. This chapter focused on spatialization metaphors, which are
among the most prevalent, but these may operate differently from other kinds
of metaphors. Some metaphors, such as good is up, may be more automatic and
obligatory; others may depend on deliberate, optional strategy. For example,
we may have some control over whether we think of love as a journey, a battle-
field, or a collaborative work of art. In such cases, the choice of metaphor is
important because it does not leave unaltered the experience that we view
through it. The character of love itself changes when we adopt different meta-
phors, and it seems likely that our memories of past love would change as well.

Conclusion

The findings that metaphors affect memory suggest that conceptual met-
aphors play a role in offline cognition, when a stimulus is no longer available
to elicit direct action. This work complements studies that focus on immedi-
ate judgments of perceptible items. In keeping with studies of schemas, ste-
reotypes, and categories, the findings reviewed here illustrate that metaphors
can influence cognition in complex ways, producing variable outcomes across
different tasks.

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 5
Metaphor in Judgment
and Decision Making
Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz

“I say, block those metaphors. America’s economy isn’t a stalled car, nor
is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets a bit more rest. Our
problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies. And bad metaphors
make for bad policy,” wrote Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman in his
New York Times column (2010, p. A25). Why would bad metaphors make for
bad policy? Can metaphors shape how people think about the issues at hand
and how they decide to fix them?
Neither traditional theories of metaphoric thought nor standard
approaches to decision making would suggest so. However, key assumptions
underlying both of these perspectives have been challenged by recent experi-
mental findings. We begin this chapter by briefly outlining the traditional
perspectives and the recent challenges. We propose why metaphors should

We thank the editors for helpful and insightful comments and the R C Lee Charitable Foundation for
generous support.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-005
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M. J. Landau, M. D. Robinson, and
B. P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

85

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 affect decision making in predictable ways. We then review experimental
findings that document profound effects of metaphors on decision making
across a variety of economic, consumer, and social domains. We conclude by
discussing their theoretical implications and identifying promising directions
for future research.

Traditional and Current Perspectives on Metaphor

in Thinking and Decision Making

Does Metaphor Matter for Thinking?

Traditional Western philosophy, linguistics, and related cognitive sci-

ences viewed metaphoric language as something of imaginative and extra­
ordinary use. Poets and playwrights (and perhaps some columnists) may use it
for decorative and artistic purposes, but it bears little if any relation to ordinary
thinking. From this perspective, metaphoric language is peripheral rather than
central to thought (see Chapter 2, this volume).
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) challenged this view by highlighting the
systematic patterns underlying metaphoric expressions and their pervasive,
mostly unconscious, use in everyday language. Such systematicity and perva-
siveness, they argued, would be unlikely if metaphoric language was nothing
more than fancy talk invoked idiosyncratically on limited occasions. Their
cognitive linguistics analysis assumed that “since communication is based on
the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is
an important source of evidence for what that system is like” (p. 3). Through
the window of linguistic patterns, their view of the conceptual system was
strikingly different from tradition. They proposed that the conceptual system
itself is metaphorical. Thought about abstract concepts (e.g., morality, love) is
guided by the schematic and inferential structures of relatively concrete con-
cepts (e.g., cleanliness, journey) that involve more direct bodily experience
with the physical world. Although the linguistic evidence supporting this
argument is sizeable and provocative, others warned that linguistic patterns
only indirectly bear on mental processes—language and thought are different
things (e.g., Murphy, 1996, 1997; see also Chapter 2, this volume).
Going beyond the limits of linguistic analyses, a rapidly growing body
of experimental research provides persuasive evidence for the role of meta-
phors in human thought. It shows that even subtle, incidental bodily experi-
ences can unconsciously affect thought about metaphorically related targets
(for recent reviews, see Barsalou, 2008; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010;
Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). This work produced many surprising and
memorable effects that would not have been predicted a few years ago. What

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 is more important, the findings highlight the role of bodily experiences in a
variety of psychological processes, from basic attention and memory to social
perception, attitude, inference, and judgment. How a given bodily experi-
ence affects a psychological outcome can typically be predicted on the basis
of metaphoric associations, although the specific mechanisms remain a mat-
ter of debate (cf. Anderson, 2008; Barsalou, 2008; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).

Does Metaphor Matter for Decision Making?

That incidental bodily experiences affect how people think about meta-
phorically associated targets does not necessarily imply that they also affect
how people act and decide. In classic rational choice approaches and their
derivatives, actions and decisions are based on the expected utility of an
outcome (e.g., Becker, 1976; Elster, 2006; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Some
bodily experiences are directly relevant to the expected utility of a choice
alternative, as when hunger and thirst increase the utility of food and drink.
Bodily experiences that are merely metaphorically relevant to the choice
alternatives should exert no influence.
But as numerous studies have demonstrated, how people think and how
they behave are strongly driven by their mental construal of the choice alter-
natives and the situation in which they are embedded (e.g., Lichtenstein &
Slovic, 2006; Schwarz, 2007, 2009; Smith & Conrey, 2007; Smith & Semin,
2004). In many contexts of judgment and decision making, social and moral
concerns like fairness and altruism (e.g., Fehr & Gächter, 2005; Fehr &
Schmidt, 1999; Rabin, 1993) play a more influential role than has long been
assumed, as do motivation, self-regulation, and actual or illusory control
(e.g., Higgins, 2012). Importantly, these notions tend to be constructed and
comprehended metaphorically in terms of bodily experiences, from morality
(dirty behavior) and sociability (warm person) to fairness (evenhanded) and
self-control (see Chapters 6 and 11, this volume). Furthermore, the language
of evaluative judgment brims with metaphors, as shown by the impartiality
of balanced judgments and the importance of weighty matters. Such obser-
vations suggest that metaphors may play an important role in how people
mentally construe the decision task, from their perception of the choice
alternatives and the outcomes they afford to the social context in which
the decision is situated.
From this perspective, incidental bodily experiences may activate meta-
phorically associated thoughts, goals, and feelings that pervade the construal
of a decision: How attractive are the choice alternatives? Are the benefits
worth the costs? Is my negotiation partner trustworthy? Is luck on my side?
Do I have what it takes to pull this off? The underlying processes of mental
construal are familiar from research on knowledge and goal accessibility (for

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 reviews, see Bless & Schwarz, 2010; Förster & Liberman, 2007; Higgins, 1996;
Schwarz, 2009). An embodied and metaphoric approach adds that mental
representations are multimodal instead of amodal (Barsalou, 1999, 2008) and
hence can be activated through diverse sensory experiences; moreover, knowl-
edge associations can be not only literal but also metaphoric. To date, most
demonstrations of metaphoric effects on judgment and decision making seem
to occur through this process—bodily experiences activating metaphorically
associated thoughts, goals, and feelings—but other processes are likely to exist
as well. We will revisit this issue of multiple processes and elaborate its impli-
cations after reviewing some illustrative evidence.

Embodied Metaphors Affect Mental Construal

People are social (Fiske, 2004) and moral beings (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010),
and both aspects figure prominently in how people make decisions. Human
thought about sociality and morality is highly metaphoric, with many attri-
butes conceptualized in terms of bodily interactions with the physical world
(see Chapter 11, this volume). As such, incidental bodily experiences that cue
metaphorically associated meanings should be able to change how people make
decisions. Empirically, it is true across economic, consumer, and social domains.

Metaphorical Cues With Social Meanings

Fishy and Suspicious

Linguistic analyses (Soriano & Valenzuela, 2008) indicate that social
suspicion is metaphorically associated with the sensory experience of smell in
at least 18 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German,
and Spanish. However, the specific odor differs by language, suggesting a uni-
versal conceptual metaphor with culture-specific instantiations. In English,
the relevant odor is fishy. Can smelling something fishy make people suspi-
cious and unwilling to engage in trust-based investment in a joint venture or
in a common cause?
To test this possibility, we (Lee & Schwarz, 2012a, Study 1) had an exper-
imenter spray fish oil, fart spray, or odorless water at a corner area in a campus
building. Another experimenter, blind to the smell condition, approached
students in a different area and invited them to participate in a one-shot trust
game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995) with another “participant,” who
was actually a confederate. They walked over to the smell-manipulated cor-
ner area, where each received 20 quarters ($5) and an investment form with
instructions and response space. The true participant was always approached

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 first and thus designated as decision maker A (the sender), who could freely
decide how much money to send to decision maker B. Any amount sent
would be quadrupled in value, and decision maker B could then decide how
much to send back to decision maker A. Hence, if A trusts B to reciprocate
the favor, A should send more money, thus quadrupling what is available for
later distribution. If A suspects, however, that B may not be trustworthy, A
is better off by sending less. As expected, participants exposed to incidental
fishy smells sent significantly less money ($2.53 of their $5 endowment) than
those exposed to fart spray ($3.38) or odorless water ($3.34). The amount
sent did not differ significantly between the last two conditions, indicating
that the metaphoric effect was not driven by generic valence. This “fishy
effect” was replicated in a second study using a one-shot public goods game
(Ledyard, 1995) in which people should be less likely to invest in a pool of
shared resources if they suspect their partners might not carry their share of
responsibility. Again, smelling something fishy rather than farty or odorless
led participants to contribute less money to the public good.
These studies highlight that incidental exposure to a subtle smell with
metaphoric meaning is sufficient to elicit suspicion about the motives and
trustworthiness of one’s partners, with adverse effects on cooperative behav-
ior. The effect is driven not by the generic valence of the sensory experience
but by its specific metaphoric associations, as the comparison between fishy
and farty smells suggested. Participants’ debriefing reports revealed no con-
scious awareness of the smell and its influence.
We also tested for the reverse direction of influence: Would feeling
suspicious influence participants’ perception of incidental fishy smells? As
expected, inducing social suspicion improved participants’ ability to correctly
identify fishy smells (Lee & Schwarz, 2012a, Study 3) and heightened their
sensitivity to the presence of faint fishy smells in a signal detection paradigm
(Study 7). Both of these effects were specific to the metaphorically related
fishy smell and not observed for other smells, which lacked a metaphoric
relationship with suspicion. Additional experiments indicated that social
suspicion exerts its influence on the perception of fishy smells by activating
metaphorically associated concepts related to fishy (Studies 4–6). Next, we
consider embodied metaphors that can increase trust.

Warm and Trustworthy

People who are “warm and caring” are those we can trust. Surprisingly,
the impression that someone has a warm personality can be induced by inci-
dental experiences of physical warmth. Merely holding a warm rather than
cold object (e.g., a cup of warm vs. iced coffee) can lead one to perceive
another’s personality as warmer (Williams & Bargh, 2008, Study 1) and to

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 act in socially warm and caring ways (e.g., choosing a reward for a friend
rather than for oneself; Study 2). Consistent with this metaphoric associa-
tion between physical and social warmth, Kang, Williams, Clark, Gray, and
Bargh (2011) found that incidental physical warmth can also increase trust in
cooperation games. Their participants first held and evaluated either a warm
or cold temperature pack and then played 15 rounds of a trust game (Berg
et al., 1995). Each round ostensibly involved a different partner, but in fact all
“partner” responses were computer-generated. As predicted, participants who
had held a warm rather than cold pack invested more money in the trust game
(Kang et al., 2011, Study 1). The size of this effect depends on the constraints
imposed by the choice alternatives (Study 2), highlighting the need to test
for the robustness of metaphoric effects on decisions with varying degrees of
constraint in natural contexts.

Hard and Unyielding; Rough and Adversarial

Whereas warm people are trustworthy, people who are rough or hard
seem less inviting, and interacting with them elicits corresponding behav-
iors on the perceiver’s side. The incidental experience of tactile hardness or
roughness turns out to be sufficient to elicit the same behaviors. Exploring
the metaphoric meaning of hardness, Ackerman, Nocera, and Bargh (2010,
Study 6) had participants imagine shopping for a new car, making an offer
to the dealer, being rejected, and having to make a second offer. Depending
on condition, participants were sitting in a hard wooden chair or a soft cush-
ioned chair. As predicted, those sitting in a hard chair receded less from the
first to the second offer. Apparently, they held a harder line in negotiation.
Follow-up work (Cherkasskiy, Song, Malahy, & Bargh, 2012) also found that
sitting in a hard rather than soft chair while reading criminal scenarios led
people to recommend harsher sentences.
In a conceptually similar study, Ackerman et al. (2010, Study 3) observed
that touching rough materials increased the perception that a social inter­
action is rough and adversarial. Building on this finding, they asked partici-
pants in a decision experiment (Study 4) to complete a puzzle with pieces that
were either smooth or covered in rough sandpaper. Next, participants played
an ultimatum game (Güth, Schmittberger, & Schwarze, 1982). They received
10 tickets for a $50 lottery and decided how many to give to an anonymous
(bogus) participant, who supposedly would decide whether to accept the offer
(allowing both decision makers to keep their respective allocations) or to
reject it (in which case both decision makers would get nothing). As pre-
dicted, participants who had played with a rough rather than smooth puzzle
offered more tickets in the ultimatum game, presumably to ensure acceptance
of their offer in the context of a potentially rough interaction.

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 Metaphoric Cues With Moral Meanings

Morality is a central domain of social thought, and a variety of meta-

phors have been found to ground moral thought in embodied experience
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; see also Chapter 6, this volume). For example,
virtuous people have a clean conscience and walk in the light. Can these
bodily experiences—feeling clean or seeing light—serve as metaphoric cues
that promote honorable decision making against self-interest?

Moral and Physical Purity

People respond to moral transgressions with disgust, an emotion other-
wise associated with exposure to physical contaminants from open wounds
to spoiled food (e.g., Curtis, Aunger, & Rabie, 2004; Lee & Ellsworth, in
press). In fact, moral and physical disgust involve similar subjective feelings,
facial expressions, and overlapping neural network activities. Their overlap
is also apparent in language use, from the Psalms’ (24:4) notion of “clean
hands and a pure heart” to everyday references to “dirty hands” or a “dirty
mouth” (for a review, see Lee & Schwarz, 2011). Testing the behavioral con-
sequences of these metaphoric associations, Zhong and Liljenquist (2006)
found that immoral thoughts increased the appeal of cleaning products.
Merely copying a story about someone else’s unethical rather than ethical
behavior was sufficient to make cleaning products more desirable (Study 2),
and participants who had to recall their own immoral rather than moral acts
were more likely to choose an antiseptic wipe as a gift (Study 3). As in the
physical domain, the desire to cleanse is specific to the contaminated body
part. Participants who were induced to sin with their mouth by conveying a
lie on voicemail preferred mouthwash over hand sanitizer; conversely, those
induced to sin with their hands by conveying the same lie on e-mail pre-
ferred hand sanitizer over mouthwash (Lee & Schwarz, 2010a). Just as rins-
ing your mouth would not help after getting your hands dirty, rinsing your
mouth also does not help after doing something unethical with your hands.
These parallel responses to moral and physical contamination illustrate the
extent to which moral thought draws on mechanisms of disgust that evolved
to keep us away from sources of physical contamination (Lee & Schwarz,
2011; see also Chapter 11, this volume).
Applying these insights to the legal domain, Bilz (2012, Study 3) found
that law students who did rather than did not have to use “dirty evidence” in
a mock trial were more likely to choose a bottle of hand sanitizer over a pen
as a free gift. Going beyond the effect of disgust on preference and choice,
Zhong and Liljenquist (2006, Study 4) further demonstrated that using a
cleaning product can reduce feelings of guilt and the need to make amends.

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 After recalling a moral transgression, 74% of their participants volunteered
time to help another researcher, yet simply cleaning their hands with an
antiseptic wipe reduced volunteerism to a mere 41%.
Whereas these studies illustrate that immoral acts are experienced as
“dirty” and elicit a desire to cleanse, other studies show that cleanliness can
facilitate adherence to moral standards. For example, Liljenquist, Zhong, and
Galinsky (2010) hypothesized that clean scents might promote adherence
to moral codes such as reciprocity and charity in the context of economic
decisions. Each participant played a one-shot trust game (modeled after Berg
et al., 1995) with a (bogus) partner in a room that either was or was not
sprayed with citrus-scented Windex. The participant was told that she was
randomly assigned to be the receiver and that her partner (the sender) had
decided to send her the full amount of $4, now tripled to $12. As it turns out,
participants in the clean-scented room returned more money to the partner,
exhibiting greater reciprocity (Study 1). Participants in the clean-scented
room were also more likely to volunteer for and donate money to a nonprofit
organization, acting more charitably (Study 2).

Walking in the Light

Zhong, Bohns, and Gino (2010, Study 2) explored the metaphoric
association between having a dark view and making a morally questionable
decision. Under the disguise of a product test, participants received either a
pair of sunglasses or clear glasses to test-wear while completing a supposedly
unrelated task—namely, a one-shot dictator game (modeled after Kahneman,
Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986). In the dictator game, participants were given $6 to
freely allocate between themselves and the recipient and were told that they
could keep any money they did not offer to the recipient for themselves. All
interactions were computer-mediated and, unbeknownst to the participants,
the experimenter played the recipient. As predicted, participants wearing
sunglasses rather than clear glasses offered less money, and their offers fell
below the point of fair division ($3). Thus, the subjective experience of dark-
ness, induced by wearing sunglasses, created an illusory sense of anonymity
(Study 3) and set the stage for shady economic decisions.

Other Metaphors

The examples so far reveal how incidental bodily experiences can affect
judgment and decision making in line with widely shared metaphors about
sociality and morality. Of course, metaphors are not limited to these domains
of human experience. The next few examples, on what feels important and
how people exert control over their lives, illustrate how wide-ranging meta-
phoric effects can be.

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 Heavy and Important
When describing a decision process, we may note that some consid-
erations carry more weight than others, reflecting a metaphoric association
between physical weight and conceptual importance or impact. A number
of studies highlight the power of this metaphor by showing that things
seem more important, and exert more influence, the heavier they weigh
in our hands (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009; Schneider, Rutjens,
Jostmann, & Lakens, 2011; Zhang & Li, 2012). For example, Ackerman
et al. (2010, Study 2) asked participants by how much the government
should increase or decrease funding for various social issues. When the ques-
tionnaire was presented on a heavy clipboard, participants chose to allocate
more money than when it was presented on a light clipboard. However,
this effect was limited to issues that participants were likely to know about
(e.g., air pollution) and not found for less familiar issues (e.g., regulation of
the frequency bands for radio broadcast). This boundary condition seems
surprising because one might expect incidental cues to exert more influence
the less other information people have about the issue; if this were true,
decisions about unfamiliar (rather than familiar) issues should have been
more affected by incidental cues.
Subsequent research by Chandler, Reinhard, and Schwarz (2012) shed
light on the underlying reason by revealing a possible process. In three stud-
ies, they observed that a book was evaluated as more important and influ-
ential when its heft was increased by a concealed weight. However, this
metaphoric effect of weight was observed only for participants who knew
something about the book, either because they had read it (Studies 1 and 2)
or because they could peruse a short synopsis (Study 3). Apparently, the meta­
phorically relevant weight cue provided an initial hypothesis (“this seems
important”), which participants subsequently tested against other informa-
tion. Only when they could muster supporting evidence did they endorse the
book’s importance. Hence, factual knowledge does not necessarily protect us
against the effect of incidental cues; it may increase our susceptibility. From
this perspective, in Ackerman et al.’s (2010) study, the clipboard’s weight
may have increased fund allocation when participants could muster some
supporting information but not otherwise, giving an advantage to issues they
knew something about. An important future direction is to test whether this
logic applies to other metaphoric effects. For example, would fishy smells (Lee
& Schwarz, 2012a) be more likely to undermine trust and cooperation when
decision makers can recruit some information about their partner or the situ-
ation to support their suspicion? Would physical warmth (Williams & Bargh,
2008) only render another person socially warmer when the perceiver can
find some information that is compatible with this first impression?

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 Firming Willpower (Self-Control)
To many people, decisions about what kinds and amounts of food to
consume pose an everyday self-control challenge: gustatory pleasure at the
table and weight gain on the scale, or bland food now and better health later?
Forgoing the immediate pleasure for the long-term health goal often requires
firming one’s willpower.
Hung and Labroo (2011) tested whether, why, when, and for whom the
bodily experience of firming muscles has the metaphoric benefit of firming
willpower and promoting healthier food choices. In a lab study (Study 3),
participants first completed a sentence-unscrambling task that either did or
did not prime health goals. Then they were given a nasty, sour-tasting health
tonic to test-drink and were asked to report their online thoughts between
sips. Meanwhile, under the pretense of motor skills assessment, they had to
maintain a given posture that required either lifting the heels off the floor
by contracting the calf muscles or simply keeping the feet on the ground. As
expected, firming one’s muscles increased tonic consumption (by a surpris-
ing 67%) relative to not firming one’s muscles, and this effect was partially
mediated by more willpower-related thoughts. These effects were observable
only if health goals had been primed, suggesting that firm muscles facilitate
self-control in goal pursuit and exert no influence in the absence of a rel-
evant goal.
Moving to a field setting (Study 4), Hung and Labroo (2011) also found
that simply holding a pen between stretched fingers (rather than holding it
loosely between index and middle fingers) increased the purchase of healthy
food and drinks at a snack bar. This effect was observable only for participants
with chronic health goals but not for participants with chronic indulgence
goals, again indicating that firmed muscles facilitate the pursuit of active goals.
In a final lab study (Study 5), participants who contracted their biceps showed
more disapproval of a scenario character’s unhealthy food choice (chocolate
cake) and were more likely to make a healthy food choice for themselves,
picking an apple rather than chocolate to consume. These effects on vicarious
and own food choices were observable only if muscle-firming occurred during
a self-control scenario related to food choice, not if muscle firming occurred
during a previous self-control scenario unrelated to food choice (the scenario
was about resisting boredom). This set of studies shows that as long as health
goals are temporarily or chronically accessible, firming muscles while making
food choices can firm willpower and promote healthy eating.

Washing Away Past Good or Bad Luck and Other Residue (Illusory Control)
Good or bad luck is the target of many superstitious behaviors (Vyse,
1997). People believe that luck can “rub off” when they touch lucky individuals

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 or objects (Radford & Radford, 1949). Athletes and gamblers on a winning
streak keep wearing their “lucky” shirts and socks but prefer changing their
clothes when they are on a losing streak (Bleak & Frederick, 1998; Gmelch,
1974). Such superstitions suggest that people think about luck as a contagious
substance (Rozin & Nemeroff, 1990) that can be transferred through physical
contact and removed through physical cleansing.
To test this possibility, Xu, Schwarz, and Zwick (2012, Study 1) had par-
ticipants recall either a lucky or unlucky financial decision and asked them to
describe what happened and how they felt. Next, participants were handed
an antiseptic wipe as part of an allegedly unrelated product evaluation task.
Depending on condition, they either examined it only or tested it by wiping
their hands before providing a product evaluation. Finally, participants assumed
the role of a CEO as part of a third task and decided between a high-risk and a
no-risk business option. As expected, those who had initially been assigned to
recall a lucky financial decision took more risk in the business context than
those who had to recall an unlucky financial decision. However, this effect
was observed only for participants who merely examined the antiseptic wipe;
the effect was fully eliminated for participants who actually used the wipe.
Apparently, wiping hands removed the residues of previous luck, making the
previously lucky participants more cautious and the previously unlucky ones
more adventurous.
The same effect was observed when participants gambled with their
own money (Xu et al., 2012, Study 2). Specifically, participants initially
gambled for several rounds before they were asked to participate in a product
test involving an organic soap. Some participants merely examined the soap
before evaluating it; others tested it by washing their hands. Subsequently,
participants played a final round of the gamble during which they could bet
as much as they wanted. As expected, those who had been on a winning
streak in the first few rounds of gambling bet the most in the final round,
whereas those who had been on a losing streak bet the least. Participants who
had experienced some wins and some losses fell in between these extremes,
although their losses loomed larger than their gains (consistent with pros-
pect theory; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). More important, this influence of
previous good or bad luck was observed only among participants who merely
examined the soap but was eliminated among those who washed their hands
(see Figure 5.1). In both studies, physical cleansing metaphorically removed
the residues of one’s previous good or bad luck and its impact on subsequent
risk-taking behavior.
Taking this reasoning to the domain of academic performance, Kaspar
(2012) found that participants who washed their hands after failing a test
became more optimistic about their future performance on a related task.
Unfortunately, this optimism undermined their motivation to exert effort

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 $60.00
$50.00
$40.00 37.75
33.33
28.18 31.15
$30.00
22.07
$20.00 17.47

$10.00
$0.00
Good Luck Bad Luck Mixed Luck
Washing Hands Not Washing Hands

Figure 5.1.  Amount of bet as a function of previous luck and hand washing. Error bars
represent standard errors. From “Washing Away Your (Good or Bad) Luck: Physical
Cleansing Affects Risk-Taking Behavior,” by A. J. Xu, R. Zwick, and N. Schwarz, 2012,
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, pp. 26–30, Study 2. Copyright 2012
by the American Psychological Association.

and thus impaired their subsequent actual performance—wiping off a bad

past is not always a good thing.
In combination, these studies highlight that physical cleansing can
remove more than one’s sins. It can remove many other residues of the past,
from good or bad luck to doubts and bad feelings, metaphorically wiping
the slate clean (Lee & Schwarz, 2011). We return to this issue in the next
section. Moreover, the psychological impact of physical cleansing is not lim-
ited to things that people want to wash away. When given a choice, people
want to remove the residues of negative experiences and avoid removing the
residues of positive ones (Lee & Schwarz, 2010a), but once they do cleanse,
it also removes residues they would rather keep, including the glow of good
luck (Xu et al., 2012) and positive life events (Lee, Schwarz, & Shaw, 2011).

Embodied Metaphors Affect Decision Processes

The metaphoric effects reviewed so far can be conceptualized by assum-

ing that incidental bodily experiences activate metaphorically associated
thoughts, goals, and feelings, which enter the mental construal of the situation
at hand, from the nature of one’s choice alternatives and the trustworthiness
of one’s interaction partner to the assessment of one’s mental resources and
concerns about one’s luck. To date, research has mostly focused on establish-
ing the existence of such metaphoric effects and has paid limited attention
to the underlying processes (Meier, Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, 2012). The
available evidence is even more limited for another category of metaphoric

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 effects: Incidental bodily experiences may trigger metaphorically associated
procedures that influence how people go about making a decision. Next, we
review the preliminary evidence for this type of effect.

Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance

As noted earlier, physical cleansing has powerful and surprising meta-

phoric effects, allowing people to wash away their sins (Zhong & Liljenquist,
2006) and remove other residues of past experience such as good or bad luck
(Xu et al., 2012) and failure on a test (Kaspar, 2012). Indeed, metaphoric
expressions about cleansing are not limited to issues of moral purity. If songs
and sayings are any guide to lay thinking, phrases such as wiping the slate clean
and “wash away my trouble, wash away my pain” (in the song “Shambala”)
suggest that the psychological effects of physical cleansing may not be limited
to the domain of moral purity. Instead, physical cleansing may wipe the slate
clean in a more general sense, allowing people to metaphorically remove resi-
dues of past experience (Lee & Schwarz, 2011).
If so, decision makers may be able to remove concerns about their previ-
ous choices with the help of a little soap. As seen in numerous cognitive dis-
sonance studies (Festinger, 1957; for recent developments, see Cooper, 2007),
the choices we make can profoundly affect later judgment and behavior. To
test whether dissonance effects can be eliminated through physical cleansing,
we (Lee & Schwarz, 2010b, Study 1) asked participants to rank 10 CDs in
order of preference. Next, they were offered a free choice between two CDs
that they had ranked as similarly and moderately attractive. Immediately
after choosing which of the two CDs they wanted to take home, participant
were asked to help with an unrelated product test; depending on condition,
they evaluated a bottle of hand soap by merely examining or actually using it.
Finally, participants provided another ranking of the 10 CDs based on their
current feelings.
In this free-choice paradigm (Brehm, 1956), people tend to justify their
choice by changing their perception of the choice alternatives: After hav-
ing made a choice, they perceive the chosen alternative as more attractive
than they did before and the rejected alternative as less attractive than they
did before. This increases the perceived difference between the alternatives,
putting any doubt about one’s choice to rest. As expected, this classic post-
decisional dissonance effect replicated when participants merely examined
the soap without washing their hands, but it was eliminated when partici-
pants did wash their hands (see Figure 5.2). Apparently, they had washed
away their postdecisional dissonance and had no further need to justify their
choice. In a conceptual replication (Study 2), participants who merely exam-
ined an antiseptic wipe after choosing between two fruit jams expected their

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 Difference between choice alternaves
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
0.5
No washing Hand washing
Before choice Aer choice

Figure 5.2.  Postdecisional dissonance after hand washing or no hand washing.

Higher values indicate higher preferences for the chosen alternative. Error bars
represent standard errors. From “Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance,” by
S. W. S. Lee and N. Schwarz, 2010, Science, 328, p. 709. Copyright 2010
S. W. S. Lee and N. Schwarz. Reprinted with permission from the authors.

chosen jam to taste better than the rejected one; actually using the wipe
again eliminated this dissonance effect.
De Los Reyes, Aldao, Kundey, Lee, and Molina (2012) replicated the
clean slate effect on postdecisional dissonance, using confidence in the qual-
ity of chosen and rejected pens as dependent measures. They also explored
individual differences and found that wiping hands eliminated postdecisional
dissonance only for participants who scored low on a composite measure of
intolerance of uncertainty, rumination, and generalized anxiety, but not for
participants who scored high on this measure. They noted that such individual
differences in clean slate effects might hold promise for identifying impul-
sive decision makers and for differential diagnosis. We see a broader need for
research on personal and situational variables such as rational versus experien-
tial thinking (Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996) and abstract versus
concrete construal (Trope & Liberman, 2010) that may facilitate or impair
people’s ability to distance themselves from past decisions with the aid of physi-
cal cleansing. Identifying these variables may illuminate some of the potential
complexity of metaphoric effects and the underlying mental processes.

Attaining Balance Through Compromise Choice

Another classic phenomenon in the decision-making literature is com-

promise choice (e.g., Simonson, 1989). In a simple choice set involving three
options that vary on two attributes, such as price and quality, the choice
share of the compromise option (medium price and medium quality) should
increase when people find both attributes important. Attributes are ideas,

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 and ideas are metaphorically referred to as objects that one can give, take, or
hold (e.g., let me give you a better idea, don’t steal my idea, I can’t quite grasp
it, catch this; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Objects have weight, and weight is
used metaphorically to conceptualize importance (e.g., that’s a heavy topic,
his opinion carries weight). Therefore, giving weight to an idea renders it
important—not just as a metaphoric statement but also with behavioral con-
sequences, as reviewed earlier. If giving weight to one idea renders it impor-
tant, giving weight to two ideas should render both important. Accordingly,
a bodily state that involves holding two ideas in hand and giving weight to
both may have such a procedural effect as assigning similar weights to two
attributes, thereby increasing compromise choice.
What might this bodily state look like? The balancing gesture is a prime
candidate. It has two aspects: (a) With the palms facing up, objects or ideas
can sit on the hands; (b) with the two hands moving alternately up and down,
the two objects or ideas are given similar weights (“on the one hand, this attri-
bute matters; on the other hand, that attribute matters too”). This analysis
also suggests that deviations from either aspect would rob the gesture of its
balancing meaning. If the palms are facing down, objects or ideas cannot sit
on the hands. If the two hands are stationary, the two objects or ideas are not
given similar weights. Does the balancing gesture really encourage compro-
mise choice? If so, does either deviation eliminate its effect?
To answer these questions, we (Lee & Schwarz, 2012b, Study 3) con-
ducted a study allegedly about multitasking in which participants were asked
to maintain a specific gesture for 20 seconds while reading two sets of product
descriptions (adapted from Drolet, Luce, & Simonson, 2009). Depending on
condition, the experimenter demonstrated one of three gestures: (a) moving
both hands alternately up and down with palms facing up or (b) facing down, or
(c) holding both hands palms up and stationary. The first product set included
three barbeque grills: one large size/heavy weight, one small size/light weight,
and one medium size/medium weight (compromise option). The second set
included three stereo speakers: one high power/high price, one low power/low
price, and one medium power/medium price (compromise option). Right after
the “multitasking” phase, participants marked which grill and speaker they
would like to buy. As expected, participants who moved their hands palms
up made more compromise choices than those who moved their hands palms
down or those who held their hands palms up and stationary, with no sig-
nificant difference between the last two groups. Other studies using the same
manipulations also found that the balancing gesture resulted in more balanced
time allocations to work and leisure activities (Study 2) and heightened the
perceived importance of having “balance in life” (Study 1).
In summary, a gesture that metaphorically weighs what is on one hand
against what is on the other hand can increase compromise choice and

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 balanced time budgeting, probably due to the activation of a balancing pro-
cedure. Both of the metaphoric bases of this gesture, palms up and hands
moving, are necessary for the metaphoric effect to occur.

Implications and Future Directions

Just a few years ago, it would have been absurd to predict that smelling
something fishy could reduce monetary investment in trust-based exchanges,
that sitting in a hard chair could lead one to hold a harder line in negotiations,
or that firming one’s muscles could firm one’s willpower in making healthier
food choices. However, the past few years have seen a rapidly growing list of
such metaphoric effects, cutting across economic, consumer, and social domains
of judgment and decision making. These effects are often counterintuitive and
surprising, ensuring considerable attention. They are also theoretically signifi-
cant by shedding new light on the embodied and situated nature of human
cognition and by adding to the multitude of ways in which human decision
making deviates from normative models of rational choice.
Having established that incidental bodily experiences can reliably
affect judgment and decision making in ways that are consistent with their
metaphoric meanings, it is time to go beyond mere demonstration and begin
unpacking the processes. In doing so, we will most likely learn that multiple
processes contribute to the growing list of bodily influences; below are four
examples.
77 Issue 1: Direct, nonmetaphoric effects. Incidental bodily expe-
riences can directly serve as information that people use like
any other experiential information (Schwarz, 2012). Familiar
examples are the informative functions of physiologic arousal
(Zillman, 1978), head movement (Wells & Petty, 1980), and
proprioceptive feedback from facial expressions (Strack, Martin,
& Stepper, 1988). These effects require no metaphoric mean-
ings. They occur presumably because in daily life nodding tends
to correlate with agreement and smiling with amusement, so
over time the sensorimotor experiences pick up the ability to
produce the same effects in their own right.
77 Issue 2: Metaphoric effects on mental construal of the decision situa-
tion. Incidental bodily experiences can activate metaphorically
associated thoughts, goals, and feelings to affect how people
construe the situation at hand. Most of the findings we reviewed
can be conceptualized as reflecting differences in the mental
construal of various aspects of the decision situation, such as

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 the task’s nature, the choice alternatives, one’s resources, and
the likely behavior of one’s partner. This conceptualization
integrates metaphors research with traditional themes of social
cognition such as knowledge and goal activation (e.g., Förster &
Liberman, 2007; Higgins, 1996) and mental correction (Bless &
Schwarz, 2010; Wilson & Brekke, 1994). Much can be learned
from exploring the links between metaphor effects and robust
phenomena of social cognition research. For example, basic
principles of knowledge activation and use (Higgins, 1996) pre-
dict that metaphoric effects are mediated by the accessibility
of metaphoric knowledge and moderated by its applicability to
the target; both predictions receive empirical support (Lee &
Schwarz, 2012a). Furthermore, metaphoric cues seem to affect
judgment only if one can recruit some pertinent knowledge
about the target (Chandler et al., 2012), again consistent with
familiar phenomena of confirmatory hypothesis testing.
A theoretical cross-fertilization with social cognition the-
orizing does not diminish the novelty and significance of meta-
phorical effects. To illustrate, consider that actual cleansing
(Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006) or visualizing oneself as cleansed
(Zhong, Strejcek, & Sivanathan, 2011) has been shown to
attenuate one’s guilt and make one feel morally pure and right­
eous, whereas simply being primed with purity concepts without
cleansing does not produce the same effects (Lee & Schwarz,
2011). Apparently, for some metaphoric effects, merely making
the concepts accessible may be insufficient; the action require-
ments need to be fulfilled. In fact, merely making the concepts
accessible may even backfire because thinking about purity
without a chance to cleanse may increase one’s sense of impu-
rity, a possibility that awaits testing. Contrast this with the fishy
findings (Lee & Schwarz, 2012a) in which the presence of fishy
smells is sufficient to produce metaphoric effects on social sus-
picion, much as the accessibility of trait concepts is sufficient
to affect the encoding of person descriptions (e.g., Higgins,
Rholes, & Jones, 1976; Srull & Wyer, 1979). The critical factor
to explore may be what sensation or motor action is implied by
the metaphor of interest. To be clean, one typically needs to
cleanse. To smell something fishy, one simply needs to smell.
An exploration of such bodily nuances may advance our under-
standing of metaphoric effects as well as knowledge accessibility.
77 Issue 3. Metaphoric effects on mental procedures in the decisional pro-
cess. Incidental bodily experiences may activate metaphorically

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 associated mental procedures that initiate, terminate, or change
the decision process itself. For example, physical cleansing allows
people to metaphorically wipe the slate clean and frees them from
residual concerns about their recent decisions, thereby eliminat-
ing postdecisional dissonance (Lee & Schwarz, 2010b). Mov-
ing one’s hands up and down with palms facing up elicits more
“balanced” judgments and decisions, presumably by assigning
more equal weights to the two attributes in the decision task (Lee
& Schwarz, 2012b). To date, experimental support for this type of
effects is limited, but we find it promising. It allows researchers to
leverage numerous well-understood paradigms in behavioral deci-
sion making to explore the potentially broad impact of embodied
metaphors.
77 Issue 4: Metaphoric effects without awareness. We expect that
both the direct and metaphoric effects of incidental bodily expe-
riences will be eliminated when people become aware of their
incidental nature, consistent with feelings-as-information the-
ory (Schwarz, 2012) and models of mental correction (Strack
& Hannover, 1996; Wilson & Brekke,1994). Just as awareness
undermines the influence of moods (e.g., Schwarz & Clore,
1983), arousal (e.g., Schwarz, Servay, & Kumpf, 1985), meta-
cognitive experience (e.g., Schwarz et al., 1991), and semantic
primes (e.g., Strack, Schwarz, Bless, Kübler, & Wänke, 1993),
awareness that a weight has been inserted in a book eliminates
its metaphoric effect on judgments of the book’s importance
(Reinhard, Chandler, & Schwarz, 2012). This suggests that
bodily experiences are most influential when they are subtle
and escape direct attention, paralleling the influence of other
experiential information.

In some decision situations, the processes just described may be pit-

ted against each other. For example, would physical cleansing eliminate
post­decisional dissonance in a choice between guilty pleasure and virtuous
restraint? If cleansing simply wipes the slate clean (Issue 3), it should matter
little what the content is and postdecisional dissonance should be eliminated.
However, if cleansing activates moral meanings (Issue 2), it should affect how
moral one feels about the choice alternatives or oneself, and the downstream
consequences may be more complicated. Which of these processes occur may
depend on whether people are aware or not (Issue 4) of the metaphoric effects
of physical cleansing on thoughts, feelings, goals, and procedures. Divergent
outcomes of these processes are promising avenues for future research.
Finally, we emphasize that this chapter’s focus on incidental bodily
experiences with metaphoric meanings does not imply that metaphors require

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 bodily experience in situ to exert an influence. As numerous studies illustrate,
linguistic or graphical priming of different metaphoric frames can affect peo-
ple’s thinking and inferences (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Morris, Sheldon, Ames,
& Young, 2007) without requiring a concurrent bodily input. Hence, simply
presenting tasks in different metaphoric frames can have powerful effects on
judgments and choices, and such framing effects may themselves interact
with whatever bodily experience the decision maker has at the time. The
exploration of such possibilities promises to extend the long list of insights
provided by recent work on the role of embodied metaphors in judgment and
decision making.

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 6
Dirt, Pollution, and Purity:
A Metaphoric Perspective
on Morality
Chen-Bo Zhong and Julian House

Where does morality come from? How do people make judgments and
decisions that distinguish right from wrong? Such questions have captivated
scholarly minds for centuries. Whether it is the Ten Commandments or cat-
egorical imperatives, Western philosophical tradition largely sees morality
as objective and external to human experience, either as divine codes of
conduct or universal principles that can be derived and discovered through
an independent process of reason. Drawing from a diverse body of work from
linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, however, this chapter attempts to
depict a view of morality that is embodied in human experience. Morality
evolved out of our struggle and interaction with the mundane material world,
and hence it cannot be totally separated from our concrete experiences such
as fear of pollution and desire for order. In this sense, morality is not the prod-
uct of neat, abstract reasoning based on universal principles but springs from
our emotional reactions and embodied realities. In this chapter, we explore

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-006
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M. J. Landau, M. D. Robinson, and
B. P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 how the metaphoric mapping between the concepts of purity and morality
may reflect a deeper conceptual overlap in how we conceive of morality in
terms of our embodied experiences with cleanliness, dirt, and pollution.

Neat Moral Reasoning

Is it OK to lie? There are typically two approaches to this question. The

first would say that it depends on the consequences of the lie: Lies that harm
others are morally reprehensible unless they produce good ends in aggregate.
Although such consequentialist reasoning includes many fine-grained dis-
tinctions regarding which goods should be maximized and for the benefit of
whom, it generally prioritizes the “good” of an action over the “right” of an
action. What is morally right is thus defined as that which has the best con-
sequences (Bentham, 1776/1948; Mill, 1861/1957). Alternatively, a deon-
tological approach to ethics, which emphasizes duties and rights, would say
that lying is wrong regardless of its consequences because deceiving someone,
even for the greater good, treats that person as a means to an end rather than
as someone with intrinsic value (Kant, 1785/2002). The “right” precedes the
“good”; what is right can be defined completely independent of what is good.
Both approaches use impersonal, universally applicable principles. For
example, the same consequentialist principle could be applied to evaluating
whether it is OK to kill two species of fish to save 10 other species, or whether
to kill two humans to save 10 others, or when the people you contemplate
sacrificing and saving are strangers, close friends, or relatives. Similarly, the
Kantian perspective might consider lying to conceal a personal misdeed to
be as wrong as lying to Nazi officers to save Jews hiding in your attic because
“one ought only to act such that the principle of one’s act could become a
universal law of human action in a world in which one would hope to live”
(Donaldson & Werhane, 2002, p. 7). Although these impersonal moral rules
can at times counter our moral intuitions and arrive at sharply conflicting
ethical judgment of the same action, our ability to reason freely based on
universal principles, without being confined by particular context, is often
celebrated as the defining characteristic of ethics (see Bloom, 2011).
Kohlberg’s (1963) moral development model, for instance, suggests that
the inclinations and intuitions we acquire during early childhood, many of
which originate from bodily experience and needs, such as the fear of punish-
ment, are immature forms of moral reasoning constrained by the lack of more
sophisticated cognitive capabilities. When people grow cognitively mature,
they should outgrow this so called preconventional level of moral reason-
ing and develop conventional level, and eventually postconventional level,
abstract moral reasoning based on universal principles such as reciprocity and

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 fairness. Granted that not everyone advances to the postconventional level
of reasoning, and that the same individual may switch back and forth between
the levels across time and context, the model considers abstract moral rea-
soning the aspirational high ground. Underlying all theories of “neat” moral
reasoning is the assumption that the moral laws that inform ethical behavior
can be deduced from a set of basic principles in a quasi-mathematic fashion,
such that reason and logic form the basis of moral functioning (Haidt, 2001;
Monin, Pizarro, & Beer, 2007).

Messy Moral Judgment

Neat moral rules do not always predict people’s moral judgment, how-
ever, even in the artificially constructed thought experiments that phi-
losophers often use to illustrate their arguments. One intriguing thought
experiment involves two structurally equivalent dilemmas in which a run-
away trolley is headed toward five track workers and will kill them if noth-
ing is done. In the switch dilemma, the only way to save the five is to flip a
switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks, where it will
kill one person instead of five; in the footbridge dilemma, the five can only
be saved if someone pushes another individual off a footbridge and onto the
tracks. This person will die, but his or her body will stop the trolley before it
reaches the others. In both cases, people must decide whether it is right to
kill one person to save five others. A consequentialist might say that in both
cases, people should save the five by sacrificing the one, whereas a deontolo-
gist might say that sacrificing the one individual is never morally justifiable
because we should not treat others as means to an end. Thus, different moral
principles may dictate different actions but should predict consistent actions
in both scenarios: The method by which the one individual is to be sacrificed
should have no bearing on the decision. Yet most people indicate that they
would flip the switch but are reluctant to push a stranger to his or her death.
In a series of influential studies, Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley,
and Cohen (2001) argued that people’s inconsistent responses to the trolley
dilemmas might be due to the nature of their emotional reactions to these sce-
narios. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, they found that the
regions of participants’ brains that are associated with emotional functions
(e.g., medial frontal gyrus, posterior cingulated gyrus, bilateral angular gyrus)
were significantly more active when they were contemplating the footbridge
dilemma than when they were contemplating the switch dilemma. The vis-
ceral thought of pushing someone to his or her death was more emotionally
evocative than the thought of pulling an inanimate switch, even though
the actions produced the same consequences, and these emotional reactions

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 correlate with people’s choices in the two situations (Greene et al., 2001).
Thus, people do not always play the role of a dispassionate judge applying
universally applicable principles when making moral judgments. Although
we are certainly capable of engaging in cold, impersonal calculations when
we can stand at distance flipping a switch, when we have to decide whether
to stain our hands with another person’s blood, moral reasoning becomes
messier. It is possible that morality is more than impersonal calculation of
total good or the logical discovery of categorical imperatives and is instead
deeply connected to the self and the important relationships and communi-
ties that are vital to our development and survival (Bloom, 2011).
This view is best articulated in Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist
model of moral judgment (Haidt, 2001) and moral foundations theory (Haidt
& Joseph, 2004). In his early research, Haidt asked people to make moral
judgments on a set of intriguing scenarios. One example involved kissing on
the mouth between adult siblings and another involved masturbating using
the carcass of a chicken before cooking and eating it. People were typically
quick to judge that these actions were wrong but were unable to articulate
the reasons why they were wrong when pressed (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993).
This moral dumbfounding seems to be driven heavily by the emotion of dis-
gust. Not only do disgusting activities feel wrong, but incidentally induced
disgust can also sway moral judgment. Wheatley and Haidt (2005), for exam-
ple, hypnotized participants to experience disgust upon hearing a cue word
but to have no memory of this instruction. After coming out of hypnosis,
participants read a few scenarios of actions that either did or did not contain
the cue word and were asked to judge the extent to which those actions were
wrong. They found that participants judged actions to be more morally wrong
when the description contained the disgust-inducing cue word than when it
did not. Likewise, Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008) showed that the pres-
ence of a disgusting smell increased the severity of moral judgment and that
this effect disappeared among participants who washed their hands before
they made their moral judgments. Similar results have been found with gus-
tatory disgust, such that a bad taste in one’s mouth can lead to harsher moral
judgment (Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011). Finally, individuals who are more
disgust sensitive—those who are easily disgusted by potential contaminants
such as the smell of urine or sharing a cup—tend to pass harsher moral judg-
ment (Jones & Fitness, 2008).
On the basis of these findings, Haidt (2001) suggested that moral judg-
ment is often not a product of deliberative reflection but instead is deter-
mined by a quick flux of intuitions about right and wrong that requires little
contemplation or reason. These intuitions are innate, evaluative feelings
that are evolutionarily selected and shaped by culture, custom, and socializa-
tion processes. Haidt (2007) further outlined five domains of vital challenges

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 faced by early humans and their ancestors that might have shaped moral intu-
itions: harm–care (protecting offspring), fairness–reciprocity (interaction
with nonkin), ingroup–loyalty (group cooperation), authority–respect (hier-
archy and control), and purity–sanctity (infection avoidance). Violations in
these domains induce different emotions (e.g., anger from harm, contempt
from disloyalty, and disgust from purity violations; see Rozin, Lowery, Imada,
& Haidt, 1999), which translate into flashes of approval and disapproval that
influence moral judgments.
Among these domains, purity is perhaps the most intriguing. The other
four moral domains each serve important social functions that are of direct
evolutionary advantage. For instance, caring for vulnerable offspring and
protecting them from harm is essential for the propagation of human genes.
Similarly, fostering an internally cohesive group through loyalty and authority,
and knowing whether other groups are behaving unfairly, can promote group
selection. It is not surprising, then, that our moral intuitions are founded in
these domains, and in these cases intuitions and reason do not diverge drasti-
cally. Perhaps it is for this reason that some legal scholars suggest that some
laws should be founded on emotions such as anger. After all, what provokes
anger is injustice and threats against safety and survival. John Stuart Mill went
as far as to argue that in this way, all of a society’s ideas about law and justice
can be seen as built on anger and fear (Nussbaum, 2004).
The same cannot be said about purity and its primary emotion, dis-
gust. In contrast to notions of care, justice, loyalty, and authority, purity is
not an inherently social concept. Although all of the other moral domains
patently support social order, it is not immediately clear how concerns of
contamination serve a social function beyond health and hygiene (Haidt &
Joseph, 2007). Instead, scholars have connected purity and the maintenance
of moral order by considering purity’s symbolic meanings. In her analyses of
the emotion disgust, Nussbaum (2004) argued that disgust is different from
anger in that it does not reflect real threat or harm but is instead rooted in
our existential desire to be separated from our animal nature and to transcend
mere flesh and bones. Shweder, Much, Park, and Mahapatra (1997) similarly
maintained that practices related to purity and pollution extend beyond mere
hygienic needs to serve symbolic, social functions, including the demarca-
tion of cultural boundaries (Soler, 1973/1979) and suppressing the selfishness
often associated with humanity’s carnal nature (e.g., lust, hunger, material
greed) by cultivating a more spiritual mind-set (see also Schnall, 2011). It
thus seems that purity, compared with other moral foundations, is the most
distant to neat moral reasoning and that its connection to morality is primar-
ily symbolic and metaphoric.
In the following section of this chapter, we argue that the purity foun-
dation of morality constitutes the “messy” and embodied element of moral

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 thinking. The construct of morality evolves out of our continuous interaction
with the physical and social world and ultimately reflects our desire to estab-
lish order. To do so, people reference and borrow from the tools and mecha-
nisms that they have developed to establish order in the physical world. This
results in overlapping conceptual frameworks that we use to deal with and
fence off physical (e.g., disease and pollution) and social threats (e.g., betrayal
and deception). Thus, we hope to expand on the aforementioned findings that
moral judgments are messy and involve older systems (e.g., emotions) by sug-
gesting that moral judgment not only involves an intuitive element but more
importantly is intimately connected with and emerges out of our concrete and
embodied experiences that deal with purity and pollution. On the basis of the
conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) from the linguistic literature (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1999), we argue that the concept of morality may be partly built on
our conceptual frameworks of dirt and cleanliness and hence have acquired
properties of how we think about dirt, pollution, and purity.

Metaphoric Basis of Morality

Concrete experiences, such as physical cleanliness, and abstract con-

cepts, such as morality, are typically considered orthogonal to each other. In
fact, the separation of bodily experience and psychological constructs is at
the core of the idea of mind–body separation that dates back to Plato and
Descartes. The cognitive revolution in psychology renewed this ancient idea
and started a field of research that modeled human information processing
after computer systems (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996). The human mind
was seen as the computer operating system that is directly responsible for
cognitive activities, whereas the body was the hardware that provides crucial
support to, but does not participate directly in, thinking and reasoning.
Purely cognitive models, however, do not seem to fully account for
anomalous findings from a growing body of research showing that thinking
is not independent of the body. For example, Strack, Martin, and Stepper
(1988) had individuals hold a pencil in their mouth using either their lips
(smile inhibiting) or teeth (smile facilitating) while reading humorous car-
toons. They found that those who held the pencil between their teeth had
more intense humor reactions to the cartoons than those held the pencil
between their lips. In a recent study, Neal and Chartrand (2011) found that
people who had received a cosmetic procedure that reduces muscular feed-
back from the face (Botox) had more trouble identifying emotional facial
expressions compared with those who received a procedure that does not
reduce feedback (a dermal filler). Thus, facial muscular feedback seems to
play an important role in identifying and labeling emotions both in the self

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 and others. These are just a few examples of a host of research that demon-
strates the importance of concrete bodily experience in anchoring percep-
tion, attitudes, and behavior (see Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).
To explain these anomalies, Barsalou (1999) proposed modifications
to traditional models of cognition and mental representation and suggested
that cognition includes not only abstract and amodal mental representations
but also modal perceptual content from various sensors (see also Varela,
Thompson, & Rosch, 1991, p. 172). These perceptual inputs are recorded
by systems of neurons in sensory-motor regions of the brain that capture
information about perceived events in the environment and in the body
(Barsalou, 1999). They are then used in perception, categorization, and judg-
ment to construct and run simulations, similar to mental models. In other
words, thinking is argued to involve perceptual simulation (Schubert, 2005).
As William James (1890/1950) explained, “every representation of a move-
ment awakens in some degree the actual movement” (p. 526). Once enacted,
these perceptual symbols can in turn influence thoughts and perceptions.
For example, the activation of an elderly stereotype has been shown to auto-
matically induce behavioral changes consistent with the stereotype, leading
people to actually walk slower (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Damasio
(1994) similarly illustrated this using the scenario of expecting to see an old
friend. The mental simulation of meeting an old friend not only includes
mental images and representations but is also accompanied by physiological
changes such as increased heart rate and blushing. Independent of thoughts
and mental images, these physiological changes may inform and reinforce
the extent to which we look forward to meeting the friend. Contrary to the
computer model, these findings highlight the interdependence of higher level
cognitive processes and lower level bodily sensations and experiences.
Barsalou’s (1999) model, however, does not specify which concrete
experiences are incorporated into what abstract processes, nor does it elabo-
rate a mechanism beyond simple associative conditioning. Unlike Barsalou,
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) suggested that concrete experiences are not just an
input into abstract thinking but directly shape the formation and evolution of
abstract thought. With their CMT, they argued that the human mind operates
metaphorically. During conceptual development, human beings first acquire
lower level, concrete knowledge through direct experience with the environ-
ment before later grasping more complex and abstract concepts. The concrete
concepts learned early on can then serve as a metaphoric scaffolding to aid
the comprehension of abstract concepts. For example, children first learn con-
crete concepts such as distance (close vs. far) and spatial orientation (up vs.
down) through direct sensory experience before they attempt to comprehend
abstract constructs such as time. CMT suggests that people may rely on the
metaphor of spatial relations to make sense of time. Thus, in phrases such as

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 “I look forward to meeting you” or “the meeting has been moved back,” time
is metaphorically modeled after physical relations, and time passing is pictured
as objects moving along a physical dimension. Conceptualizing time in terms
of spatial relations allows people to form mental pictures of time and facili-
tates the understanding and communication of an otherwise ethereal concept.
Many other abstract and higher order constructs are similarly conceptualized
through lower level, concrete constructs such as importance and physical
weight (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009), social exclusion and coldness
(IJzerman & Semin, 2009; Williams & Bargh, 2008; Zhong & Leonardelli,
2008), and prosociality and sweetness (Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, &
Robinson, 2012). Thus, abstract constructs and processes do not emerge out
of the blue but evolve from our concrete experiences of interacting with the
physical world.
CMT offers a unique perspective on morality: Morality may be modeled
after our understanding of concrete concepts, such as dirt and cleanliness, so
that moral transgression is mentally represented as dirt and virtue as clean-
liness. As an abstract construct, morality develops much later than lower
level concepts such as dirt and cleanliness (but see the ongoing debate sur-
rounding moral nativism, e.g., Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007; Scarf, Imuta,
Colombo, & Hayne, 2012). Therefore, it is possible that when people start
to develop an understanding of moral and social threats, they use emotional
and conceptual tools that they have already grasped through dealing with
physical threats, such as contamination and pollution. Indeed, disgust has
been found to be an emotional reaction to both physical purity violations and
moral violations. Even though disgust is originally rooted in our evolutionary
past as a mechanism for avoiding the ingestion of noxious substances, such
as rotten food and feces, over time, it has expanded to communicate a sense
of wrongness in social and cultural domains, including moral violations such
as adultery and deception (Schaller & Duncan, 2007). Physical and moral
disgust not only are expressed by similar facial expressions and physiological
activation (Chapman, Kim, Susskind, & Anderson, 2009; Rozin, Lowery, &
Ebert, 1994) but also use partially overlapping brain regions of the frontal and
temporal lobes (Borg, Lieberman, & Kiehl, 2008; Moll et al., 2002). Rather
than creating new neural circuitry to process morality, individuals may have
adapted existing circuitries that are used to process contaminations and pol-
lutions (Rozin, 1999).
Similarly, concepts related to cleanliness and dirt are frequently referenced
in descriptions of moral issues. In English, for example, the phrase money laun-
dering implies that the proceeds of crime are “tainted” and need to be “cleaned”
to pass as legitimate; a tarnished reputation can indicate that previous immoral
acts are perceived to foretell future immoral acts, and the phrase blood on your
hands signifies involvement in nefarious activities. In Judeo-Christian religion,

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 the book of Leviticus repeatedly links impurity with sin and clean­liness with
holiness, describing various foods, actions, and states that are abominations
(Klawans, 2000).
Moreover, in less technologically advanced civilizations, people actually
confound moral transgression and physical pollution (Douglas, 1966). The
Nuer (also known as the Nei Ti Naath, roughly meaning original people) society,
for example, is a confederation of tribes located in south Sudan and western
Ethiopia. To Nuers, physical pollution and moral transgression are psychologi-
cally indistinguishable. Common beliefs among Nuers include that if a wife
engages in adultery, her husband will experience back pain, or if incest occurs
in the tribe, contagious skin diseases will spread among its members. To stop
these negative consequences, the victims (and sometimes the offenders) need
to perform cleansing rituals. The Nuers have such confidence in the conflation
between pollution and transgression that they use signs of pollution as an evi-
dence for transgression. Thus, the husband’s back pain may be used as evidence
that the wife has committed adultery.
The Nuers are not the only culture to conflate physical cleanliness with
morality. Although medical advances have dispelled many superstitions so
that most people today recognize that moral transgressions do not directly
cause physical pollution, at some level the psychological overlap between
physical cleanliness and morality remains. Recent research reveals that moral
transgressions literally feel dirty, such that reminding people of their past
unsavory acts induced greater desire for cleansing products such as shampoos
and bars of soap (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Moreover, the metaphoric link
between morality and cleanliness can have quite specific effects unique to a
given modality. A subsequent study found that those who lied through voice
mail desired mouthwash over other things, whereas those who lied via e-mail
desired antiseptic hand wipes (Lee & Schwarz, 2010). Conversely, cleanliness
has been found to signal moral purity (e.g., Helzer & Pizarro, 2011; Xu, Bègue,
& Bushman, 2012; Yan, Ding, & Yan, 2011; Zhong, Strejcek, & Sivanathan,
2010). Zhong et al. (2010) found that participants who felt physically clean
(as opposed to the ones who were led to feel physically dirty) tended to make
more severe moral judgments on a variety of social issues such as obesity,
homosexuality, and using profane language. This finding seems to be driven
by an enhanced moral self-image after the cleanliness induction. Other stud-
ies yielded similar results. Helzer and Pizarro (2011), for example, found that
individuals standing near a hand-sanitizer dispenser tended to make harsher
moral judgments than those not reminded of cleanliness. Thus, in addition to
sins feeling filthy, cleanliness is psychologically next to godliness.
Together, these observations depict a picture of morality as being psy-
chologically embodied in physical dirt and cleanliness, and demonstrate
a level of psychological equivalence between the concrete experience of

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 contamination and purity, on the one hand, and the abstract notions of vice
and virtue on the other. If this is indeed the case, then we might expect
more than mere spreading of activation from concrete experiences of dirt
and cleanliness to abstract constructs of morality. We might also expect that
how we think about morality reflects the ways in which we think about dirt
and cleanliness. The following section outlines three dimensions of dirt and
cleanliness that might have shaped the way people conceptualize morality.

The Metaphoric Structure of Moral Mind

One important characteristic of metaphors is property transfer. In the

metaphor “Juliet is the sun,” for example, the source concept of the sun is used
to describe the target concept, Juliet. When Shakespeare says that Juliet is
the sun, many properties associated with the source concept, such as warmth,
illumination, and the center of the known universe, become automatically
activated and transferred to form a mental picture of the target concept.
Thus, there is no need to describe explicitly that Juliet is warm, radiant, and
the center of a certain young man’s life; the metaphor automatically evokes
all of these concepts (see Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010, for a review). Thus,
if the concept of morality is metaphorically built on the conceptual frame-
work of dirt and pollution, we would expect properties associated with dirt to
shape how people think about morality.
Being able to identify a potential source of pollution is undoubtedly
important for increasing the chance of survival. Mere categorization of dirt
from nondirt, however, is often insufficient because dirt comes in different
forms with varying properties. For example, if a pond that tribe members
rely on as a water source becomes polluted, it is important to know how long
that pollution will persist and whether anything can be done to clean it up;
it may be equally important to know whether the pollution may spread to
nearby water sources; finally, what is the severity of pollution? Does it simply
produce an unpleasant taste, or does it pose real health hazards? These three
dimensions of dirt and pollution—permanence, contagion, and harm—may
carry significant adaptive implications that shape not only how we assess
physical pollution threats but also social threats from moral transgressions.
Specifically, these properties of dirt may influence how we think about moral
reputations, the likelihood of copycat unethical behavior, and how we assess
the morality of harmless deviant behaviors, respectively. This is not a claim
that permanence, contagion, and harm are the only properties of dirt and
pollution relevant to morality, or even the most important ones; rather, these
dimensions serve as a starting point for our analyses of the metaphoric struc-
ture of embodied morality.

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 Permanence

You and your partner are in a long-term relationship. Things are going
well until one day your partner confesses that he (or she) slept with some-
one else a couple of weeks ago. Your partner says that this was a one-time
thing and asks for your forgiveness.
In a moral psychology class, a scenario such as this would typically end
with the question “How wrong was your partner’s behavior?” In the real world,
however, moral judgment and condemnation rarely end our moral evaluation
process because of ongoing social relationships. Instead, what people do in
situations like this is determined not only by their judgment of the act itself,
but also by the assessment of the likelihood of future transgressions. If we
believe that our partner’s dalliance is truly a one-time affair, the likelihood of
saving the relationship and forgiving the partner is much higher than if we
think that the partner may cheat again in the future. Assessments like this
are not unique to intimate relationships but applicable to many other forms of
transgression without the involvement of personal relationships. In the case
of crime, for example, even though an individual can terminate his or her
interaction with a particular criminal, as a society, we need to decide whether
and how we can rehabilitate criminals and reduce the likelihood of recidivism.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,266,800 adults
were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons and county jails at year-
end 2010 (Glaze, 2011). Additionally, 4,887,900 adults were on probation or
on parole. In total, approximately 7,100,000 adults were under correctional
supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2010, which is slightly more
than three out of every 100 resident adults in the United States. Given the
large population and the stakes involved, we would expect people to follow a
rational process to predict recidivism rates. Criminologists, for instance, use
statistical modeling to predict recidivism (e.g., Collins, 2010; Cottle, Lee, &
Heilbrun, 2001). An average person, however, often thinks of transgression
and crime as permanently polluting. A person who transgresses is thought of
as having been tainted and it is difficult to come clean again. This is best com-
municated in the aphorism once a criminal, always a criminal. When assessing
transgressions and crimes we often conceive of stains, such as blood, that are
difficult to wash away. Lady Macbeth’s futile attempt to wash the blood from
her hands is a dramatic example of this metaphoric thinking written into our
collective conscience.
Thinking of transgressions and crimes as staining dirt and pollution may
enable us to use our fear of permanent pollution to regulate social behaviors.
If we believe that transgressions are going to leave a permanent “taint” on
our character and reputation, we might be less willing to transgress in the
first place. However, just as any heuristics in judgment and decision making,

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 it could also have maladaptive effects. First, thinking of transgressions and
crimes as staining permanently may lead us to be much less forgiving and tol-
erant of others’ misdeeds than otherwise. One of the cornerstones of psychol-
ogy is the realization that behaviors are jointly determined by character and
situational factors; thus, honest people can engage in dishonest behaviors in
particular circumstances (Maûar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008). If we believe “once a
cheater, always a cheater,” we are likely to distance ourselves from those who
have made the mistake of transgressing. Given another chance, those indi-
viduals may actually be able to stay “clean,” but stigma and social isolation
may push them to relapse into transgression again, producing a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The United States currently has the highest rate of incarceration
in human history; it is interesting to think about whether this has anything
to do with how Americans treat and react to dirt and pollution. The United
States has hygiene standards that are unmatched in history (Smith, 2007)
and this hypervigilance for germs and dirt may be reflected in the desire to
expunge “pollutants” from society. A metaphoric perspective of moral judg-
ment may thus enhance understanding of the critically understudied process
of reintegration as a means of recidivism reduction (e.g., O’Donnell, Baumer,
& Hughes, 2008; Shinkfield & Graffam, 2009).
Second, the permanence of stains is also dependent on the power of
cleansing. Oil stains on clothing may be difficult to wash off with water alone,
but powerful cleansers can often do the trick. Ironically, if we know that
stains can be easily washed off, we are less likely to be as careful avoiding dirt
and pollution to begin with. It turns out that such licensing effect of washing
is not limited to dealing with dirt and pollution but also social transgressions.
Many cultures, such as the Nuers and the Bemba (an ethnic group of central
Africa), believe that moral vices, including adultery and incest, come with
lethal dangers. The Bemba, however, have confidence in their purification
rituals for adultery, so they frequently give in to their desires (Douglas, 1966).
Many world religions, including but not limited to Christianity and Islam,
embrace the idea that washing can purify body and soul, purging sins and
granting new beginnings. Cleansing and purification, whether literal or sym-
bolic, may serve as a safety net that allows people to engage in unsavory and
dangerous activities that are otherwise barred by their social systems.
Moral evaluations should not be limited to episodic judgments isolated in
time and space (i.e., a solitary act as good or bad) but should involve context-
specific projections and assessments of future behavior. Such projections are
important not only because of the personal relationships we may have with
the person being judged but also because of the more general connections and
mutual responsibilities we share with each other due to the social contract
that binds us together as a society. Similar to the influence that the emotion
disgust has on moral judgment (Haidt, 2001), moral evaluations regarding the

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 permanence of moral record may be guided by our intuitions about the stains
of dirt and pollution. Yet although a “better-safe-than-sorry” strategy may help
individuals avoid those most likely to (re)offend, emphasizing the dispositional
nature of moral behavior may have perverse societal consequences by further
delaying an evidence-based approach to recidivism prevention policies.

Contagion

What would happen if we drop a dead cockroach into a bowl of soup?

The whole pot would be spoiled because of the spreading of germs and goo that
the dead cockroach oozes throughout the liquid. What about putting a dead
cockroach on top of a pile of chocolates? Most people recognize that although
the chocolates that come in direct contact with the dead cockroach may be
contaminated, those that remain untouched are not. However, when asked
whether they would like to eat pieces of chocolate near, but untouched, by the
dead cockroach, many would refuse or hesitate. When it comes to dealing with
contagion and contamination in the physical world, our intuitions often fail
to distinguish between contamination through contact and a type of magical
thinking in which contamination occurs through mere association. For exam-
ple, Rozin, Millman, and Nemeroff (1986) found that people are reluctant
to eat feces-shaped fudge, and Morales and Fitzsimons (2007) demonstrated
that contact with an unopened package of sanitary napkins is enough to make
another packaged product less desirable; mere mental association with filth
seems to signal the corruption of what is otherwise perfectly clean.
Magical thinking characterizes how people deal with social pollutants
as well. In traditional cultures, for example, social systems and structures
often evolve alongside fear of contagion from the impure. The most cited
case is probably India’s caste system. Within the system, a member’s defin-
ing aspect is their purity: Brahmans, considered the purest, are afforded the
highest positions in society, whereas Dalits are considered both physically
dirty and morally corrupted. These “untouchables” are not allowed to marry
into families of higher caste, participate in religious activities, or even share
physical proximity with the upper class for fear of contagion (Deliège, 1999).
Although to a much lesser extent, such magical thinking can also be observed
in racial tensions between Whites and Blacks in the United States. “Whites
only” drinking fountains and separate seating areas, among other segrega-
tion practices, vividly demonstrate the illusory fear that Blacks would pollute
communal property. Thus, fear of contagion that originates from interacting
with the physical world can spill over into social segregation and discrimina-
tion. If social impurities are conceived as contaminating dirt and the mere
presence of them could corrupt the otherwise pure and righteous, then sepa-
rating them from the rest of the society both physically and socially seems a

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 logical remedy. Indeed, in a recent example, a North Carolina pastor, Charles
L. Worley, ranted that people should round up all “queers and homosexuals”
and quarantine them inside an electric fence (Eng, 2012).
Magical contagion not only guides how we fear that a social pollutant
may contaminate ourselves but also shapes our perception of the extent to
which it may corrupt the behavior of others. It is impossible nowadays not to
turn on the television without hearing about reports of unethical behaviors
or crimes. Books, movies, and video games are filled with profane language,
nudity, sex, and violence. It is thus of paramount importance that we under-
stand how exposure to transgressions and unsavory content may affect the
behaviors of others, particularly the young. Are certain unethical behaviors
seen as more contagious than others? Such judgment is likely to have impor-
tant consequences because the damage of a transgression depends not only
on its severity but also the likelihood that it may influence others and spread
through society.
The perceived contagiousness of different behaviors may depend on
the extent to which they involve and resemble purity violations. Although
people may generally conceive of transgressions as dirt and pollution, there
may still be variations in terms of the extent to which a transgression resem-
bles dirt and pollution. Compared with violence and corruption, for example,
which also involve harm and justice concerns, nonviolent sexual transgres-
sions are exclusively purity violations, and as such they often evoke particu-
larly strong feelings of disgust (Haidt, 2001) and may be more likely to trigger
the kind of magical thinking often associated with physical pollution. This
may partly explain why sexual content provokes more media censorship than
does violent content, at least in the United States. Nudity and sex, even con-
sensual, are treated as contagiously influential for children and adolescents’
behaviors. The Motion Picture Association of America’s film rating system,
for example, imposes harsher regulation on sex than violence, and in fact
issued four times as many NC-17 ratings (no children or under 17 admitted)
for sexual content than for violent content (Bourke & Dick, 2006), despite
decades of research showing that children model violence in movies and
computer games (e.g., Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961; Engelhardt, Bartholow,
Kerr, & Bushman, 2011).
Thus, seeing morality through the lens of dirt and pollution may insti-
gate an unwarranted fear of contagion in our interactions with others who are
outside of our systems of social or moral order. However, the mere existence of
differences in looks, opinions, values, and preferences need not automatically
lead to strife; differences can coexist and be celebrated. By better understand-
ing our deep seated fear of contagion, we may be poised to learn more about
the psychological underpinnings of our tendencies toward segregation on the
one hand and our strides toward integration on the other.

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 Harm

From the evolutionary perspective, our aversion to dirt and pollution

has the adaptive advantage of promoting pathogen avoidance. There are cer-
tainly dirt and pollutants that are dangerous and harmful: deadly contagious
disease, rotten flesh, and excrement, to name just a few. A big part of what
we categorize as dirt and pollution, however, poses no apparent threat to our
health and survival. Soil on the kitchen floor is typically seen as dirt, but
there is no obvious health hazard associated with it. Mary Douglas (1966)
eloquently argued that our categorization of dirt diverges from an absolute
standard of what is harmful to something relative and symbolic, defined in
terms of trespass within a particular system of order. In other words, there is
no absolute dirt; dirt is something that falls outside of a system of order. Soil
in the garden is not dirt; it only becomes dirt when it is brought into the
kitchen. Likewise, for farmers that literally make their livelihoods from the
land they work, soil is not dirt but a valuable resource. This relative nature
of dirt is nicely demonstrated in Thomas Hardy’s novel Far From the Madding
Crowd (1874/2000) when farm laborers commend the shepherd who refuses a
clean mug for his cider as a “nice unparticular man.” By being “unparticular”
about “dirt in its pure state,” the shepherd signals that he is equal with the
farmers and shares their systems of values and beliefs.
This decoupling between dirt and harm might have shaped how we
think about morality, where moral judgments are often decoupled from harm.
Previous research has found that although people are capable of conduct-
ing formal analysis of harm and using that as the basis of judgment, they do
not always do so when making moral judgments (see Haidt, 2001). In the
aforementioned phenomenon of moral dumbfounding, for example, people
insisted that scenarios, such as the one involving consensual kisses between
brothers and sisters, were morally wrong even though they could not articu-
late any harm caused by such action (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). A con-
sensual kiss, even if it is between a brother and sister, probably does not cause
much harm; however, it does make people feel uncomfortable because it is
not what people normally do. It thus seems that the basis of moral judgment is
broader than merely harm and justice, as philosophers speculate, but instead
encompasses boundary trespassing as well. Much like soil in the kitchen is
considered dirt, behaviors and values that cause no harm, but nevertheless
trespass value system boundaries, are likely to be deemed wrong. Indeed,
exposure to worldviews that contradict our own, and thus are considered
to be morally wrong, can elicit the same gustatory disgust perceptions that
prevent us from ingesting filth (Ritter & Preston, 2011).
Such moral overreaction is not without its cultural advantages: By
meticulously labeling and rooting out impurities, groups are able to protect

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 their boundaries, strengthen their core belief systems, and ultimately bind
group members into tribelike communities. Basing moral judgments on
boundary trespassing, however, could also induce a “groupish righteousness”
(see Haidt, 2012) that intensifies culture wars and leads to the persecu-
tion of cultural minorities. Importantly, however, boundary trespassing and
the uncomfortable sensations (e.g., disgust) it induces, can often be per-
ceived as harm, thus justifying blatantly prejudicial or even violent behav-
iors. Vilification of ethnic and cultural minorities is a common occurrence
throughout history. Even in recent years, much of the condemnation of
homosexuality has been couched in illusory harm to the institution of mar-
riage and children, not to mention natural disasters and terrorist attacks
portrayed as divine retribution.
To summarize, previous research has established purity as a moral domain
and has shown that manipulating physical dirt and pollution through visual
or olfactory means can alter moral judgment. The current analysis suggests
that the relationship among dirt, pollution, and purity on the one hand and
morality on the other may be much more complex because of the many ways
that we think about dirt. Rather than perceiving and categorizing dirt mono-
lithically, people form subjective impressions of dirt along dimensions includ-
ing permanence, contagion, and harm, and this in turn shapes how we think
about morality.

Discussion and Conclusion

In her book Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Suellen

Hoy (1995) described the historic transformation of the United States from a
dreadfully dirty state in the 19th century to the meticulously clean society it is
today. During mid-19th century, sanitation was not unknown to Americans,
but people seemed to have felt no urgency to clean up. For the most part,
people still lived in preindustrial, hygienically primitive situations on small
farms or country villages where dirt was part of everyday work. Today, people
doing dirty jobs are frowned on and stigmatized, as if they themselves were
sources of pollution and contamination (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999). Hygiene
standards and sanitation in both private and public spheres have far exceeded
what is necessary for health and safety reasons. From antibacterial soap, to
antiperspirant, to colon cleansing, it is as if Americans have become obsessed
with cleanliness. Ironically, this hypersanitation may be so extreme that it is
actually making us sick by inhibiting the proper development of the immune
system, which increases the risk of developing allergies and autoimmune dis-
orders (Hampton, 2011), and by creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs (e.g.,
Nordmann, Naas, Fortineau, & Poirel, 2007).

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 From within a bubble of cleanliness, people may form misconceived
ideas about dirt and pollution. Dirt, mud, dust, grease, sweat, and the like,
things that are otherwise perfectly normal derivatives of everyday life, now
seem tainting, contagious, and harmful. The perceived threat of dirt is no
longer only that it might undermine health but also that it might breach our
hypersanitation. In other words, cleanliness might have acquired value and
meaning independent of health, fitness, and survival. Unbeknownst to many
of us, however, is the possibility that the misconceptions we have about dirt
may subtly work its way into influencing our perception and judgment in
social domains. On the basis of previous work in embodied cognition and
CMT, we propose that the concept of morality may be built on the concep-
tual framework of dirt and pollution, and hence how people think about
social and moral deviants parallels how they think about dirt. Thus, just as
people typically think of dirt as tainting, contagious, and harmful, they judge
social deviants along the same dimensions. People who have transgressed are
typically seen as being permanently tainted and can never come clean (e.g.,
once a criminal, always a criminal); social deviations are seen as magically
contaminating and require physical and social segregation; and otherwise
harmless behaviors may be seen as dangerous because they provoke the feel-
ing of disgust. These heuristics in moral judgments can have serious conse-
quences, leading to less tolerance of mistakes and differences. If people are
eager to purge the dirt from their physical world, will they be equally passion-
ate about eliminating deviation and diversity from their social order?
Understanding these intricacies in the metaphoric mapping between
dirt and morality may thus help correct biases in our moral judgment. For
example, reminders that dirt can often be removed without leaving a stain
may promote forgiveness of mistakes and support for rehabilitation programs;
similarly, reminding people that many stains do not rub off and that not all
disease is contagious may reduce our imaginary fear that the mere presence
of differences may contaminate and corrupt us and others; finally, exposing
people to harmless dirt, such as soil and mud, may increase the likelihood
that they will see the distinction between being different and dangerous (and
wrong). These are just a few examples of how changing conceptions of a con-
crete construct, such as dirt, may influence or improve how we think about
abstract constructs, such as moral systems.
Independent of that, the current chapter also highlights the need to
study moral dimensions such as permanence and contagion that have not
received much attention in moral psychology and philosophy, largely because
of the emphasis on impersonal, abstract aspect of moral reasoning. The sce-
narios and dilemmas researchers craft to study moral reasoning processes tend
to be devoid of context and relationships. The vignettes that people ponder
usually happen in one-shot situations in which the individuals involved have

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 no meaningful connections or relationships (Bloom, 2011). Thus, it makes
no sense to think about whether the action may happen again or how it may
affect an observer. This is obviously not the case in the real world, where
actions and behaviors happen in social context, embedded in meaningful
relationships. It is usually not the end of the story when we deem a lie unethi-
cal; in most cases, we need to assess whether the individual will lie again to
determine our attitude toward that person, and we often must judge whether
the lie will influence others to be deceitful. In the case of crimes, recidivism is
one of the most important judgments to make when making decisions about
sentencing. Another important concern for the correctional system is send-
ing the right message to others so that the crime is not copied. A metaphor-
based view of morality helps us to recognize that moral judgment is not simply
the product of abstract reasoning but rather is modeled after our experience
with the physical and social world. These deep-rooted aspects of morality
constitute a blind spot in traditional moral psychology and philosophy and
offer important and promising avenues for future research into embodied
moral judgment.

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 7
Toward a Metaphor-Enriched
Personality Psychology
Michael D. Robinson and Adam K. Fetterman

Conventional wisdom on metaphor suggests that it is the province of

poets, metaphor is an optional way of thinking, or that metaphor merely
serves communication purposes. In this chapter, we show that such wisdom is
at variance with how human beings actually think and function. We first pro-
vide a brief overview of the metaphor representation perspective. We then
make a case for the utility of this perspective in understanding how people dif-
fer from each other and do so within a broader context of how personality has
traditionally been assessed. We then present four lines of personality research
inspired by the metaphor representation perspective. We conclude with a dis-
cussion of the challenges and unanswered questions involved in translating
the metaphor representation perspective to personality psychology.

This publication was made possible by COBRE Grant P20 RR020151 from the National Center for
Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Its contents are
the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NCRR or NIH.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-007
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

133

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 A Brief Overview of the Metaphor
Representation Perspective

Our view of metaphor is heavily influenced by the writings of Lakoff and

Johnson (1980, 1999), a linguist and philosopher, respectively. We term their
set of ideas the metaphor representation perspective (Meier & Robinson, 2005)
and contrast it with three more conventional perspectives of metaphor. First,
it might be thought that metaphor is the particular province of poets, lyri-
cists, or expressive writers. However, this is simply not the case as linguistic
metaphors appear to be commonly used by virtually everyone (Gibbs, 1994).
Second, it might be thought that there are as many metaphors as there are
figures of speech that are metaphoric. This is not the case in that the same
conceptual metaphors (e.g., life is a journey, the self is a container) seem to
motivate multiple specific linguistic expressions (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).
For example, the phrases “I’m feeling up,” “things are looking up,” and “that
was an uplifting movie” are not unrelated, but rather all capitalize on the
same conceptual metaphor, mostly generally good is up.
Third, it might be thought that metaphors are only about communica-
tion. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), however, made the novel and fundamentally
interesting suggestion that we use metaphors in speech because we often think
metaphorically. That is, language use follows from the manner in which our
minds work. From this perspective, the phrase “I’m feeling up” captures how
people think about their happiness, even in the absence of a communication
context. A rationale for this idea is that many of our most important feelings
and concepts—such as peace, love, or anger—lack a clear perceptual referent,
which creates epistemic problems (Searle, 1998). People resolve such difficul-
ties by scaffolding (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009) abstract feelings and
thoughts on perceptual dimensions—such as up–down, warm–cold, close–far,
and dirty–clean—that are more concrete, immediate, and visceral, which in
turn facilitates their intuitive understanding (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010).
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) further suggested that metaphor representa-
tion processes guide our thoughts like “a hidden hand.” An important body
of social psychology research has supported this idea (Landau et al., 2010).
These studies have manipulated perceptual cues associated with prominent
metaphors and shown that they result in metaphor-consistent outcomes.
For example, Meier and Robinson (2004) showed that positive words were
evaluated faster when presented higher on the computer screen and negative
words were evaluated faster when presented lower on the computer screen,
consistent with a good is up conceptual metaphor. IJzerman and Semin (2009)
showed that incidental manipulations of warmth influenced subsequent per-
ceptions of interpersonal proximity, consistent with a closeness is warmth con-
ceptual metaphor. We could cite multiple other important studies here, but

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 they will be cited in other chapters in the present volume. Also, for a fuller
discussion of conceptual metaphors, see Gibbs (Chapter 2, this volume) or
Landau, Robinson, and Meier (Chapter 1, this volume). Of more importance
for our chapter is the potential of the metaphor representation perspective to
provide novel insights into personality functioning.

Toward a Metaphor-Enriched
Personality Psychology

In understanding how and why people differ from each other, midcen-
tury personality psychologists had an admirably broad view of assessment.
Self-reports of personality were commonly used, but the same researchers
used many implicit experimental tasks as well. For example, Allport’s (1937)
personality text contended that expressive style (e.g., in handwriting) was
informative of personality, McClelland’s (1951) text contended that projec-
tive measures were crucial in discerning the social motives of individuals,
and Bruner (1951) provided evidence for the idea that personal values were
evident in basic perceptual tendencies.
Subsequently, Mischel (1968) published an important book in which
individual differences were questioned in terms of their predictive validity.
Although not desired (Mischel, 2009), this book was interpreted to suggest
that behavior is a function of situations not personalities (Ross & Nisbett,
1991). A schism between social and personality psychology occurred as a
result of this controversy (Kenrick & Funder, 1988). Personality psychology
largely abandoned outcome predictions to focus on issues of taxonomy among
self-reported traits. After many years of refining their measures, personality
psychology rebounded by showing that individual differences are of substan-
tial value in outcome prediction (e.g., Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). The
person–situation controversy is therefore a nonissue at present, and it is now
possible to revisit the wisdom of earlier personality psychologists, such as
Bruner (1951) and McClelland (1951), who insisted that personality psy-
chology can only be complete to the extent that it focuses on implicit as well
as self-reported assessments.
Implicit approaches to personality assessment have multiple benefits.
Practically speaking, explicit and implicit assessments tend to be uncorre-
lated or only weakly correlated with each other (Robinson & Neighbors,
2006). Thus, implicit assessments of the person can reveal important insights
concerning the individual that cannot be adequately captured by an exclu-
sive reliance on self-reported traits. In addition, implicit personality variables
moderate the manner in which self-reported traits function (Robinson &
Gordon, 2011). Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, implicit assessments

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 are process-based in nature. They are not reliant on beliefs about the self
(Robinson & Clore, 2002) and therefore provide insights into mechanisms
that self-reported traits cannot (Robinson & Gordon, 2011). For such reasons
and others, we have suggested that personality psychology needs to embrace
implicit assessments of the individual to a greater extent than it currently
does (Robinson & Compton, 2008).
We think that the metaphor representation perspective, which can model
personality processes in an implicit manner, possesses considerable value in
understanding personality and individual differences. There is an important
nuance to this work that should be mentioned up front, however. Manipulations
of vertical position (Meier & Robinson, 2004), warmth (IJzerman & Semin,
2009), or visual backgrounds (Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter, & Feltman,
2009) might be quite irrelevant in understanding individual differences. Indi­
viduals, for example, do not have visual backgrounds (Wilkowski et al., 2009).
Considerable creativity is therefore necessary to translate this perspective to the
individual difference realm.
We have now presented a theoretical and historical background for our
research on metaphor-related processes in personality. Four lines of research
are reviewed, two of which use reaction times to probe the vertical dimension
of space. Following these earlier lines of research, we show how prominent
metaphors can be translated into preference or forced choice judgments in a
way that implicitly probes variations in personality.

Evidence for a Metaphoric View of Personality

Depression and Vertical Attention

There are two dictionary definitions for depression. The first refers to a
downward indentation. The second refers to a condition marked by sadness,
lethargy, and hopelessness. From a metaphor representation perspective, it is
not likely a coincidence that we use the same word to characterize both states.
Rather, the latter dictionary meaning likely borrows from the former and does
so in relation to the conceptual metaphor sadness is down. Indeed, the adjec-
tive “down” is often used to refer to sad feelings. From an embodied perspec-
tive, the body droops when it is tired and lays supine when this is especially
so, and such covariations in experience are likely responsible, in part, for the
genesis of thinking of depression as a downward vertical state (Tolaas, 1991).
Taking the metaphor representation perspective (Lakoff & Johnson,
1999) seriously, individual differences in depression might constrain and
entrain attention in a downward vertical direction, independent of any
communication context. This prediction was examined in two studies by

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 Meier and Robinson (2006). In both studies, people were asked to respond
as quickly as possible to spatial probes higher or lower on a computer screen,
and the location of these probes was varied in a fully randomized manner.
In addition, we measured levels of depression using the well-validated Beck
Depression Inventory. As hypothesized, individuals higher in depression were
faster to respond to low spatial probes, and individuals lower in depression
were faster to respond to high spatial probes. There was thus a significant and
consequential relationship between levels of depression and whether atten-
tion favors lower or higher areas of visual space, implicitly and cognitively so.
As to whether activated negative thoughts bias attention downward,
they do according to the experimental results of Meier and Robinson (2004),
which involved negative word evaluations. However, the results of Meier and
Robinson (2006) are perhaps more profound in that they suggest that rela-
tively chronic states of depression bias attention downward irrespective of pos-
itive or negative affective primes. In other words, vertical biases in selective
attention may track levels of depression and in turn serve as a useful probe of
depression levels. This idea warrants further research because probes of depres-
sogenic cognition are considered valuable to the depression literature (Segal
& Swallow, 1994), ours is a novel probe of depression levels, and there are now
numerous results showing that manipulations of spatial attention (typically
disfavoring threatening stimuli) are efficacious in reducing levels of psycho-
pathology (MacLeod, Koster, & Fox, 2009). Accordingly, it would be valuable
to examine whether training attention upward mitigates depression levels.

Dominance–Submission and Vertical Attention

Prominent linguistic expressions suggest that states of dominance and

submission are conceptualized in terms of high and low vertical positions,
respectively. For example, we refer to increasingly dominant individuals as
upwardly mobile, social climbers, or rising stars. In contrast, we refer to indi-
viduals who are losing their social status as headed for a fall or on a downward
spiral. Such metaphoric associations can explain why bosses in corporate
buildings have offices that are typically on higher floors, why graphics for
organizational structures typically place workers “under” their supervisors,
and why standing (relative to seated) individuals are judged to be more dom­
inant (Schwartz, 1981). Consistent with verticality metaphors, Schubert
(2005) found that dominant animals (i.e., those “high” in the food chain)
were categorized more quickly when presented higher on a computer screen,
whereas submissive animals (i.e., those “low” in the food chain) were catego-
rized more quickly when presented lower on a computer screen.
In two studies, Robinson, Zabelina, Ode, and Moeller (2008) sought
to examine whether personality variations in dominance can be understood

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 from a verticality perspective. They assessed personality tendencies toward
dominance using the adjective markers of Wiggins, Trapnell, and Phillips
(1988). In these same studies, individuals also completed a vertical attention
task. Consistent with metaphors for dominance versus submission, domi-
nant individuals attended upward in visual space, and submissive individuals
attended downward. We have yet to show that such biases upward or down-
ward in visual space predict more specific social behaviors, but this direction
of future research can be advocated. For example, those biased upward in
vertical attention may also engage in more coercive and domineering rela-
tionship behaviors and exhibit greater confrontation and less appeasement
in response to provocations in daily life (Moskowitz, 2010). It is also seems
consistent with Fiske’s (1993) theory of power to suggest that placing indi-
viduals in more dominant (versus submissive) social roles may alter their
vertical attention in an upward-favoring direction.
Although our depression- (Meier & Robinson, 2006) and dominance-
related (Robinson et al., 2008) findings might be linked, we are inclined to
suggest that they are not. The fact is that the up–down dimension appears to
be recruited for multiple metaphoric purposes, including in morality, spiritu-
ality, happiness, and dominance domains (Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen,
& Schjeldahl, 2007). Individual differences in spirituality, for example, might
also predict vertical selective attention, although results of this type would
not likely be due to covarying levels of depression or dominance. It would
seem useful to conduct a study in which multiple individual differences of a
verticality type are assessed at the same time, thereby permitting multiple
regression tests of which dimension or set of dimensions is the most conse-
quential one for vertical selective attention.

Prosocial Personality and Sweet Taste Preferences

We refer to nice gestures as sweet, nice people as sweet, and terms of

endearment among relationship partners often borrow from this root con-
ceptual metaphor (e.g., cupcake, honey, sugar, sweetheart). Sweet tastes, of
course, are gustatory in nature, whereas people are not entities to be eaten.
Nonetheless, the ubiquity of such linguistic expressions suggested to us that
the psychological domain of interpersonal niceness would draw from the
metaphoric domain of sweet taste experiences. In Study 1 of Meier, Moeller,
Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012), pictured individuals stated liking a par-
ticular food item and one whose primary taste was sweet (e.g., ice cream), sour
(e.g., lemons), bitter (e.g., grapefruit), salty (e.g., beef jerky), or spicy (e.g.,
curry). Persons expressing liking for a sweet food (but not other foods) were
judged to be more agreeable (i.e., nice, friendly) but not more extraverted or
neurotic.

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 The remaining studies focused on individual difference predictions,
broadly construed. In Study 2 (Meier et al., 2012), we assessed the personality
trait of agreeableness (e.g., am interested in people, have a soft heart). Higher
levels of the personality trait of agreeableness predicted higher levels of lik-
ing for sweet foods, but not sour, bitter, salty, or spicy foods. We believe such
results occurred not because agreeable individuals actually eat sweet foods
more often, although they might, but rather because their typical thoughts are
of a prosocial type (Graziano & Eisenberg, 1997). Such prosocial thoughts, in
turn, are likely to recruit metaphoric interests consistent with them. It is for
this reason, we suggest, that the food preferences of agreeable individuals grav-
itate toward sweet foods via a cognitive consistency mechanism (Gawronski
& Strack, 2012).
The goals of Study 3 of Meier et al. (2012) were more ambitious. In this
study, we dispensed with measuring agreeableness by self-report. Instead, the
sole personality variable was the extent to which people liked sweet foods
(e.g., candy, honey, maple syrup, sugar). The laboratory session was one in
which people could volunteer to help others in concrete ways. The first depen-
dent measure asked individuals whether they would commit to flood cleanup
efforts in the Fargo–Moorhead community, which had a historic flood during
the time of the study. At the end of the study, we told participants that their
extra credit was assured but that an English professor needed volunteers to
complete a media survey and deposit it three floors above the psychology
department. We surreptitiously monitored which participants completed and
deposited this optional survey. We found that greater liking for sweet foods
predicted both of these prosocial behaviors. Those who like sweet foods to
a greater extent thus appear inclined and compelled to help others in the
absence of significant incentives for doing so, an important criterion of pro-
social functioning (Dovidio, Piliavin, Schroeder, & Penner, 2006).
Studies 4 and 5 of Meier et al. (2012) were manipulation studies, and we
highlight the results of Study 4 here. The personality literature has increas-
ingly suggested that there are personality states as well as personality traits.
For example, McNiel and Fleeson (2006) showed that extraverted behaviors
have the same correlates—and particularly positive affect—whether manipu-
lated (by instructions to “act extraverted”) or measured in trait-related terms.
Accordingly, we thought it possible that a sweet taste experience would ren-
der individuals psychologically more agreeable. Participants were randomly
assigned to taste a sweet (Hershey’s Kisses) or less sweet (Altoid’s Tangerine
Sours) candy before reporting on their personality levels of agreeableness. As
hypothesized, participants randomly assigned to the sweet taste condition
reported higher levels of agreeableness subsequently. This study, like the pre-
vious studies, provides support for the metaphoric mapping of agreeableness
to sweetness, but does so in causal terms.

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 As others do (e.g., Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003), we regard tenden-
cies manifest in everyday life as the ultimate phenomenon to be explained
by personality assessments. Although not yet published, we can report that
sweet taste preferences predict prosocial reactions in everyday life. In a rel-
evant study, we asked individuals to report on their liking of sweet, sour,
bitter, salty, and spicy foods. Subsequently, the same individuals completed a
14-day experience-sampling study over the Internet. Among other findings,
it was found that sweet-preferring individuals experienced greater positive
emotions on days when they engaged in prosocial behaviors (e.g., helped
others) but that this same within-subject profile was markedly diminished
among those not liking sweet foods. This illustrative finding is displayed in
Figure 7.1. The important point here is that the individual difference assess-
ments of Meier et al. (2012) should have wide utility in understanding indi-
vidual differences in daily social functioning.

Rationality Versus Emotionality and the Head-Heart Metaphor

Human beings are relatively unique animals in that they have capacities
to apprehend the world and behave in both rational and emotional manners.
Rational thinking is rule-driven, nonemotional, and intellectual (Kahneman,
2003). Emotional thinking is intuitive, impressionistic, and reactive (Epstein,
1994). Neither one is necessarily better. Rational thinking helps one solve
important intellectual problems, but not all problems can be solved intel-
lectually (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996). Emotional thinking is reactive and

3.4
Low Prosocial Behavior
3.3 High Prosocial Behavior
Level of Positive Emotion

3.2

3.1

3.0

2.9

2.8

2.7

2.6
Low Sweetness High Sweetness
Preferences Preferences

Figure 7.1.  Liking of sweet foods as a predictor of relations between daily prosocial
behavior and daily levels of positive emotion.

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 error prone (Epstein, 1994), but there is wisdom to emotional thinking, per-
haps most prominently highlighted in the work of Damasio (1994) and in
the emotional intelligence literature (Zeidner, Matthews, & Roberts, 2009).
Rational and emotional thinking would seem fundamental in understanding
differences between people, yet this distinction is not well captured by trait
approaches to personality (Epstein, 1994).
Traditional attempts to understand this rational versus emotional dis-
tinction rely on brain process considerations. Rational, logical thinking styles
are purportedly left hemispheric and emotional, reactive thinking styles are
purportedly right hemispheric. It is true that the right hemisphere decodes
emotion better (Heller, Schmidtke, Nitschke, Koven, & Miller, 2002),
but attempts to link these two processing styles to left versus right hemi-
spheric activity have not resulted in a strong set of findings (Corballis, 1999).
Alternatively, rational thinking is said to be cortical, and emotional thinking
is said to be subcortical (Miller & Cohen, 2001). Among human beings, how-
ever, these are highly interactive systems, and it would be an oversimplifica-
tion at best to suggest that the rational–emotional distinction can be mapped
onto activation in cortical versus subcortical structures (Pessoa, 2009). For
example, the frontal cortex plays a much more dominant role in generating
emotional responding than can be appreciated on the basis of such brain-
based frameworks (e.g., Canli et al., 2001).
As an alternative explanatory framework, we suggest that the classic
metaphoric distinction between the head and the heart (mentioned by Plato,
Shakespeare, and many others; see Swan, 2009, for a review) may have con-
siderable value. Linguistically, we refer to rational individuals as having their
head on straight and we encourage smarter decisions with the suggestion to
use your head. By contrast, we refer to emotional individuals as having a great
heart and encourage smarter decisions of this emotional type with the sugges-
tion follow your heart. Fetterman and Robinson (in press) created a one-item
metaphor questionnaire by asking the following question: “Irrespective of
what you know about biology, which body part do you more closely associate
with yourself?” Participants had to choose the brain or the heart. The brain
rather than the head was used because the brain, like the heart, is a particular
bodily organ.
Across the six studies in which this measure was administered, two strik-
ing initial patterns were evident. The first was that a relatively equal number
of people indicated that the self was located in the brain versus the heart.
For example, in Study 1 of this work, 58 (48%) participants picked the brain
organ as the location of the self, whereas 62 (52%) picked the heart organ
as the location of the self. Second, and consistent with gender stereotypes
depicting women as the more “emotional” sex (Robinson & Clore, 2002), all
six studies found that there were significant gender differences. For example,

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 in Study 1, it was found that male participants thought the self was located
in the brain to a greater extent (58%), whereas female participants thought
that the self was located in the heart to a greater extent (63%).
Of more importance were the outcomes predicted. In Study 1, heart-
located individuals reported higher levels of affect intensity, femininity, and
liking of intimacy. In Study 2, heart-located individuals reported higher lev-
els of attention to emotion (Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai,
1995) and greater experiential (Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996)
thinking styles. In Study 3, heart-located individuals reported greater levels
of agreeableness, emotionality, and warmth, along with lower levels of logical
thinking. These studies, then, converge on the idea that a novel, metaphor-
informed individual difference measure has great potential in understand-
ing the relative emotionality of different individuals, at least in self-reported
terms. Two further points can be made. The first is that heart-located indi-
viduals reported greater levels of emotionality but also greater levels of agree-
ableness and warmth. Overall, then, we might wish to have heart-located
individuals as interaction partners, despite their apparent tendencies toward
greater emotionality. The second important point is that the vast majority
of such relations remained significant when controlling for participant sex.
Study 4 examined outcomes that should be higher among “head” people.
Those who located the self in the head had higher GPAs and did better on
trivia problems. Thus, there is evidence in favor of their greater intellectual
functioning. Study 5 sought to pit rational versus emotional thinking tenden-
cies against each other in a common set of social judgment problems. In this
study, we administered moral dilemmas such as the classic trolley problem ask-
ing people whether they would actively kill one person to save several other
individuals. Being an active agent in the death of the one person is a rational
solution to the problem, but emotional considerations discourage such an act
of calculated killing (Greene & Haidt, 2002). As hypothesized, head-located
individuals were more likely to solve these problems in a rational manner,
whereas heart-located individuals were more likely to solve these problems in
an emotional manner. Thus, a simple one-item metaphor-informed individual
difference variable was of substantial value in understanding social decision
making.
Studies 1 through 3 had suggested that heart-located individuals are
more emotional, but there was an important limitation to these results in
that they all relied on trait-reported emotional tendencies. Such trait-
reported tendencies often fail to predict how individuals react to emotion-
relevant events in daily life (Barrett, Robin, Pietromonaco, & Eyssell, 1998).
In Study 6, therefore, we administered a daily diary protocol. We highlight
one particular result here. For 14 days in a row, participants reported on the

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 2.2
Low Stressor Days
2.1 High Stressor Days

Levels of Negative Emotion

2.0

1.9

1.8

1.7

1.6

1.5

1.4
Head People Heart People

Figure 7.2.  Head versus heart self-locations as a predictor of relations between daily
stressors and daily levels of negative emotion.

extent to which particular days were low or high in the occurrence of stress-
ful events (e.g., “had a lot of responsibilities”). They also reported on their
daily levels of negative emotion because stressors are a common elicitor of
such negative emotional reactions (Chamberlain & Zika, 1990). Consistent
with the purported emotionality of heart-located individuals, they, relative to
head-located individuals, exhibited stronger relations between daily stressors
and daily negative emotion levels (see Figure 7.2). We emphasize the impor-
tance of these results in understanding the differential functioning of heart-
versus head-located individuals in their daily lives.
Individuals are not differentially located in their hearts or heads, but
they believe that they are, and such beliefs are predictive of multiple out-
comes in a metaphor-consistent direction. Additionally, the results of Studies 1
through 6 suggest that a manipulation of differential attention to the heart
versus the head might alter decision making in an emotional versus rational
manner. In Study 7 (Fetterman & Robinson, in press), we introduced a cover
story stating that our interest was in understanding responding using one’s
nondominant hand. In a between-subjects manipulation, some individuals
were asked to place their dominant index fingers on their temples and others
over their hearts, in both cases to eliminate the temptation to use their domi-
nant hands in responding. Thereafter, they completed trivia problems and
moral dilemmas. As hypothesized, head-pointing individuals did better on
the trivia problems, and heart-pointing individuals were more likely to solve
moral dilemmas in an emotion-favoring manner. Altogether, the findings of

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 Fetterman and Robinson (in press), like those of Meier et al. (2012), estab-
lish the relevance of metaphoric considerations in understanding personality
processes in a manner that greatly extends the earlier results of Meier and
Robinson (2006) and Robinson et al. (2008).
We can also emphasize the broader significance of these findings. We
did not ask individuals whether they were rational or emotional but rather
assessed such tendencies in an implicit, metaphor-informed manner. Doing
so, we suggest, bypasses perennial concerns such as the social desirability
of trait responding (Edwards, 1957). Of perhaps more importance, this
single-item measure was consequential in its predictive value across many
individual differences, such as sex differences, thinking style preferences,
emotionality, femininity, emotional intelligence, intellectual performance,
that have hitherto been treated as largely separate literatures. From this
perspective, the findings of Fetterman and Robinson (in press) possess an
integrative predictive value that is largely unprecedented in the personality
literature. Finally, of course, these findings point to the value of a metaphor-
informed personality psychology, perhaps even more so than any previous
investigations.

Investigating Metaphoric Processes in Personality

Landau et al. (2010) were able to review many studies in favor of a

metaphor-enriched view of social psychology. In fact, social psychologists
have conducted the vast majority of work in this area, as highlighted in the
present volume. Personality psychology has lagged behind, and it is prob-
ably safe to say that there are few investigators of metaphor whose primary
interest is individual differences. This is true of the present authors as well,
despite the fact that we are self-described personality psychologists first and
social psychologists second. There are challenges in translating the metaphor
representation perspective to personality psychology, unanswered questions,
and wisdom that we have only recently acquired. In this section, we consider
such issues.
In a sense, every experiment is also a potential individual difference
study (Kosslyn et al., 2002) and this is true in the metaphoric realm as well.
One only has to examine variations across participants to realize that some
individuals exhibit the predicted social cognitive pattern and others do not.
In metaphor-related studies of a cognitive type, we have examined the poten-
tial moderating role of individual differences in visual imagery (Marks, 1973)
on the basis of the idea that imagistic thinkers might be more metaphoric in
their thinking (Paivio, 2007). We have yet to find moderating effects of this
type. Many of our investigations have focused on affective processes (Meier

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 & Robinson, 2005). For this reason, we have examined the potential mod-
erating role of attention to emotion (Salovey et al., 1995) in several studies.
We have yet to find moderating effects of the latter type either.
Instead, our thinking is that individual differences in metaphoric cogni-
tion need to be examined more directly than in past studies—for example,
on the basis of appreciation for conceptual metaphors. We are just beginning
this line of research and have crafted a relevant questionnaire, which is pre-
liminary at the present time. It will ask individuals to decide whether an ini-
tial statement (e.g., related to sad feelings) is better characterized in literal or
metaphoric terms. By including a number of such items, we hope to develop a
reliable and valid scale of individual differences in metaphoric thinking. We
hypothesize that a greater frequency of metaphor-related endorsements may
moderate many of the metaphoric effects documented in the social psychol-
ogy literature (Landau et al., 2010), although this has yet to be determined.
By contrast, the assessment of individual differences of a metaphor-
specific type might be served by assessing the extent to which the individ-
ual displays preferences consistent with prominent metaphors. For example,
Meier et al. (2012) asked individuals to self-report their liking for sweet foods.
Those who liked sweet foods to a greater extent were more prosocial in their
personalities and behaviors. It therefore appears to be fruitful to extend this
line of research in assessing other metaphor-specific individual differences. For
example, the color black has been shown to facilitate negative evaluations
(Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004), speed categorizations involving immoral
words (Sherman & Clore, 2009), and result in more aggressive behavior
(Frank & Gilovich, 1988). Accordingly, asking individuals whether they
prefer the color black or the color white may have untapped value in diverse
outcome domains. We are currently developing a number of individual differ-
ence measures of this type and expect them to have predictive value in future
personality-related studies.
Additionally, it is notable that metaphors for the same concept often
seem to possess very different implications. It would therefore be of value to
pit different metaphors against each other in the study of individual differ-
ences. Fetterman and Robinson (in press) essentially did so by asking indi-
viduals whether they thought of the self as a heart- or head-located entity.
Individuals differed quite a bit in how the self was conceptualized, and such
differences had systematic implications for their personality traits, emotion-
ality, thinking styles, and intellectual performance. This assessment approach
can be extended. For example, we would expect individuals viewing love as a
game to be more promiscuous and less committed to their romantic partners
than those viewing love as a flower (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Similarly, we
might expect individuals viewing anger as a beast to be less prone to aggression
than those viewing anger as fire because beast-related metaphors are arguably

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 more pejorative (Gibbs, 1994). In short, there appears to be value in contrast-
ing different metaphors for the same concept by asking individuals to choose
which conceptual metaphor seems more apt. There is little doubt, to us at
least, that investigations of this type would yield additional insights into the
manner in which individual differences function.
Although the focus of the present chapter was on our own investiga-
tions, necessarily so because they have been unique in focusing on vertical
attention, taste preferences, and head–heart metaphors, individual differ-
ences have proven their worth in other investigations in the embodiment
literature. Perhaps most straightforwardly, Stefanucci and Proffitt (2009)
found that people fearing heights to a greater extent were more prone to over-
estimating distances downward from a high vertical position. Schnall, Haidt,
Clore, and Jordan (2008) found that disgust manipulations (e.g., complet-
ing the study in a filthy room) led to harsher moral judgments, particularly
among individuals higher in sensitivity to their own bodily sensations. More
recently, Bargh and Shalev (2012) found that especially lonely individuals
seek (Study 1) and benefit (e.g., Study 3) from physical warmth sensations.
Whether all such individual difference findings converge is arguable because
they seem to be focusing on different mechanisms and processes. Regardless,
findings from our investigations converge with these other investigations in
highlighting the importance of individual differences in understanding how
and why metaphor-consistent manipulations work.
Conceptual metaphors are likely to have a bodily basis (Tolaas, 1991).
This bodily basis may yield other directions for individual differences
research. For example, what is important is big according to prominent
metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). For this reason, tall, big people may
come to have a greater sense of social potency and others may treat them
with greater respect than short, small people. White is good and black is
bad according to prominent metaphors (Meier & Robinson, 2005). Such
considerations may help explain why darker skinned individuals are the fre-
quent target of prejudice and discrimination. There are multiple other ways
in which bodies differ, such as their strength, perceptual acuity, and age, that
also may prove explanatory in the individual difference realm. Concretely
so, Bhalla and Proffitt (1999) found that stronger, more fit individuals were
less likely to overestimate the slant of a hill (Study 3) and that older individ-
uals (Study 4) were more likely to overestimate the slant of especially steep
hills. Although their explanation was based on bodily resources and capaci-
ties, their findings encourage a broader focus on how differences between
bodies, perhaps through the locus of the metaphor representation perspec-
tive, may influence judgment and decision making in ways that have yet to
be determined.

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 Conclusion

We believe that the metaphor representation perspective (Lakoff &

Johnson, 1980, 1999) can provide many insights into personality functioning
that a trait self-report perspective cannot. In this sense, we echo earlier calls
for a multimethod assessment of personality (Allport, 1937; Bruner, 1951;
McClelland, 1951), but we do so in a novel and metaphor-informed manner.
In the present chapter, we focused primarily on the results of four investiga-
tions, but also considered the interface of personality and social psychology,
the optimal manner in which personality processes of a metaphoric type can
be assessed, and the limitations of standard assessment approaches in per-
sonality psychology. In the latter case, for example, there are significant con-
cerns that trait-outcome relations may often reflect tautologies, such as when
(trait) self-reported negative affect predicts (state) self-reported negative
affect (Cervone, 1999). A metaphoric view of personality processes can avoid
such tautological relations. In addition, it can provide potential insights into
how a history of bodily experiences (e.g., those linking low energy levels to
lower vertical positions, as in fatigued states or sleep) are drawn on in con-
ceptualizing one’s personality tendencies.
Moreover, individual difference investigations can point to novel social
cognitive manipulations. Studies 2 and 3 of Meier et al. (2012) revealed that
individuals who liked sweet foods to a greater extent were more prosocial in
nature. Such results led to manipulation studies in which participants savored
either a sweet or nonsweet food, and this manipulation caused individuals to
be more prosocial. It is doubtful whether results of this type would have been
found as quickly were it not for the individual difference findings. Similarly,
the multiple individual difference findings of Fetterman and Robinson (in
press) led to a manipulation study in which individuals pointed to their heads
or hearts before completing trivia problems and moral dilemmas. Were it not
for the earlier individual difference findings, Study 7 of this work would not
have been conducted. In sum, a personality-process perspective of conceptual
metaphor can result in novel manipulations and findings that might not be
discovered otherwise.
Of final importance, we emphasize the value of individual difference
studies for two additional reasons. First, there are always concerns as to
whether social cognitive manipulation effects (perhaps excepting reaction
time effects) are due to demand characteristics. An individual difference
perspective can circumvent such concerns because relevant relations are
established in the absence of potentially more transparent priming manipula-
tions (Robinson & Neighbors, 2006). Second, although individual difference
results are ambiguous with respect to cause and effect (McNiel & Fleeson,

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 2006), such studies are beneficial in establishing that a relevant relationship
is actually consequential to the manner in which individuals live their lives
(Robinson & Compton, 2008). For such reasons, we advocate future studies
of the metaphor representation perspective in which individual differences are
accorded a central role.

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 8
The Role of Metaphors in
Intergroup Relations
Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, and Luciano Arcuri

Do metaphors play a role in intergroup relations? Are they used to main-

tain a positive image of the ingroup and to denigrate the outgroup? Do they
shape our stereotypes and inform our decisions and behaviors? We believe they
do, starting from the very definition of stereotype. When Lippmann (1922)
proposed his seminal concept of a social category, he decided to synthesize
this complex concept by way of a metaphoric image, that of a stereotype,
that is, a mold or a stamp. The image effectively integrates two important
features of social categories—namely, that they are represented in the mind
of people as a rigid container and that they denote many exemplars with
the same characteristics. The term stereotype derives from the combination
of two Greek words, stereos, which means “solid,” and typos, which means
“a model.” Stereotype therefore refers to a solid model, like the metal plate
used to print pages in the old printing houses. According to Miller (1982),

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-008
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 this term underlines two characteristics: rigidity and replication of sameness.
When applied to groups of people, stereotypes act as rigid boundaries, within
which the same characteristics are applied to all members of the group. The
metaphoric use of the term stereotype illustrates the importance of this figure
of speech in social cognition. In line with the historical origin of the word,
stereotypes are indeed often expressed by means of metaphors.
In the context of social cognition, metaphors represent a meaningful
interface between the categorical knowledge that is linguistically expressed
by a stereotype and the vividness of the emotive and sensory aspects of per-
ceptual experience. Among the fuzzy and flexible linguistic tools used to
describe the world, the metaphor is the one that best allows people to express
multiple characteristics in a concise and effective way, suggesting the subset
of features associated with the stereotype.
In this chapter, we discuss what functions metaphors fulfill and what
aspects of intergroup relations are likely to be affected. We first illustrate the
prevalence and origins of intergroup metaphors and reflect about the reasons
why they are so widely used. In the subsequent parts of this chapter, we argue
that metaphors are potentially relevant at different levels—the individual,
the interpersonal, and the broader societal level. Starting from the individual
level, we first show that metaphors affect all stages of social cognition as they
guide categorization, enhance the perception of groups as homogenous enti-
ties, and facilitate inferences of stereotype-congruent information. At the
interpersonal level, metaphors are often used strategically to justify the status
quo, such as when outgroup members are dehumanized and when unpleasant
aspects of reality (e.g., suffering caused by war) are downplayed. At the broad-
est, societal level, metaphors have tangible effects on how social problems
are framed and resolved. In the final section of this chapter, we discuss open
questions and propose new avenues for the small but growing research area
on metaphors in intergroup relations.
Throughout this chapter, we provide empirical evidence concerning
either embodied metaphors that are closely linked to bodily experiences (such as
vertical position or height, e.g., upper class) or classical resemblance metaphors
(e.g., lawyers are sharks). Although these two types of metaphors may well be
processed differently, for the aims of this chapter, we treat the two as largely
interchangeable. Also, we focus mainly on conventionalized metaphors with
meaning that is socially shared; we largely ignore novel metaphors that are
sophisticated but comparably rare communication devices, estimated to con-
stitute only about 5% of all metaphors (Steen, 2011). According to Bowdle
and Gentner’s (2005) career of metaphor hypothesis, compared with novel
metaphors, socially shared conventional metaphors are processed more easily
(no comparison is needed) and faster and are automatically more available to
thought, such that they are as familiar and accessible as category names. These

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 characteristics make conventional metaphors a particularly relevant tool in
intergroup discourse.

Metaphors in Intergroup Relations

Metaphors are here defined as figures of speech in which relatively con-

crete, tangible concepts (referred to as source concepts) are used to represent
more abstract concepts (referred to as target concepts). Such metaphors gener-
ally associate a concrete object, image, or event to a social category that typi-
cally (but not exclusively) occurs in the role of target domain. Importantly,
target and source concepts generally refer to different categories of stimuli
that have nothing literally to do with each other.

Types of Intergroup Metaphors

There is an almost unlimited variety of metaphoric labels applied

to social groups, ranging from basic spatial metaphors (down for clinically
depressed and out of their mind for mentally ill), references to the animal
world (beast for criminal offenders, ape for African American, or loan shark for
Jew) and contamination (pestilence for immigration; see O’Brien, 2003), and
references to the presumed social function of the category, as in anchor baby,
a metaphor applied to children of noncitizens born in the United States,
presumably facilitating immigration.
However, not all figurative descriptions of outgroups are metaphors in
a strict sense—that is, comparisons to literally unrelated concepts. At times,
outgroups are referred to by features that are directly linked to the group,
such as historical events or food preferences. Such expressions may best be
subsumed under the label metonym—a figure of speech in which a specific
exemplar or attribute of an object comes to represent the entire object (e.g.,
Hollywood becomes a metonym for the American film industry1). For instance,
outgroups are frequently labeled by reference to historical events involving
that group, as illustrated by the English term Christ killer used to refer to Jews
(see Durante, Volpato, & Fiske, 2010, for an analysis of the depictions of
Jews during fascism) or by the Italian expression l’ultimo giapponese (the last
Japanese) used to describe a person or group fighting a losing battle.2

1There is considerable debate about the appropriateness of distinguishing metaphor and metonymy
(see Barnden, 2010, for a recent review of the controversy). Although debatable and fuzzy, the distinc-
tion may be conceptually useful in the context of intergroup relations because metonyms are generally
defined by greater contiguity between source and target domain.
2The metaphor derives from the historical fact that small groups of Japanese soldiers held out in remote

areas because they were entirely unaware that the Second World War had ended.

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 Interestingly, some historically based intergroup metonyms become
entirely conventionalized and survive for centuries even when the event that
originally gave rise to their use is no longer part of the collective memory.
For instance, the common Italian metaphor fare il portoghese (in English: to
play the Portuguese), which stands for a dishonest person trying to receive a
service without paying, derives from an event that took place in Rome during
the 18th century, when the Portuguese ambassador organized a theatre play
that was offered for free to all Portuguese citizens of Rome. That night many
natives of Rome entered the theatre claiming to be Portuguese. Ironically, it
was the Romans, rather than the Portuguese, who cheated.3 Another example
of conventionalized metaphors is the terms right wing versus left wing, which
originated from a practical matter of spatial organization during the French
Revolution. It was in 1789 when the king of France called the Estates General,
and the liberal deputies of the Third Estate sat to the left of the president,
whereas the nobility sat to the right side. Since then, right wing has become a
synonym for conservative political attitudes and left wing for liberalism. The
step from the distribution of bodies in space to a metaphoric representation
of political ideology was short, and la gauche et la droite are now much more
than mere spatial coordinates. Although anchored in specific historical events,
these metaphors (fare il portoghese and right wing–left wing) are used frequently
without speakers and listeners being aware of their derivation, which illustrates
that they are conventionalized to the point of losing their metaphoric origins.
Metonyms are particularly common in disparaging references to social
groups, where the entire category is identified with some physical feature (e.g.,
skinhead for members of the hard mod movement in the United Kingdom or
redneck for the rural population of the United States), food habit (kraut for
German or macaroni for Italians), typical name (Guido for Italians), charac-
teristic behavior (holy roller for ritualistic protestants in the United States),
or phonetic feature of native language (ching chong for Americans of Chinese
descent).
An important question is whether there are source concepts that are
intrinsically suited to become metaphors or metonyms, in which case one
would expect a considerable overlap across cultures and languages. It is our
impression that metonymic stereotypes tend to be more culturally specific,
whereas metaphoric stereotypes are more likely to be shared across cultures,
presumably because they are grounded in universal features of bodily expe-
rience and worldly knowledge. In line with this idea, cross-cultural and

3This example illustrates that social groups (in this case, nationality) may also occur in the role of source
concept. In the current example, the Portuguese metaphorically represent the concept of dishonesty or
cheating. Occasionally social categories may represent both source and target concepts, for example,
“this surgeon is a butcher.”

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 cross-linguistic studies generally show a certain degree of overlap, especially
for those metaphors that are strongly anchored in spatial or bodily experi-
ences (Emanatian, 1995; Yu, 1995) or that are linked to shared experiences
with nature. An English–Persian comparison study conducted by Talebinejad
and Dastjerdi (2005) found a total or partial overlap in meaning for about
three fourths of the 44 animal metaphors included in the study but different
meanings in the remaining fourth. For instance, chicken stands for fear in
English but for stupidity in Italian, turkey refers to a stupid person in English
but to a hypocrite in Persian, and owl represents wisdom in most European
languages4 but is associated with death in some African cultures and con-
sidered a bad omen in the Middle East. Also, the core message of fairy tales
is often quite similar across cultures, yet they may involve different (local)
animals to represent the same human characteristics (e.g., fear, cleverness,
pride; see Satta, 2011). As these examples illustrate, there is some varia-
tion in the specific source–target pairing, yet the very principle that human
groups or human traits are represented by metaphors such as animals seems
universal. We argue here that, even where the specific content varies across
language communities, the very mechanism and the cognitive consequences
of metaphors are shared across cultures. Given the greater cultural–historical
ubiquity of metaphors (compared with metonyms), in this chapter we mainly
focus on metaphoric stereotypes.

Functions of Metaphors in Social Discourse

The main question arising is, what are social metaphors for? Conceptual
metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) states that metaphors are a tool of
thought rather than of language and that they play a crucial role in concept
understanding and knowledge building. Indeed, they are often referred to
as conceptual metaphors to distinguish them from the linguistic expressions
that are their representing instances (see Chapters 1 and 2, this volume). To
exemplify this concept, the linguistic expression “the project gets on the
road” or “has a head start” refers to a conceptual metaphor that explains the
project (the target) in terms of a journey (the source). Importantly, this cog-
nitive account of metaphors implies that, like schemas (Allbritton, 1995),
metaphors are used automatically and without effort (Lakoff, 1993). In the
social realm, they therefore fulfill similar functions and respond to similar
cognitive needs as stereotypes.

4The origin of this metaphor is generally attributed to the fact that the owl was the symbol of Athena,
the goddess of wisdom, in ancient Greece, although the association between owl and wisdom may date
back to earlier times.

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 But why would metaphors be so common in intergroup discourse? We
argue that metaphors are particularly powerful social tools because they allow
generalizations across all members of a given category while communicating
concrete and vivid images. This unique combination of abstraction and con-
creteness derives from the paradox of metaphor raised by Gibbs (2008), who
underlined the twofold nature of metaphors. On one hand, metaphors create
a new and creative vision of a given target and “allows us to transcend the
mundane” (p. 5). On the other hand, metaphors are deeply rooted in bodily
experience and worldly knowledge and hence offer a more concrete vehicle
to represent the target. Therefore, metaphor is concrete and abstract at the
same time, and this paradox is particularly relevant for social metaphors.
Take, for example, the metaphor that is widely endorsed in Italy according
to which Chinese people are ants. The metaphor is abstract because it cap-
tures the generalizability of the stereotype that Chinese are many, crowded,
and hardworking. At the same time, it is concrete because the content of
the stereotype is easily represented with a concrete image (e.g., the anthill).
This twofold nature of the metaphor is particularly important from a social
point of view because it promotes a social categorization that is abstract and
general, able to include a wide number of instances, but at the same time it
also is graspable and catchy. We therefore propose here that metaphors are a
powerful social tool for facilitating categorization, creating and maintaining
stereotypes, and justifying the existing social system.
To explain the capacity of metaphors to facilitate social categoriza-
tion and stereotypic inferences, we can refer to a useful conceptual scheme
suggested by Ortony (1975) that underlines three crucial qualities of meta-
phors: compactness, inexpressibility, and vividness. Compactness refers to the
capacity to communicate multiple characteristics in a single expression that
would otherwise require a long list of properties. For instance, the metaphor
shark implies, in a single word, a whole chunk of features such as aggres-
sive, vicious, cruel, unscrupulous, merciless, and tenacious. Thus, metaphors are
quick, concise, and effective communication devices. The second attribute
acknowledged by Ortony is the metaphor’s capacity to express the inexpress-
ible. Metaphors step in where literal language fails. Whereas some metaphors
can be translated into literal equivalents (e.g., rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic may be translated into performing futile actions in times of crisis), others
offer a unique possibility to give shape to the unnameable. For instance, it is
difficult to talk about time without reference to space and, within the con-
fines of a given language, some metaphors (e.g., the last Japanese) can only be
translated into yet another metaphor (fighting a lost battle).
Finally, according to Ortony (1975), the metaphor lies much closer to
perceived experience than a nonmetaphoric equivalent. Thanks to its vivid-
ness, the metaphor enables the communication of ideas with the richness of

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 details, much less likely to come about in the normal course of events. In sum,
metaphors represent stronger labels able to broaden the boundaries of the
category, narrow its characteristics, and communicate these characteristics
in an efficient and vivid manner.
In the subsequent parts of the chapter, we analyze at which points meta-
phors come into play and what effects they may exert on the intraindividual
level, how they are used in interpersonal discourse, and how they may affect
policy decisions at a broader societal level.

Social Cognitive Consequences

of Metaphoric Language

Looking first at the intraindividual level, metaphors have been shown

to affect different stages of social cognition, namely, initial categorization,
perceived homogeneity, and stereotyping.

Social Categorization

Many natural and social phenomena are continuous, such as time, color,
and race, yet they are mentally and linguistically represented as discrete cate­
gories, such as spring and summer, blue and green, and Black and White. Language
is a discrete symbol system through which we convey what is usually some kind
of continuum (see Labov, 1973). However, this system is incapable of literally
capturing every conceivable aspect of an object, event, or experience that one
might wish to describe. Ortony (1975) suggested that metaphors make up for
this deficiency.
According to Gentner and Wolff (1997), the processing of metaphors
occurs mainly by structural alignment. According to this model, the elabora-
tion and understanding of a metaphor implies the matching of the similar
features of the source and the target (i.e., alignment). The features that have
been filtered in the initial phase according to context and systematicity (i.e.,
maximizing the commonalities between source and target) are then struc-
turally matched in source and target, completing the inference process and
the mapping procedure. Once a metaphor has completed its career and is
widely socially shared, familiar, and conventionalized, it can be processed by
an abstraction-driven elaboration, in which the source domain works as an
abstract representation whose features are projected into the target.
This model accounts for several properties of metaphors. Particularly
important for social cognition is the role that metaphors play in categoriza-
tion. If metaphors are “categorical, class-inclusion assertions” as suggested by
Glucksberg (2008, p. 69), then they should facilitate the inclusion of stimuli

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 in a given category. In line with this idea, Jones and Estes (2005) showed
that participants primed with a metaphor are more likely to include a target
word in the class promoted by the metaphor. For example, being primed by
that desk is a junkyard increases the likelihood that desks are included in the
class junkyards compared with a literal (e.g., that desk is from a junkyard) or
no prime. Similarly, after being primed by the metaphor the argument is war,
participants included the target argument in the class of war more easily than
after being primed by the literal that argument started a war. If we apply this
finding to social targets, the expected effect is that metaphors facilitate the
categorization of a target person with respect to a social group and, as a conse-
quence, also the attribution to stereotypical characteristics (an issue we come
back to in the next section).
The role of metaphors in the categorization of groups has been inves-
tigated by several scholars who have mainly focused on spatial metaphors
and, in particular, on the horizontal and the vertical position in space. Many
social concepts (e.g., good vs. bad, happy vs. sad, god vs. devil) map onto
the vertical space, but the one that is most relevant to intergroup relations
is clearly the concept of power. This metaphor is evident in common refer-
ences to social status such as the upper class, moving up the social latter, or your
highness. Schubert (2005) found that the vertical metaphor of power influ-
ences the elaboration of social information and facilitates social categoriza-
tion. In particular (Schubert, 2005, Experiment 2), social categorization of
targets as more powerful (or as less powerful) was facilitated when the target
word occurred in the metaphor-coherent position, with the powerful group
occupying a spatially higher and the powerless a lower position in the visual
field. This confirms that the power = up metaphor is active even when not
expressed linguistically and that it affects categorization even if not directly
relevant to the task at hand. Importantly, these facilitation effects occur more
strongly when a comparative framework (e.g., powerful vs. powerless) is acti-
vated (Lakens, Semin, & Foroni, 2011), suggesting that spatial metaphors
are, at least in part, based on contrasts rather than on absolute positions.
In these studies, the mapping of power onto the vertical space was
grounded in the perceivers’ physical experience with space (e.g., children
experience that adults who tower over them tend to be more powerful). Quite
different is the case of horizontal mapping of political orientation that has
recently been investigated by Farias, Garrido, and Semin (2013). As explained
at the beginning of this chapter, the terms right wing and left wing derive from a
particular historical incident, but they have become a conventional metaphor
for political orientation in many languages. In one of Farias et al.’s (2013)
studies (Experiment 3), participants were asked to categorize photos of well-
known politicians as either socialist or conservative (without any mention
of the spatial terms left wing or right wing). In line with conceptual metaphor

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 theory, they were faster in classifying group members when the photo appeared
in the metaphor-consistent position (socialists to the left and conservatives to
the right). Similarly, van Elk, van Schie, and Bekkering (2010) found faster
reactions to party acronyms when either the response key (Experiments 1–3)
or the spatial position on the screen (Experiment 4) matched the political
orientation of the party. Thus, Farias et al.’s and van Elk et al.’s studies concur
that spatial metaphors associated with political parties guide the processing
of information regarding these parties and their members, facilitating recog-
nition in spatially congruent positions and interfering with recognition in
incongruent positions.
Together, the studies on vertical and horizontal asymmetries reported
here suggest that metaphors do indeed facilitate (or hamper) processing by
creating metaphoric categories that make the shared characteristics of source
and target more salient (Gentner & Wolff, 1997). Depending on whether
exemplars occur in a metaphor-congruent or incongruent position, their
categorization is facilitated or not. Interestingly, such metaphor-driven facili-
tation in categorization was found both for metaphors that are grounded in
bodily experiences (power = up) and for those that are purely language-driven
(left wing vs. right wing).

Perception of Group Homogeneity

If metaphors are structural mappings that promote the comparisons and

selection of the elements that a source and a target have in common, they
should also emphasize the similarity of intraclass targets and the differences
of interclass targets by virtue of the filtering process of relevant features in the
structural representation. This effect has been observed for literal category
labels, with evidence showing that they are able to shape the perception of
the described objects. For example, Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, and Shapiro
(2005) showed that the name of a color can influence its evaluation, with
visual stimuli that belong to the same linguistic category being judged as more
similar compared with stimuli that belong to different categories (irrespective
of their actual similarity).
In the case of social membership, categorization is known to produce
similar effects, with members of the same group being perceived as more simi-
lar than members of different groups, even when the targets are randomly
assigned to the groups in a minimal group paradigm (Billig & Tajfel, 1973).
Interestingly, the degree to which exemplars are seen as similar depends on
the strength of the category label under which they are subsumed, as recently
demonstrated by Foroni and Rothbart (2011). Participants viewed silhou-
ettes of women differing in weight (from very slim to greatly overweight) and
asked to judge the similarity of pairs of target women. Not only were similarity

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 judgments greater when the two targets were subsumed under the same label,
but similarity judgments increased as a function of the strength of the verbal
label. For instance, the same two body shapes were perceived as more similar
when subsumed under the label anorexic rather than below average.
Applying this same principle, one may hypothesize that metaphors
(“this lawyer is a shark”), compared with semantically similar literal descrip-
tions (“this lawyer is merciless”), will increase the perceived homogeneity of
category members with respect to the relevant trait. This argument is based
on the assumption that metaphors, compared with nonmetaphoric equiva-
lents, represent stronger labels able to both broaden the boundaries of the
category and narrow its characteristics. By broadening the boundaries of a
category, we mean that a metaphor should enhance the likelihood that a
member is included in the category. For example, under the metaphor dolly,
we can include any pretty, cute, and lovely woman, from a wide age range. A
literal correspondent (e.g., cute girls, sexy women) would limit the inclusion
of some members. At the same time, the characteristics that are defined and
selected by the metaphor are extremely precise and vivid, making the group
homogeneous.
To test this hypothesis, the authors of this chapter recently conducted
a study in which participants read a four-sentence description of a lawyer
and of a politician including either a metaphoric or a semantically similar,
nonmetaphoric statement that was stereotypical of the category.5 The lawyer
was either described as a shark or as unscrupulous, the politician either as
fox or as shrewd. Subsequently, participants (none of whom were lawyers or
politicians) were asked to estimate what percentage of the entire category
of lawyers or of politicians were similar to the target person. As can be seen
in Figure 8.1, in both cases, participants exposed to the metaphor perceived
the social category as more homogeneous compared to those who had been
exposed to a semantically similar trait adjective. Although more systematic
research is needed, these first observations suggest that metaphors may indeed
enhance the perceived homogeneity of outgroups.

Metaphor-Driven Stereotyping

Besides driving categorization and influencing perceived homogeneity,

metaphors fulfill a third function in intergroup settings: They guide stereo-
typic inferences. Looking first at embodied metaphors that are grounded in
physical experiences, there is evidence that people inadvertently rely on
spatial metaphors when making inferences about social targets. To cite just

5We thank Angela Alessandrini for kindly collecting the data.

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 90

80

70

60

50
Trait Adjective
40 Metaphor

30

20

10

0
Lawyer Politician

Figure 8.1.  Percentage of lawyers or politicians who share the characteristics of the
target person as a function of type of description (trait adjective or metaphor).

one example, leaders are generally perceived as powerful, but the degree to
which people infer power depends critically on how the leader’s position is
represented in space. Giessner and Schubert (2007) varied systematically
the vertical distance between leaders and lower level personnel in a fictitious
organizational chart. The greater the distance, the more participants believed
that the leader was powerful,6 supporting the idea that metaphor-consistent
spatial information enhances stereotypical inferences.
Even more interesting is the case of classical resemblance metaphors
(e.g., those that associate the category surgeon to butchers). As stated earlier,
such metaphors generally imply great generality across category members,
combined with the potential to provide a clear image of relevant traits. In
fact, the metaphor represents a meaningful interface between the categorical
knowledge that is linguistically expressed by a stereotype and the vividness
of the emotive and sensory aspects appearing in the perceptual experience of
people. In the flow of the fuzzy and flexible linguistic tools used to describe the
world, the metaphor enables people to combine characteristics in a concise
and effective way, suggesting the subset of features associated to the stereotype.
This dual effect can be illustrated analyzing the social metaphor lawyers
are well-paid sharks (Glucksberg, 2008). The source shark represents a literally

6
Somewhat inconsistent with metaphor theories (Sperber & Wilson, 2008), this research also found
that unrelated priming of longer (vs. shorter) vertical distance had similar effects on power judgments.

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 unrelated category—namely, predators—whose selected features (e.g., cruel,
ferocious) are filtered and projected to the target category, lawyers. Through
the use of this metaphor, the traits of law professionals that are also typi-
cal of predators (e.g., being merciless and aggressive) come to the forefront,
whereas other traits typical of lawyers but unrelated to the metaphor are
pushed into the background (e.g., being eloquent). At the same time, this
metaphor-relevant image is applied to the entire category of lawyers, without
exceptions and without differences in degree.
However, one may wonder whether a similar result could also be obtained
by affirming that lawyers are unscrupulous, aggressive, and merciless. The dif-
ference between a metaphor and a list of traits is threefold. First, a single inci-
sive word (metaphor) conveys a broad and flexible range of information that
otherwise requires that each piece of information is specified separately (see
Ortony, 1975). In other words, metaphors are economic vehicles to commu-
nicate stereotypes because they provide an efficient synthesis of the most rel-
evant characteristics. Second, metaphors often take the form of nouns, which
have been shown to facilitate stereotypical inferences and to inhibit counter-
stereotypical inferences much more than comparable traits do (Carnaghi et al.,
2008). Third, related to the above argument, trait adjectives allow for different
degrees (a specific lawyer may be more or less merciless), whereas metaphoric
nouns are either–or statements (a specific lawyer either is a shark or he is not).
As a consequence, metaphors may induce stronger stereotypical inferences
than semantically similar trait descriptions.
We addressed the question of whether intergroup metaphors affect lis-
teners above and beyond the effects of nonmetaphoric trait descriptions in
the new study just mentioned. Applying widely shared stereotypes according
to which lawyers are unscrupulous and politicians are shrewd, we varied the
last statement contained in the descriptions using either a metaphor (lawyer:
“his colleagues describe him as a shark”; politician: “his colleagues describe
him as a fox”) or an equivalent nonmetaphoric adjective (lawyer: “his col-
leagues describe him as unscrupulous”; politician: “his colleagues describe
him as shrewd”). In the control condition, the final statement was omit-
ted. Participants then rated each of the two target persons on a number of
scales, including scrupulousness (immoral, merciless, daring), and shrewdness
(astute, cunning, sly). Unsurprisingly, the target persons were perceived more
in line with the stereotype when the additional, stereotype-relevant informa-
tion was provided. More important, as can be seen in Figure 8.2, this effect
was stronger when the information was communicated through a metaphor
compared with a semantically similar adjective. If confirmed across larger
and more representative sets of stimuli, this would suggest that metaphors
may be particularly powerful tools of communicating stereotypes as listeners

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 3.9

3.8

3.7

Control
3.6
Trait Adjective
Metaphor
3.5

3.4

3.3

Figure 8.2.  Attribution of stereotypical traits (either shrewdness or unscrupulousness)

as a function of condition.

draw stronger stereotype-consistent inferences from such metaphors than

from equivalent trait terms.
Extending the foregoing argument, one may even hypothesize that
metaphors affect self-stereotyping. Thus, specific metaphors may increase the
likelihood that people attribute to themselves those traits that align with the
activated metaphor. Indirect evidence for this idea comes from a study by
Oppenheimer and Trail (2010) in which spatially rightward- (or leftward-)
oriented participants reported more conservative (or liberal) political atti-
tudes. Apparently, the left–right metaphor affected people’s political attitudes
through direct bodily experiences—namely, body inclination. In this case,
self-perception changed as a function of the metaphor, but the opposite
may also be envisaged, suggesting that the relation between metaphors and
self-perception is bidirectional. In line with this idea, Duguid and Goncalo
(2012) showed that people who were made to feel powerful overestimated
their own height. Although, to our knowledge, there is currently no research
evidence for the relation between metaphor and self-stereotyping, these two
studies provide at least indirect evidence for a (bidirectional) link between
metaphors and self-perception.
Together, the small but growing body of research reported in this section
shows that the exposure to metaphoric language affects the way listeners elab-
orate social information. In the following section, we look at how metaphors
are used to describe ingroup and outgroup and which functions they are likely

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 to fulfill in intergroup contexts, thus focusing on the speaker rather than the
listener.

The Use of Metaphors in Interpersonal Discourse

Metaphors are often used in interpersonal discourse as well as in mass

communication with the explicit or implicit intent to delegitimize the out-
group or conceal illegitimate behaviors of the ingroup.

Delegitimization and Dehumanization

Frequently metaphors are used in intergroup relations with the inten-

tion of dehumanizing the outgroup. In his seminal work on delegitimization
strategies, Bar-Tal (1989) argued that dehumanization frequently involves the
use of labels that either describe the outgroup as subhuman (e.g., as animals)
or as superhuman creatures (e.g., as monsters or demons). In line with Haslam
(2006), we may add a third form of dehumanization that links social groups to
objects or automata (e.g., robots or machines). What these three types of meta-
phors (subhuman, superhuman, and automata) have in common is that they
place the outgroup outside the boundaries of the category human being, thus
paving the way for treating its members as not human. An extreme historical
example of denial of humanity is Hitler’s reference to Jews as parasites or rats, a
rhetorical tool aimed at encouraging moral disengagement and ultimately justi-
fying genocide. Contrary to the wishful thinking of the democratically minded
reader, the use of dehumanizing animal metaphors is by no means a phenom-
enon of the past. To cite just one example, the Italian chapter of the Stormfront
Internet forum (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/f148/),7 considered the most
popular White supremacy hate site worldwide, recently invited its readership
to watch the TV program of a successful Jewish journalist in the following
way: “We may observe, just as one observes rats in the laboratory, how the Jew
lies and distorts reality. . . . Unfortunately these Jewish pigs are very capable of
making people believe whatever they want” (December 20, 2011).
Bar-Tal and Hammack (2012) argued that delegitimization strategies
such as these “free human beings from the normative and moral restraints
and justify participation in violence, including the most evil actions” (p. 29).
According to these authors, dehumanizing narratives, such as those containing
animal metaphors, fulfill multiple functions including the facilitation of moral
disengagement, the justification of discriminatory acts and of social exclusion
of the outgroup, and the maintenance of the ingroup’s feeling of superiority.

7Stormfront was founded and is run by the American White nationalist Don Black.

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 Although we are not aware of research that has systematically investi-
gated the entire range of functions hypothesized by Bar-Tal (1989), there is
strong evidence that outgroups are not only perceived as less human but also as
more animal-like than ingroups. On one side, the steadily growing field of infra-
humanization has provided consistent evidence that people deny outgroups
uniquely human, secondary emotions (such as pride), whereas primary emo-
tions, shared with the animal world (such as fear), are approximately equally
assigned to ingroup and outgroups (for recent reviews, see Leyens, Demoulin,
Vaes, Gaunt, & Paladino, 2007; Vaes, Leyens, Paladino, & Miranda, in press).
On the other side, there is evidence that outgroups are not only perceived as
less human but also associated with animal images. For instance, Viki et al.
(2006) found that people associated the outgroup more with animal-related
words (and less with human-related words) than the ingroup. Using an Implicit
Association Test procedure (Study 1) Viki et al. found that people provided
faster responses when outgroup and animal words (vs. ingroup and human
words) shared the same response key than vice versa. Importantly, the asso-
ciation of outgroups with the animal world held not only for negative (e.g.,
creature, carnivore, primal) but also for positive concepts (e.g., instinct, earthy,
nature; Viki et al., 2006, Experiment 4). Similarly, Pérez, Moscovici, and Chulvi
(2007) found that Gypsies were associated with wild animals, and Boccato,
Capozza, Falvo, and Durante (2008), using a priming procedure, observed that
outgroup members were more associated with animality than with human-
ity, whereas ingroup members were primarily associated with humanity (see
Capozza, Boccato, Andrighetto, & Falvo, 2009, for a related study using ambig-
uous human–ape faces). Particularly striking is the fact that, even today, Blacks
are implicitly associated with apes even in people denying such associations at
an explicit level. Goff, Eberhart, Williams, and Jackson (2008) ran a series of
studies showing that White Americans, regardless of their racial attitudes, asso-
ciate “Black” with “ape” and that this association is distinct in the sense that
it was not observed for other social groups, nor were Blacks associated with
animals other than apes (e.g., feline). Similarly, Saminaden, Loughan, and
Haslam (2010), using a go/no-go procedure, found that traditional or indige-
nous (vs. industrialized) cultures are associated both with animals (vs. persons)
and with children (vs. adults). According to Saminaden et al., this illustrates
that even today traditional cultures are metaphorically dehumanized by placing
them in either a phylogenetically (animals) or an ontogenetically (children)
inferior position. This was true regardless of whether traditional versus indus-
trialized cultures were presented in the form of verbal labels (tribal, traditional
vs. industrial, civilized, etc.) or images.
This latter finding is important because it shows that dehumanizing meta-
phoric rhetoric may rely on not only verbal concepts but also images. In line
with this idea, Volpato, Durante, Gabbiadini, Andrighetto, and Mari (2010)

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 reported an impressive archive analysis of visual images published in La difesa
della razza, a pseudo-scientific journal supportive of racist policies in Italy
(1938–1943), finding that Jews were frequently portrayed as vultures, spi-
ders, parasites, microbes, or devils (approximately 4% of all images describing
Jews), whereas Blacks were primarily associated with apes or were objecti-
fied by showing only body parts such as hands or feet (approximately 2% of
all images describing Blacks). Volpato et al. observed that, at least for Jews,
metaphoric associations with animals were actually more frequent in visual
materials than in the text. Thus, intergroup metaphors need no language;
they may be expressed as efficiently or even more potently through images.
Although dehumanization often relies on animal metaphors, not all ani-
mal metaphors are offensive. Some animal metaphors signal positive affect
(e.g., a woman calling her partner panda or a father referring to his daughter
as Spatz, the German world for sparrow), others describe acceptable social
behaviors. For instance, the verb scimmiottare (in Italian), “to ape” (English)
or nachäffen (in German) may be used with a negative connotation, but it
may also describe the playful synchronization behavior typically shown by
children when they mimic one another.8 So what makes an animal metaphor
offensive? Haslam, Loughnan, and Sun (2011) investigated this question,
finding that animal metaphors were considered particularly offensive when
(a) they involve disliked or disgusting animals (e.g., rats, vultures, cockroaches,
or worms rather than kittens, puppies, or rabbits) and (b) when they imply
a high degree of dehumanization, suggesting that the target-person is indeed
animal-like. Interestingly, animal metaphors do not become more offensive
the greater the phylogenetic distance to human beings. As the authors observe,
among the most offensive metaphors are animals that are distant (e.g., worms,
parasites) but also some (e.g., pigs, rats, apes) that are close relatives of human
beings. Together, these findings suggest that the offensiveness of animal met-
aphors may derive from two distinct sources: disgust (often involving phyloge-
netically distant animals) and falling short of full humanity (often involving
phylogenetically close animals, e.g., apes or dogs).
Also, looking at the great variety of animal metaphors used in inter-
group contexts, one may roughly distinguish two large groups, those that are
broadly offensive without referring to any specific trait (e.g., rat, dog) and
those that are narrower in meaning and are synonyms for specific human
traits. Examples for this latter category, taken from the Italian language, are
bradipo (bradypus) for slow, asino (donkey) for stupid, volpe (fox) for shrewd,
and squalo (shark) for unscrupulous. Although we cannot cite any empiri-
cal evidence in favor of this hypothesis, we suspect that the former type of

Haslam et al. (2011) found that, among the 40 animal metaphors considered in this research, approxi-
8

mately 20% were nonoffensive, whereas the large majority (80%) served hostile intentions.

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 metaphor has a primary function in dehumanization, whereas the latter is
more closely related to stereotyping.
Another largely unexplored issue regards the cognitive and behavioral
consequences of dehumanizing metaphors. There is evidence that metaphors
do affect people’s thinking, as illustrated by Goff et al.’s (2008, Experiment 5)
finding that participants primed with ape words were more likely to condone
violence against Blacks. Yet to our knowledge, many other consequences of
the exposure to dehumanizing metaphors, such as moral disengagement and
discriminatory behavior, remain to be explored.

Hiding and Deemphasizing Reality Through Metaphors

The systematic and coherent way in which we are able to compre-

hend one aspect of a concept in terms of another will necessarily hide other
aspects of the concept. Consider the following sentence produced by a person
involved in an intense discussion with a challenger: “He (she) attacked every
weak point in my argument.” Through this metaphor, the activity of “carrying
on a discussion” is partially structured by the source concept war. In allowing
us to focus on one aspect of a target concept (e.g., battling aspects of argu-
ing), a metaphoric source can prevent us from focusing on the other aspects
of the target that are not coherent with the metaphor. In this example, we
may lose sight of the more cooperative aspects involved in an argument, such
as comparing opinions or identifying logical flaws.
Allbritton (1995) argued that one of the central functions of meta-
phors is to filter information, promoting the selection and interpretation of
information in a way that is coherent with the metaphor. Just as stereotypes
tend to channel the interpretation of events (Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985),
metaphors tend to direct attention to certain aspects while detracting atten-
tion from others.
Looking at the use of metaphors in everyday talk, Cameron (2008) main-
tained that people use metaphors to think, to explain themselves to others,
and to organize their discourse. Their choice of metaphor often reveals not
only their conceptualization but also, and perhaps more important for human
communication, their attitudes and values. Listening to and visualizing meta-
phors coined by others may help us to broaden our vision. Metaphors describe
the world in a vivid yet familiar way, enabling us to see events from a specific
perspective.
Metaphors carry not only ideational content but also information about
the speaker’s attitudes and values with respect of that content. The affective
potential connected to a particular metaphor is crucial in understanding the
reason a speaker decides to use it to influence the listener’s attitudes about
groups or social categories. According to Graumann (1990), three dimensions

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 of affect help to analyze how speakers’ choices contribute to the affective
functioning of a metaphor: alignment–distancing, positive–negative evalua-
tion, and emphasis–deemphasis. In particular, when the topic of discourse is
uncomfortable for speakers in some way, metaphor helps to distance speaker
and listener from the event and to deemphasize its unpleasant aspects.
Consider as an example the problem of social conflicts between national
groups. At times, the course of the events culminates in real war. In this case, it
becomes extremely important to distinguish what is metaphoric from what is
not. Pain, death, hunger, and injury of loved ones are not metaphoric; they are
real, and, in a war, they trouble hundreds of thousands of real human beings
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). However, to hide the atrocious aspects of this social
scenario from the public opinion, political leaders and military strategists at
times translate the war into a sort of competitive game like chess or into a
sport like football or boxing. An expression like the arms race refers to a meta-
phoric representation of a competitive game in which the opponents are fight-
ing for the possession of a trophy without the actual use of deadly weapons.
It is a metaphor in which there is a clear winner and loser, and a clear
end to the game. The metaphor highlights strategic thinking, team-work,
preparedness, the spectators in the world arena, the glory of winning and the
shame of defeat. This metaphor takes away the images of death and mourning
and emphasizes a more acceptable view of the conflict. The public is primed
to accept this clean scenario, providing a moral justification of the war.
Another metaphor hiding the real state of affairs is the term side effects
to indicate that a war is producing blameless victims. In medicine, a side effect
is an effect, typically adverse, that is secondary to the one intended; the term
is predominantly used to describe adverse consequences of the use of a drug.
In the case of a war, the air raids that cause death and destruction in the
civil population are justified by means of the expression side effects. It associ-
ates the concept of war to an important and functional therapeutic proce-
dure that unfortunately produces unwanted but expected injuries: the death
of innocents.
During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the proposed strategy of the
Serbian army against the Muslim minority was based on the systematic assas-
sination of people (men, women, old people, children) living in rural com-
munities. To hide the criminal nature of this conduct, the expression used by
Serbian politician to portray this strategy was ethnic cleansing. This metaphoric
image directs the attention of the unaware listener toward a worldview based
on the following idea: In a confusing social and political reality that is not easy
to understand, the best way to impose order and transparency on the ethnic
environment is through a sort of physical cleaning up. Following the same
logic, the German Nazi regime during the Second World War alluded to the
design of the systematic elimination of the Jewish people using the expression

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 final solution. In terms of Graumann’s (1990) work, all these examples repre-
sent an attempt to affectively deemphasize a representation of social reality
by means of a metaphor, ultimately justifying existing social, economic, or
political arrangements (for a more detailed discussion of metaphoric framing
effects in the political realm, see Chapter 9, this volume).

Metaphoric Framing of Intergroup

Relations and Policy Decisions

As the foregoing examples show, metaphors do not always refer to any

specific social group but rather to intergroup relations in a wider sense. When
talking about immigration, acculturation, racism, diversity, equity, power, hos-
tile intergroup relations, international negotiation, or impermeable national
boundaries, we tend to make use of metaphors such as melting pot, color-
blindness, Cold War, iron curtain, ping-pong or chess, or simply to spatial relative
positions that represent these abstract concepts. For instance, Henze (2005)
found that school leaders in the United States tend to mentally represent the
concept of “diversity” with reference to horizontal space. Also, nation is often
envisaged as a home or as a physical body (Levine, 1995; O’Brien, 2003), and
international negotiations are often framed as chess games, with politicians
making wrong moves, worsening their position with every move, ending up
in a stalemate, or being grandmasters who handle the endgame well or offer a
draw at the right time (Mišić Ilic, 2008).
A number of authors (e.g., O’Brien, 2003) have argued that metaphors
are intentionally used in public debate concerning immigration to create a
fearful climate and to justify restrictive policies. Particularly common in this
context are disease-related metaphors (e.g., immigration as pestilence, plague,
or as a cancer) as well as natural-catastrophe metaphors (e.g., immigration as
a flood, a tide against which dams must be erected).
Are metaphors such as these able to shift public opinion and to influence
social policy? An interesting recent set of studies by Thibodeau and Borodistky
(2011) suggests that metaphors may indeed shape the framing of and the solu-
tion to social problems. In this research, participants received a fictitious news
article describing the increasing crime rate in a North American city, using
either an animal (a wild beast) or a disease metaphor (a virus infecting the city)
to refer to criminality. Participants were then asked to propose intervention
strategies to counter the increase in crimes. The solutions that participants
proposed were in line with the metaphor: Compared with the wild animal
metaphor, the disease metaphor elicited more prevention-focused and fewer
punishment-focused interventions. Thus, metaphoric framing does seem to
have tangible consequences for public opinion attitudes.

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 Conclusions and Future Research

This brief review of the literature suggests that metaphors play a rele-
vant role in intergroup relations by affecting various cognitive (categorization,
homogeneity perception, stereotyping) as well as more motivational aspects.
Social categorization comes easier when the immediate context is metaphor-
congruent (e.g., when categorizing targets in powerful vs. powerless groups,
located, respectively, in the upper or lower position). Not only do metaphors
facilitate the classification of exemplars, they also make exemplars appear
more similar to each other, thus enhancing group homogeneity. Metaphors
also shift interpretation and inferences such that metaphor-consistent aspects
of a social group come to the foreground, whereas other features are ignored.
Importantly, this shift in interpretation appears more potent when elicited by
a metaphor than by a semantically similar trait adjective. As we have seen,
this hiding or filtering function becomes an important tool when trying to dis-
tort reality and to justify hostile intergroup behaviors, including war. Finally,
metaphors provide a critical tool in dehumanizing propaganda, where out-
groups are associated with subhuman beings (animals), superhuman creatures
(devils), or automata (robots) and hence mentally excluded from the human
race and often treated accordingly.
Although the small but growing literature on intergroup metaphors sug-
gests that metaphors should have a definite place in theorizing and research
on language and social cognition, many aspects remain to be explored. First
of all, research should focus on the basic question of whether metaphors
affect listeners above and beyond nonmetaphoric discourse and whether
they operate by similar or distinct mechanisms. Also, the relation between
metaphoric and nonmetaphoric representations remains to be explored (e.g.,
see Loughnan, Haslam, & Kashima, 2009, for the mutual influence between
metaphor-based and attribute-based dehumanization).
Second, it remains to be seen whether speakers use metaphors differen-
tially when talking about ingroups versus outgroups. Similar to the linguistic
intergroup bias (Maass, 1999), according to which positive ingroup and nega-
tive outgroup behaviors are described more abstractly than negative ingroup
and positive outgroup behaviors, one may suspect that metaphors are used
in a strategic way to differentiate the ingroup favorably from the outgroup.
Thus, metaphors may be handy tools of communication when describing pos-
itive characteristics of the ingroup or negative characteristics of the outgroup.
Third, assuming that metaphors function much like schemata, as sug-
gested by Allbritton (1995), there seems to be a striking parallelism between
the cognitive functions of metaphors and those of stereotypes. In our opinion,
the interplay between the two remains to be explored. We suspect that a
metaphoric framing of stereotypes will greatly increase their impact.

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 Fourth, it has been argued that metaphors reduce uncertainty. The
first empirical evidence for the relation between metaphors and uncertainty
came from research by Keefer, Landau, Sullivan, and Rothschild (2011), who
showed that the accessibility of a metaphor (such as life is a path) affected sub-
sequent cognition only when people were in a state of subjective uncertainty.
Specifically, the metaphor life is a path enhanced participants’ perception of
autobiographical continuity only when personal uncertainty was salient.
Although Keefer and colleagues have shown that uncertainty moderates the
effect of metaphoric thinking, to our knowledge, there is as yet no direct
evidence that metaphors actually reduce uncertainty. If metaphors were to
reduce uncertainty, then any target that creates uncertainty should be par-
ticularly likely to be described by a metaphor. This possibility seems interest-
ing in relation to uncertainty identity theory, according to which uncertainty
reduction represents the motivational component of social identification and
drives subsequent intergroup behaviors (Hogg, 2007).
Fifth, relatively little is known about the communicative functions of
metaphors in intergroup discourse. Allbritton (1995) and others have sug-
gested that metaphors promote intimacy and closeness because they highlight
the shared knowledge among the speakers. Similarly, Castelli, Arcuri, and
Zogmaister (2003) showed that stereotypes are a social tool that enhances
the perception of closeness and similarity among group members. Thus, it
remains to be seen whether metaphors fulfill this social function above and
beyond that of stereotype sharing.
At the most general level, many studies reported here aimed primar-
ily at investigating intergroup phenomena—for instance, by testing whether
outgroups are denied the same degree of humanity that is generally granted to
ingroups. As a consequence, a considerable portion of the research discussed
here was framed within social-psychological theory (e.g., infrahumanization
or dehumanization models), rather than within metaphor theory. We believe
that research in this area would benefit from a more explicit reference to the-
oretical concepts and experimental designs used in the metaphor literature.

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 9
The Metaphoric Framing Model:
Political Communication
and Public Opinion
Victor Ottati, Randall Renstrom, and Erika Price

This chapter develops a comprehensive model of metaphor effects

within the domain of political communication and political cognition. We
begin by considering the nature and prevalence of metaphor commonly
appearing in political rhetoric. We then provide an overarching theoretical
perspective that conceptualizes metaphoric political rhetoric as a form of
political framing. This metaphoric framing model posits that a communication
or situational cue initially activates a root metaphor in the mind of the message
recipient. This root metaphor contains an image, central theme, or storyline
that is associated with the political entity, event, or issue being described. This
metaphoric image influences the message recipient’s attitudes and opinions
regarding the event or issue. The psychological nature of this influence is pre-
sumed to be multifaceted, encompassing a variety of mediating psychological

This chapter was funded by a National Science Foundation grant awarded to the first author
(Grant 0518007).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-009
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

179

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 process mechanisms. These include metaphoric framing effects that are medi-
ated by information seeking, selective information processing, interpretation
of ambiguous information, as well as metaphor-guided attribution, inference,
and elaboration. The metaphoric framing model also posits that metaphoric
language can influence the message recipient’s cognitive processing style
en route to deriving a political opinion or attitude.

Nature and Prevalence of Metaphor

in Political Communication

A metaphor contains two fundamental components. The target (topic)

of the metaphor is simply the object, event, or issue being described (Lakoff,
1993; Richards, 1936). The source (vehicle) is some other object or event
that conveys a certain meaning about the target (topic). For example, pol-
lution is a disease contains pollution as the target (topic) and disease as the
source (vehicle). Many researchers have suggested that metaphor compre-
hension entails mapping semantic and evaluative connotations of the source
(e.g., disease) on to the metaphor target (e.g., pollution). Thus, pollution is a
disease might convey that pollution is a source of sickness, weakness, decay,
and death.
Metaphor is prevalent in many forms of communication, including
both spoken and written discourse (Gibbs, 1994; Graesser, Long, Mio, 1989;
Lakoff, 1987; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Mio & Katz, 1996). Although
often viewed as a literary device reserved for extraordinary or poetic utter-
ances, metaphor also pervades ordinary and conventional forms of commu-
nication (Lakoff, 1993). Research confirms that metaphor is commonly used
in literature (Kreuz & Roberts, 1993; Kreuz, Roberts, Johnson, & Bertus,
1996), advertising and marketing (Arndt, 1985; Hunt & Menon, 1995),
interpersonal communication (Fussell & Moss, 1998), and psychotherapy
(McMullen, 1989). In many instances, metaphors describe an abstract entity
or issue in terms of more concrete aspects of human experience (Landau,
Sullivan, & Greenberg, 2009). Thus, it is not surprising that metaphors are
highly prevalent in the political realm (Howe, 1988; Lakoff, 2004; Mio,
1996, 1997).
Politicians use metaphors to characterize themselves (e.g., Sarah Palin
as a mama grizzly), their opponents (e.g., Tony Blair as Bush’s lap dog), and
their political agendas (e.g., New Deal, Bridge to the Twenty-First Century).
Charismatic presidents are more likely to use metaphoric language in their
inaugural addresses, suggesting that metaphors can inspire the electorate
(Mio, Riggio, Levin, & Reese, 2005). Indeed, metaphoric language is used to
great effect during public policy debates, often to persuade the public toward

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 a certain viewpoint (e.g., social services are abused by welfare queens) or to
explain a particular policy stance (e.g., domino theory to justify U.S. involve-
ment in Vietnam). Metaphors are also used by the media when reporting on
elections and political candidates (e.g., horse race, dark horse candidate, riding
the president’s coattails, mudslinging, landslide victory).
Several types of metaphor are used in political communication, includ-
ing those involving war, sports, family, and nature (S. Gilbert, 1979; Howe,
1988). Metaphors involving war, conflict, and violence are particularly
prevalent (Eubanks, 2000; Howe, 1988) For example, the trade is war meta-
phor is often used by politicians to suggest there are winners and losers when
it comes to international trade and as such may influence the public’s atti-
tudes toward protectionism, tariffs, and free-trade bills in Congress. The
war on drugs metaphor provides another prominent example. Many have
argued that this metaphor increased incarceration rates for illegal drug users,
culminating in the overcrowding of U.S. prisons. War metaphors are also
used during political campaigns. For example, Sarah Palin encouraged her
conservative supporters not to retreat but to reload in the run-up to the 2010
elections (for related examples, see Martin, 2011). Sports metaphors are as
prevalent as war metaphors, if not more so (Howe, 1988). Politicians play
hardball. When they advance a particular policy, they bring out their heavy
hitters. During debates, candidates come out swinging, don’t pull any punches,
and land a knockout punch. Such metaphors may provide an apt description
for many political events, but because men often have a greater interest
in sports than women do, sports metaphors may turn women off to politi-
cal communications or arguments (Howe, 1988; but see Ottati, Rhoads, &
Graesser, 1999).
In contrast to war and sports metaphors, family metaphors are often
used to bring people together. Reagan often used sports metaphors dur-
ing the 1984 campaign, referring to the Washington tax increase team and
the grassroots opportunity team (Howe, 1988). There were also allusions to
Reagan being a quarterback and America scoring touchdowns again. In con-
trast, during the primaries, Mario Cuomo spoke of Americans being a family
and bound to one another, and Jesse Jackson described his multiethnic cam-
paign as a rainbow coalition (Howe, 1988). Many other metaphors are also
prevalent in politics. For example, machine metaphors describe Congress
and the lawmaking process (the sausage-making factory), and political bosses
are said to run political machines in large cities that produce votes for candi-
dates the boss supports. Cancer metaphors have long been used to describe
political problems (e.g., Watergate is a cancer on the presidency). Likewise,
metaphors that reference the body—three arms of government, heads of state,
brain trust—are prevalent. We even refer to our organized political system
itself as the body politic.

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 Agenda-Setting, Priming, and
Metaphoric Political Priming

How do political metaphors influence public opinion? To address this

question, it is important to consider metaphor effects in the context of a
larger body of work regarding the effects of political communication. Early
analysis of political communication, although often based on anecdotal
evidence, characterized the mass media as exercising a powerful influence
on public opinion. However, empirically oriented researchers eventually
rejected this claim. Indeed, academic orthodoxy came to emphasize that the
media produces “minimal effects” on public opinion (Klapper, 1960). During
this minimal effects era, it was suggested that political opinions are, in large
part, determined by long-standing political predispositions. The political
campaign and media were viewed as short-term forces that failed to modify
deeply entrenched, long-standing political predispositions. This research era
ended, however, when researchers documented the presence of agenda-setting
and priming effects.
Agenda-setting research demonstrated that the media are effective in
telling the public what to think about (Behr & Iyengar, 1985; Rössler &
Schenk, 2000; Soroka, 2003; Sutherland & Galloway, 1981). That is, by giv-
ing extensive coverage to certain political issues and less coverage to other
issues, the media influence the relative salience and importance of political
issues in the mind of the public (Bizer & Krosnick, 2001; Iyengar, Kinder,
Peters, & Krosnick, 1984). This agenda-setting effect, in turn, gives rise to
a media priming effect. That is, media coverage of an issue increases the
likelihood that voters will rely on that issue when they derive their overall
evaluation of a politician’s performance (Behr & Iyengar, 1985; Iyengar et al.,
1984; Soroka, 2003). Thus, for example, prominent and frequent coverage
of domestic economic issues increases the weight ascribed to the president’s
economic performance when voters derive their global evaluation of the
president (Iyengar et al., 1984).
The minimal effects assumption was also challenged by research docu-
menting media framing effects. Whereas agenda-setting determines what the
public thinks about, media framing influences how individuals think about
an issue. More specifically, news frames emphasize, prime, or highlight cer-
tain aspects of a political event while deemphasizing or ignoring others
(Dimitrova & Stromback, 2005; Entman, 1993, 2004). In doing so, frames
increase the accessibility or importance of certain aspects of a news event
and decrease the accessibility or importance of other aspects of a news event
(Druckman, 2001; Iyengar, 1991; Nelson, Oxley, & Clawson, 1997). A news
frame consists of words and phrases that highlight and select what is most rel-
evant, notable, or important about a news event (Druckman, 2001; Entman,

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 1993). It often provides a central theme or storyline that organizes and adds
coherence to specific information pertaining to a news event (Berinsky &
Kinder, 2006; Druckman, 2001). This central theme or storyline promotes
a particular construal of the news event (e.g., referring to the Iraq War as
an occupation versus a liberation; Pfau et al., 2005; Semetko & Valkenburg,
2000). Comprehension, interpretation, and opinion formation regarding a
news event are thereby shaped by the manner in which the media frames the
news event (Nelson et al., 1997). For example, public opinion regarding a
Ku Klux Klan rally depends on whether the news event is framed in terms of
freedom of speech, racism, or public safety (Druckman, 2001).
This chapter conceptualizes metaphor in political communication
as metaphoric political framing. From this perspective, metaphoric political
utterances function as communication frames that elicit many of the effects
produced by political frames more generally. Notably, however, metaphoric
political frames are often more subtle and are therefore difficult for citizens to
detect or control (Bougher, 2012; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011).

The Metaphoric Framing Model

The metaphoric framing model can be applied to a variety of domains.

These include therapist–client interaction, parent–child interaction, inter-
personal communication in close relationships, persuasion, advertising,
political communication, and other forms of mass communication. This
chapter applies the model to examine the effects of metaphoric statements
contained in news stories, political speeches, news interviews, and other
forms of mass political communication. The metaphoric framing model is
inspired by theory and research in psychology, political science, and com-
munication. Its psychological foundations can be found in conceptual meta-
phor theory (Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), research regarding the
cognitive representation of events (Pennington & Hastie, 1986), as well as in
social psychological models of persuasion (Chaiken, 1980; Petty & Cacioppo,
1986), impression formation (Wyer & Srull, 1989), and stereotyping (e.g.,
Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998; D. Gilbert & Hixon, 1991). Political commu-
nication research regarding framing effects also provides a foundation for the
model (e.g., Entman, 2004; Iyengar, 1991).
The metaphoric framing model attempts to integrate the implications
of these various theoretical approaches to provide a more comprehensive and
overarching conceptualization of metaphor effects. In doing so, it also pro-
vides an explicit account of many psychological processes that are yet to be
fully illuminated in the metaphor literature. These include a fivefold typology
of metaphor activation, an explicit distinction between metaphor activation

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 Direct
Root
Application
Metaphor
or Inference
Explicitly
Stated
Selective
Processing

Surface
Metaphorical
Guided
Utterance
Interpretation
ACTIVATION JUDGMENT
OF ROOT EFFECT
Incidental (assimilation,
METAPHOR
Surface Guided
contrast)
Metaphorical Attribution,
Utterance Elaboration

Prime Metaphor
Metaphor Rejection
Source
PROCESS
STYLE
Chronic Cognitive
FIGURE 1 Motivation or
EFFECT
Accessibility
of Metaphor Ability

Figure 9.1.  The metaphoric framing model.

and application, an explicit distinction between metaphor-induced judgment

effects and metaphor-induced process style effects, as well as a more fully
articulated model of the psychological process mechanisms that mediate the
effect of metaphor on judgment and process style.
The metaphoric framing model contains two basic stages of cognitive
processing: metaphor activation and application (see Figure 9.1). The first
stage involves activation of a root metaphor. This occurs when, either explic-
itly or implicitly, a root metaphor is activated that links the communication
target to a metaphor vehicle or source (e.g., Operation Desert Storm is a football
game). As will soon become apparent, there are at least five psychological
routes to activating a root metaphor. The root metaphor typically contains
a concrete entity, event, or storyline (e.g., football game) that is associated
with the target of the communication (e.g., Operation Desert Storm). Often,
this central theme or storyline can be conceptualized as a prototypic event
schema or script (e.g., an event in which fans are loyal to their preferred
team, the coach is in charge of the game plan, offensive maneuvers are based
on both a ground and passing game strategy, nonessential personnel sit on
the sidelines). The second stage involves application of the metaphor. At this
stage, the central theme or storyline influences the individual’s impression of
the target event or topic being described in the communication (e.g., Israel
remained on the sidelines produces the belief that Israel did not directly par-
ticipate in the military operation). This can occur in a relatively direct or

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 indirect manner. In what follows, we describe each stage of the metaphoric
framing model in more detail.

Activation of the Root Metaphor

In accordance with the implications of conceptual metaphor theory

(Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the metaphoric framing model pre-
sumes that verbal statements (e.g., “the allied force included special teams”)
activate an underlying metaphor in the mind of the message recipient (e.g., war
is a football game). The underlying conceptual metaphor can be activated by a
diverse set of surface metaphoric utterances and functions as the root origin of
a diverse set of cognitive entailments (e.g., civilians are merely spectators, remain
loyal to your team!). For these reasons, the metaphoric framing model uses the
term root metaphor to identify the underlying conceptual metaphor that is acti-
vated. As previously noted, the root metaphor contains a target, source, and a
linkage that implies the target is the source. For example, the root metaphor
Operation Desert Storm is a football game contains Operation Desert Storm as
the target (topic), football game as the source (vehicle), and is a as the linkage
between the target and source.
According to the metaphoric framing model, the root metaphor can
be activated in at least five ways. First, it is possible that the root metaphor
is directly and explicitly stated in a communication. For example, a politi-
cal commentator might argue that the presidential campaign is a beauty contest
and provide specific examples of campaign events that support this cynical
construal of a presidential contest. Explicit metaphoric expressions of this
nature significantly influence the message recipient’s reasoning regarding
social and political issues. For example, Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011)
provided information with statistical information regarding crime rates that
was preceded by crime is a virus or, alternatively, crime is a beast. Individuals
exposed to the former metaphor recommended crime solutions analogous to
viral epidemic solutions (e.g., “investigate source,” “institute programs that
will decrease the spread of crime”). Individuals exposed to the later metaphor
recommended crime solutions that are analogous to those often prescribed
for dangerous animals (e.g., “hunt down, capture, and cage the criminals”).
Often, however, a root metaphor is activated in the listener’s mind even
when the communication fails to contain any direct or explicit mention of
the root metaphor. This more implicit avenue of activation emerges when
a communication contains surface utterances that imply (but do not directly
state) the root metaphor. For example, a description of Operation Desert
Storm might indicate that the allied attack featured a ground game as well
as the use of special teams to execute a successful end sweep strategy (Beer
& de Landtsheer, 2004). Although not explicitly stated, the root metaphor

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 Operation Desert Storm is a football game is clearly implied by this description.
As such, this description will presumably activate this root metaphor in the
mind of the listener. Research confirms that this avenue of activation can
serve as an effective means of political persuasion. As one example, Bowers
and Osborn (1966) activated a death metaphor to persuade participants to
cut government aid to needy students. Although they never explicitly stated
government aid is death, such a metaphor was implied by the language in the
persuasive communication (e.g., allow our government to slowly strangle indi-
viduality, permit the basis of our national strength to rot, the death rattle of liberty).
Compared with a literal communication, those who were exposed to the com-
munication containing the death metaphor showed greater attitude change.
A third avenue of activation is even more subtle (or implicit) than the
one just described. In this case, a root metaphor is activated by incidental,
surface metaphoric utterances that are not even part of a communication
regarding the specific target of evaluation. Evidence for this process is pro-
vided by Landau et al. (2009). Specifically, American participants were ini-
tially exposed to information that increased or decreased motivation to avoid
bodily contamination. Next, some participants read an essay description of
the United States containing surface metaphoric expressions that compared
the United States to a physical body. Importantly, none of this information
specifically pertained to immigration (the target of evaluation). Nevertheless,
this information influenced attitudes toward immigration. Namely, increased
motivation to avoid bodily contamination predicted more negative attitudes
toward immigration and immigrants. For these participants, the root meta-
phor my country is a body was incidentally activated by the essay. As a conse-
quence, among these participants, motivation to avoid viral invasion of the
body was associated with more negative attitudes toward immigration. In the
control condition, participants initially read a parallel essay that described
the Unites States in literal terms. Among these participants, motivation to
avoid bodily contamination had no impact on attitudes toward immigration.
A fourth avenue of activation is potentially the most subtle of all. In this
case, the context incidentally primes the metaphor vehicle (source), without
implying or mentioning a link between the source and target. When subse-
quently considering the target, however, the individual spontaneously links
the target to the recently activated source, thereby producing activation of
the metaphor. Effects of this nature can emerge when the metaphor source is
activated by a physical cue. For example, when holding a warm (as opposed to
cold) cup of coffee, participants are more likely to rate a target person as warm
(Williams & Bargh, 2008). In this case, the physical cue does not state or imply
the root metaphor (i.e., interpersonal warmth is physical warmth). Nevertheless,
this root metaphor is spontaneously activated when participants rate the tar-
get person. An analogous effect might emerge in the political domain. For

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 example, participants might spontaneously activate the war is a football game
metaphor when viewing news coverage of a war immediately following a tele-
vised football game (even if the news program fails to mention or imply a
link between football and war). Effects of this nature may be limited, however.
Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011), for example, found that crime is a virus
elicited metaphor-consistent reasoning regarding crime policy. In contrast, a
condition that simply primed virus failed to produce this effect.
The previously described avenues of metaphor activation involve situ-
ational cues (e.g., physical cues, surface metaphoric utterances) that prime a
metaphor when an individual thinks about the target. A fifth avenue of meta-
phor activation involves individual differences in chronic accessibility. From
this perspective, the accessibility of a metaphor is significantly influenced by
chronic predispositions (Bougher, 2012; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). For exam-
ple, some individuals might chronically construe public policy regarding drug
abuse in terms of a war on drugs. Other individuals might chronically construe
this public policy in terms of a medical epidemic. Individual differences of this
nature are presumably associated with a variety of political predispositions
(e.g., ideology, partisanship), worldviews (e.g., social dominance orientation),
personality characteristics (e.g., authoritarianism), values (e.g., egalitarian-
ism, freedom), and cultural orientations (e.g., individualism, collectivism,
modernity). If a metaphor regarding a topic is chronically accessible, it might
be automatically activated by the mere mention of the topic. For example,
among conservatives, the simple mention of taxation might automatically acti-
vate metaphors involving physical burden, socialism, or robbery.

The Nature of the Activated Representation

Activation of the root metaphor does not simply produce a comparison

between one entity (e.g., virus) and another (e.g., crime). On the contrary, the
root metaphor maps an entire conceptual domain on to another conceptual
domain (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Lakoff, 1993). Thus, the metaphor crime is
a virus maps a series of cognitive entailments associated with virus onto crime
(e.g., education inoculates youth against a criminal lifestyle, urban youth programs
prevent the spread of crime). Moreover, in addition to activating a comparison
between entities or objects, metaphors can activate an entire storyline or nar-
rative (Stone, 1988). This narrative storyline can be conceptualized as an
event representation or script that guides comprehension, understanding, and
inferences that are derived on the basis of a communication (for related con-
ceptualizations, see Berinsky & Kinder, 2006; Pennington & Hastie, 1986).
Consider, for example, the following description of U.S. military action
during Operation Desert Storm: “The Highway of Death was a death camp.
It was Auschwitz on a road.” This description activates the root metaphor

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 Operation Desert Storm was genocide. This metaphor contains a genocide script
or event representation possessing some rather notable elements. Genocide is
a morally repugnant, barbaric, inhumane, and egregious practice. Perpetrators
of genocide commonly elicit intense feelings of disgust, repulsion, and anger.
Victims of genocide are, in most cases, completely helpless and unable to
defend themselves. In light of this genocide script, Operation Desert Storm
might be viewed as a merciless, gruesome, and inhumane attack on a helpless
and powerless group of Iraqis. This view of Operation Desert Storm should
engender negative attitudes toward the military operation.
In comparison, consider a description of Desert Storm that indicates
“Desert Storm was Bush’s Emancipation Proclamation. The imprisonment of
Kuwait was diverted.” This description activates the root metaphor Operation
Desert Storm was a liberation of captives. This metaphor contains the captive
liberation script, a prototypic event representation possessing a drastically dif-
ferent set of implications. In this storyline, the Kuwaiti “captives” are inno-
cent and powerless victims who have been unfairly treated by hostile and
unfriendly Iraqi “captors.” The U.S. “liberators” are heroes who rescue and
release the captives. In this captive liberation script, the U.S. invasion is
perceived to be a heroic action that freed innocent Kuwaiti citizens. Clearly,
the genocide and captive liberation scripts activate divergent stories of the
U.S. war in Iraq. Once activated, these images or storylines serve as cogni-
tive frames that can influence public opinion regarding U.S. military action
in Operation Desert Storm.

Effect of Metaphor on Political Judgment

The effect of metaphoric political framing on the public’s attitudes and

opinions is potentially mediated by a variety of psychological process mecha-
nisms (Ottati & Renstrom, 2010; for a related discussion, see Ottati, 2001).
Some of these psychological process mechanisms involve relatively direct
effects of the activated cognitive frame on citizens’ political judgments. In
other cases, however, the metaphoric political framing effect is postulated to
be more indirect (Ottati & Renstrom, 2010). In these instances, metaphoric
statements activate a cognitive frame, storyline, or expectancy that influences
cognitive processing of other information pertaining to the target. These
effects on cognitive processing, in turn, elicit effects on political judgment.

Direct Application Hypothesis

Metaphor comprehension entails mapping informational implications
of the source onto the target (Gentner, 1983; Gibbs, 1994; Ortony, Reynolds,

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 & Arter, 1978; but see Gineste, Indurkhva, & Scart, 2000). In accordance
with this perspective, the direct application hypothesis presumes that the mes-
sage recipient takes information contained in the source and directly applies
it to form an impression of the target. Thus, if a description of Desert Storm
activates the genocide script, the message recipient might directly infer that
U.S. soldiers ruthlessly killed Iraqis who were helpless and unable to defend
themselves. This direct inference can serve to “fill in missing data” if the mes-
sage recipient receives no other information that more directly and explicitly
describes U.S. soldiers’ behavior during the military operation. Individuals
who adopt this belief are, of course, likely to derive a negative evaluation
of Operation Desert Storm. In this fashion, the direct application process
should ultimately produce an effect on the public’s attitudes and opinions
regarding Operation Desert Storm. In accordance with this formulation,
research confirms that metaphors can produce an assimilation effect on polit-
ical judgment. That is, metaphors containing positive vehicles elicit positive
evaluations of political entities and policies, whereas metaphors containing
negative vehicles produce the opposite effect (Johnson & Taylor, 1981).
It is important to note that the metaphor source is not simply an abstract
schematic category that includes the target as an exemplar (Landau et al.,
2010). On the contrary, the source and target constitute distinct categories or
concepts that contain both shared and unshared attributes. Only the shared
attributes are potentially mapped onto the target (Hitchon, 1997; Kintsch,
2001). Thus, the metaphor Operation Desert Storm is a football game does not
lead the receiver to infer that U.S. soldiers wore football uniforms, drank
Gatorade during timeouts, or spiked a ball when they penetrated enemy lines.
Individuals fail to generate these inferences because they involve features of a
football game that are clearly not shared by a military action. However, such
a communication may well lead the American public to avoid criticism of the
war and to remain loyal to the U.S. military. It may also promote a sanitized
view of the war that neglects the physical pain, suffering, and death caused by
the military action. After all, good football fans should remain loyal to their
preferred team, and although football is an aggressive sport, football players
rarely kill each other.
Importantly, direct application does not necessarily produce an effect
on attitudes toward the communication target that is congruent with the
overall valence of the metaphor source (vehicle). In some cases, the evalua-
tive implication of features shared by the target and source is not equivalent
to evaluation of the source taken as a whole. Consider, for example, President
Reagan’s claim that the government is a baby. Although most people evaluate
babies positively overall, the positive features of a baby (e.g., cute, lovable,
cuddly, fresh) are not easily attributed to government. That is, the positive

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 features of a baby are not the shared features. However, negative features of a
baby are readily attributed to the government. For example, the government
can be construed as irresponsible, lacking restraint, failing to clean up after
itself, and so on. A baby and the government potentially share all of these
negative features. Thus, when Reagan described the government as a baby,
direct application of the shared features would have negatively influenced the
public’s attitude toward government.
Direct application should be most likely to occur when the message
recipient has little prior knowledge of the news event. Under such conditions,
the implications of the activated metaphor can be directly applied without
any “interference” from the message recipient’s prior knowledge of the news
event. Thus, metaphoric activation of the genocide script might engender
negative opinions regarding Operation Desert Storm mostly among individu-
als who have incomplete knowledge of the U.S. soldiers’ actual behavior
during the operation. This effect might be weaker among message recipients
who can rely on detailed prior knowledge of the military operation to derive
an opinion, assuming of course, that such knowledge contradicts the implica-
tions of the genocide script. Individuals who have detailed prior knowledge
might also rely on a previously established issue frame that is chronically
accessible and consistent with their prior political predispositions (Hansen,
2007). Consistent with this conceptualization, research suggests political
experts are resistant to influence elicited by issue frames that contradict their
prior predispositions (Hansen, 2007; but see Johnson & Taylor, 1981).

Selective Processing Hypothesis

To persuade the public, metaphors can be used in political communica-
tions to selectively highlight certain information while overlooking infor-
mation that contradicts a politician’s primary argument (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980). As Edelman (1971) famously noted:
Metaphor . . . defines the pattern of perception to which people respond.
To speak of deterrence and strike capacity is to perceive war as a game;
to speak of legalized murder is to perceive war as a slaughter of human
beings. . . . Each metaphor intensifies selected perceptions and ignores
others, thereby helping one to concentrate upon desired consequences
of favored public policies and helping one to ignore their unwanted,
unthinkable, or irrelevant premises and aftermaths. Each metaphor can
be a subtle way of highlighting what one wants to believe and avoiding
what one does not wish to face. (p. 67)

In this fashion, politicians use metaphor to set the frame of the debate, empha-
sizing information and arguments they promote while obscuring information
and arguments they prefer to ignore.

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 The trade is war metaphor described earlier effectively highlights certain
aspects of free trade (i.e., free trade causes countries to compete for cheap or
skilled workers, with some countries winning and others losing) while ignor-
ing or disregarding others aspects of free trade (i.e., most countries prosper
from free trade either through increased jobs or decreased prices for imports).
A candidate advocating an antitrade position can use the trade is war meta-
phor and highlight the negative competitive aspects of free trade. In contrast,
a candidate who wishes to convince his or her constituents that free trade is
beneficial would seek to avoid such a metaphor, instead selecting a metaphor
that emphasizes the shared prosperity of free trade and downplays or ignores
any aspects involving competition between nations for jobs (e.g., free trade is
a rising tide that lifts all boats). In this fashion, metaphors can distill an intricate
and multifaceted policy into a simpler (and often one-sided) issue descrip-
tion. When metaphor selectively highlights only one side of an issue, it may
lead the public to derive their policy opinion on the basis of an incomplete,
limited, or biased set of considerations. Political candidates can use this to
their advantage to promote themselves or their policies.
It is likely that metaphoric framing produces selectivity effects at many
stages of information processing. A metaphoric news frame, by highlighting
certain aspects of a news story and ignoring others, essentially constitutes a
form of selective news presentation. Thus, the metaphoric political framing
effect is, by definition, mediated by the message recipient’s selective exposure
to information pertaining to the news event. Because the news consumer
does not directly control how a news source chooses to frame a news story,
this is essentially an involuntary form of selective exposure (see Ottati, 2001).
Research suggests that metaphoric framing can also elicit a voluntary selective
exposure effect when individuals actively seek out or selectively attend to
information pertaining to the target. Specifically, Thibodeau and Boroditsky
(2011) presented experimental participants with information that activated
the crime is a virus or crime is a beast metaphor. When given an opportunity to
seek out additional information pertaining to crime, participants sought out
information that confirmed the validity of the metaphor. This finding identi-
fies a process in which metaphoric communication might amass long-term
effects on social policy reasoning that increase over time.
Metaphoric political framing effects might also be mediated by selective
encoding. Once activated, a metaphoric image might facilitate the encod-
ing of subsequent literal information that is consistent with the image. For
example, reference to welfare queens might increase the likelihood that citi-
zens encode subsequently encountered examples of welfare abuse or decrease
the likelihood that citizens encode subsequently encountered examples of
welfare success stories (e.g., an individual who rises from poverty to eco-
nomic success). Effects of this nature, which involve selective encoding of

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 information into long-term memory, might emerge even when controlling for
the previously described effects of selective exposure and attention.
Metaphoric political framing effects might also be mediated by selective
retrieval of previously acquired information pertaining to a political issue.
Thus, references to welfare queens might increase the likelihood that previ-
ously encountered examples of welfare abuse are recalled or decrease the like-
lihood that previously encountered examples of welfare success are recalled.
That is, metaphoric framing might highlight previously acquired issue infor-
mation that is metaphor-consistent and reduce the accessibility of previously
acquired information that is metaphor-inconsistent. Here, the highlighting
function of metaphor is retrospective.

Guided Interpretation Hypothesis

Previous theory and research suggests that metaphoric statements provide
a schematic framework that guides cognitive processing of other, literal state-
ments contained in a communication (Billow, 1977; Mio, 1993, 1996; Read,
Cesa, Jones, & Collins, 1990; see also Srull & Wyer, 1979). When a metaphor
precedes literal statements about a political issue, it can serve as a cognitive
expectancy that influences the interpretation of subsequent information. This
metaphor-guided interpretation effect might, in turn, produce an effect on
the message recipient’s attitudes and opinions regarding the issue. This effect
should be especially likely to emerge when the subsequently encountered news
information is ambiguous and, therefore, open to alternative interpretations.
In accordance with this assumption, Renstrom, Krumdick, and Ottati (2008)
found that individuals rated ambiguously hostile behaviors enacted by a target
person, Donald, much more negatively if the description of those behaviors
was accompanied by a hostile metaphor (“Donald is a Nazi”) versus a neutral
control metaphor. However, this effect emerged only when the hostile meta-
phor preceded (as opposed to followed) the ambiguous behavioral description,
suggesting that the metaphor acted as a frame that guided the interpretation
of the rest of the descriptive communication.
A similar effect might emerge in the political domain. Suppose
“Congressman Jones is a rock star” precedes the literal statement “He accu-
mulated more than a million dollars in contributions last quarter.” In this case,
the literal statement is interpreted to suggest Congressman Jones attracted
financial support due to his charisma and popular support. In contrast, if
“Congressman Jones is a puppet” precedes the literal statement, a different
interpretation is likely to emerge. Namely, the literal statement will be inter-
preted in a negative fashion (i.e., the congressman is bought and controlled
by rich contributors or lobbyists).

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 Guided Attribution and Elaboration
Although yet to be tested, it seems likely that metaphor guides attri-
bution. For example, the welfare queen metaphor might elicit dispositional
attributions for unemployment whereas the ailing economy metaphor might
elicit situational attributions for unemployment. These attributions, in turn,
should increase the likelihood that individuals endorse metaphor-consistent
policy solutions for the unemployment problem. Consistent with this claim,
Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) demonstrated that metaphors influence
proposed solutions to the crime problem. Namely, as noted previously, crime
is a beast elicited crime proposals that focus on enforcement, punishment,
and incarceration. In contrast, crime is a virus elicited proposals for social
reform that focus on addressing the social causes of crime (e.g., poverty) and
preventing the spread of crime.
In a related fashion, it can be anticipated that metaphor will elicit a
metaphor-consistent pattern of cognitive elaboration. For example, individu-
als who view unemployment as a symptom of an ailing economy should gener-
ate pro-arguments in responses to a proposal to introduce a federally funded
job creation program. In contrast, individuals who view the unemployed as
parasites should generate counterarguments in response to such a proposal.

Metaphor Rejection
The previously described hypotheses presume that individuals, either
consciously or unconsciously, accept the validity of the activated meta-
phoric proposition. In some cases, however, individuals may actively reject
a metaphoric proposition. When this occurs, it can be anticipated that the
metaphoric framing effect will be reduced, eliminated, or even reversed (see
Schwarz & Bless, 2007, for a related conceptualization). Consider, for exam-
ple, a communication containing the statement “CNN is Nazi propaganda
promulgated by big business.” Although some individuals will regard this as
an apt metaphor, many will consider it to be an extreme, unfair, and inappro-
priate characterization of CNN news (or big business). How does this latter
group of individuals respond to this communication?
Inspired by theory and research regarding the effects of context on judg-
ment (e.g., Schwarz & Bless, 2007), the metaphoric framing model presumes
that one of three psychological processes will ensue. First, these individuals
may simply discount the implications of the metaphor when deriving a judg-
ment. If this occurs, the aforementioned metaphor should elicit ratings of
CNN bias that are no different from ratings obtained in a control condition
that excludes the metaphor. Second, these individuals might derive an ini-
tial judgment that is biased in the direction of the metaphor. After doing so,

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 however, these individuals might attempt to correct for the biasing influence
of the metaphor. If they undercorrect, the metaphor framing effect should be
reduced (but not eliminated). If they correct in an appropriate fashion, the
metaphor framing effect should be eliminated. If they overcorrect, the effect
should be reversed. In this latter case, presentation of “CNN news is Nazi
propaganda promulgated by big business” should reduce ratings of CNN news
bias relative to a control condition.
A third process might ensue when the source of the metaphor is per-
ceived to be overly extreme. In this case, the source may function as a stan-
dard of comparison when individuals rate the target. Thus, a respondent
might reason that, compared with Nazi propaganda, CNN is a decidedly fair
and unbiased purveyor of news. As a consequence, the metaphor “CNN news
is Nazi propaganda” might elicit judgments that are opposite to the implica-
tions of the metaphor.

Effects of Metaphor on Process Style

Basic research confirms that metaphor can significantly influence cog-

nitive style when individuals process other literal information contained in
a communication. Inspired by dual-process models of persuasion (Chaiken,
1980; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), Ottati et al. (1999) demonstrated that meta-
phors influence the degree to which message recipients systematically process
other, literal statements in a communication. Systematic processing occurs
when the message recipient carefully attends to, scrutinizes, and elaborates
on the literal statements. It is marked by increased generation of message-
relevant cognitive responses, a more complex and organized representation
of the target, and increased sensitivity to argument strength when listeners
derive their evaluation of the target (Chaiken, 1980; Gernsbacher, 1991;
Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
It is important to note that this effect of metaphor on cognitive style is
not equivalent to the previously described effects of metaphor on political
judgment (Ottati et al., 1999; Ottati & Renstrom, 2010). When metaphor
influences cognitive style, the evaluative impact of the metaphor is deter-
mined by the strength of the literal statements, not the valence of the meta-
phor source. Careful scrutiny of strong literal arguments produces positive
cognitive responses (pro-arguments), whereas careful scrutiny of weak literal
arguments produces negative cognitive responses (counterarguing). A meta-
phor that promotes systematic processing should therefore produce positive
attitudes toward the target if the literal message arguments are strong but
produce negative attitudes toward the target if these arguments are weak. A
metaphor that reduces central processing should produce an obverse pattern
of effects (Ottati et al., 1999).

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 Motivation to Systematically Process
On the basis of these considerations, Ottati et al. (1999) developed the
motivational resonance model. This model proposes that metaphor increases
systematic processing when it contains content that is of personal interest to
the message recipient but decreases systematic processing when it contains
content that alienates or disinterests the message recipient. Accordingly,
Ottati et al. reported that a sports metaphor increases systematic processing
among sports enthusiasts, but decreases systematic processing among listen-
ers who dislike sports (for related conceptualizations, see McGuire, 2000;
McQuarrie & Mick, 1999). Although this model has yet to be tested using a
political communication, it is potentially influential in this domain. As pre-
viously noted, sports metaphors are extremely prevalent, for example, when
military missions are described by politicians, political analysts, and mili-
tary leaders (Beer & de Landtsheer, 2004). According to the motivational
resonance model, this reliance on sports metaphors might promote a more
sophisticated, elaborate, and complex understanding of military operations
among sports enthusiasts. However, it should produce the opposite effect, and
alienate individuals who dislike sports.

Ability to Systematically Process

Metaphor might also influence the message recipient’s ability to engage
in systematic processing. Some theory and research suggests that a metaphor
can increase the coherence of a communication, providing an overarching
schematic framework that guides interpretation, facilitates organization, and
facilitates central processing of literal statements (Billow, 1977; Krumdick,
Renstrom, Aalai, & Ottati, 2007; Mio, 1993, 1996; Read et al., 1990). For
example, Read et al. (1990) demonstrated that metaphor facilitates encoding
and recall of subsequently presented literal political information, presumably
because metaphor activates a cognitive structure that facilitates comprehen-
sion and organization of related literal political information. According to
this view, metaphor should increase systematic processing of other, literal
statements contained in a communication.
Alternatively, as previously noted, metaphor might promote selective
processing that leads the message recipient to ignore important information.
When this is the case, metaphor might produce a one-sided and oversimplified
view of a political issue (Landau et al., 2009; Thompson, 1996). Moreover, if
the metaphor fails to afford clear linkages with the literal statements contained
in a communication, it might confuse or distract the listener and thereby
reduce systematic processing of the literal communication arguments (Billow,
1977; Frey & Eagly, 1993; Mio, 1996; Mio & Lovrich, 1998). Although
research has yet to determine when each of these effects will emerge, effects of

the metaphoric framing model      195

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 this nature should be extremely relevant to understanding the role of meta-
phor in political communication.

Multiple Metaphors

In democracies characterized by electoral competition, the public is con-

fronted with multiple (and often conflicting) metaphoric frames (Hansen,
2007). Often, individuals also possess chronically accessible metaphoric frames
that are spontaneously activated by the mere mention of a political issue.
Thus, multiple metaphors are often activated when an individual thinks about
a political issue or derives a political judgment. Although research regarding
multiply activated metaphors is limited, related theory and research regard-
ing priming effects provides a basis for generating some plausible hypotheses.
Specifically, it can be hypothesized that the relative influence of a given meta-
phor will be a joint function of the accessibility and perceived aptness of the
metaphor (see Higgins, 1996, for a related priming model).
When multiple metaphoric utterances converge on the same root meta-
phor, each utterance can be viewed as a repetition of one and the same con-
ceptual prime. Under such conditions, multiple utterances should increase
the accessibility of the root metaphor and thereby increase the magnitude
of the metaphoric framing effect. Thus, for example, a communication con-
taining multiple utterances that activate the war is a football game metaphor
should elicit a stronger metaphoric framing effect than a communication
that contains only one such utterance (for related evidence in the priming
literature, see Balota & Paul, 1996; Srull & Wyer, 1979).
What happens, however, when two or more distinct conceptual meta-
phors are activated at the time an individual derives a political judgment?
This can occur when a communication activates multiple conceptual meta-
phors or when a communication activates a metaphor that is distinct from a
metaphor that is chronically accessible in the message recipient. Under these
conditions, an important question involves the relative weight ascribed to
each metaphor in determining the message recipient’s reasoning and judg-
ment regarding the target issue. One possibility is that each metaphor will be
weighted equally. This should yield reinforcing effects when the metaphors
imply a similar judgmental conclusion and cancellation effects when the
metaphors imply opposite judgmental conclusions (Hansen, 2007). It seems
likely, however, that the metaphors will be unequally weighted. That is, as
previously suggested, metaphors that are high in accessibility and perceived
aptness (i.e., perceived semantic fit with the target issue) will be weighted
more heavily than metaphors that are low in accessibility or perceived aptness.
This unequally weighted approach can be derived from related research that

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 examines the effect of dual-framed messages that imply opposite judgmental
conclusions. This research suggests that dual-framed messages usually pro-
duce predisposition-consistent effects on political opinion (Hansen, 2007).
Apparently, individuals give more weight to the predisposition-consistent
frame than the predisposition-inconsistent frame when deriving political
judgments. Presumably, this is because the predisposition-consistent frame is
high in chronic accessibility and perceived to be “well fitting” by the message
recipient. However, activation of the predisposition-inconsistent frame may
be suppressed by the (competing) consistent frame (for related evidence, see
Balota & Paul, 1996; Gernsbacher, 1991). Moreover, as previously suggested,
the message recipient might actively reject a predisposition-inconsistent
frame because it is perceived to be low in aptness (i.e., perceived to provide a
poor fit). For these reasons, it stands to reason that predisposition-consistent
frames will often be given more weight than predisposition-inconsistent
frames when individuals derive political judgments.

Conclusion

The metaphoric framing model provides a basis for understanding the

effects of metaphor in political communication. According to this model,
political communications can implicitly or explicitly activate a root meta-
phor (e.g., Operation Desert Storm is a football game). This root metaphor links
the message target (e.g., Operation Desert Storm) to the metaphor source (e.g.,
a football game). The source contains a series of cognitive entailments that
are potentially mapped on to the target. This multifaceted image can directly
determine the listener’s impression of the news event. Or it can indirectly
influence this impression by guiding processing of other literal information
pertaining to the news event. Under appropriate circumstances, metaphoric
language may also influence the message recipient’s motivation or ability to
systematically process a political communication.

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 III
Current Issues
and Direction for
Future Research

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13439-10_PT3_Ch10-3rdPgs.indd 204 9/13/13 1:49 PM
 10
Do Evaluative Metaphors
Shape Emotional Thought?
A Call for New Evidence
Gary D. Sherman and Gerald L. Clore

In the realm of emotion, metaphors abound. This is true of how people

talk about emotion (Kövecses, 2000) and perhaps of how people think about,
and experience, emotion. Indeed, this is the central claim of conceptual
metaphor theory (CMT; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999)—that metaphor is
more than a linguistic phenomenon. In the current chapter, we examine this
claim with respect to a particular often-studied type of emotion metaphor—
dimensional evaluative metaphors. Dimensional evaluative metaphors involve
the mapping between the valence dimension of emotion—good–bad—and
a concrete physical dimension such as up–down, bright–dark, or big–small
(Crawford, 2009). Evaluative–experiential mappings of this form have been
the focus of most psychological research on the topic of emotion and meta-
phor. In this chapter, we review what is known about these mappings, focus-
ing on what it would mean for them to function as metaphors in the sense
articulated by CMT.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-013
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 Evaluative–experiential Mappings as Metaphors:
Structuring Abstract Thought

Metaphors clarify the meaning of an abstract, unfamiliar concept through

comparison with a more concrete, familiar concept (Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner,
1983; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). More specifically, metaphor involves a
structural or relational mapping that allows for the importing of knowledge or
meaning from a well-understood domain into a less well-understood domain.
For example, by thinking about arguments through the lens of war (“she
attacked my opinion”), one comes to understand that arguments have simi-
lar attributes to war (e.g., they are zero-sum games; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
For evaluative–experiential mappings to be metaphoric in this sense, it would
mean that people think of, and experience, goodness and badness as akin to
the experiential dimensions to which they are linked. For example, to call
the goodness–brightness mapping a metaphor implies that people conceive
of goodness as being akin to brightness—that is, as having similar attributes.
One interpretation is that how someone evaluates the world—the way he or
she thinks about and experiences goodness or badness—will be shaped by the
particular mappings that are operating in any given context. A critical ques-
tion we address in this chapter is whether the available evidence supports this
interpretation, and if not, what sort of evidence would be needed to bolster
such a view.

Correlations Between Value and Physical Attributes

An alternative explanation for people’s tendency to find evaluative

meaning in dimensions of experience is that value and certain physical attri-
butes covary. Evaluative reactions are concerned with identifying which enti-
ties are desired and which are undesired—that is, which to be approached or
avoided (Chen & Bargh, 1999). To aid in this process, people may infer value
on the basis of physical cues, such as an object’s appearance or location. Indeed,
goodness has concrete, physical correlates, or at least people tend to assume
that it does. For example, it is common for people to believe that good things
tend to be elevated or brightly colored; conversely, people often assume that
objects low in space or dark are inherently less valuable or even overtly harm-
ful. For example, in many societies, such as among the Hua of New Guinea,
food taboos specifically discourage eating foods that grow on the ground (e.g.,
some species of taro) or have dark interiors resembling dirt (Meigs, 1984). This
association between the goodness and badness of foods and their spatial origins
and brightness may derive from the fact that the ground is a source of physi-
cal contamination. Given these patterns of covariation, the mental mapping

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 of evaluation to experience (e.g., good–bad to light–dark) can then act as a
useful judgment heuristic. According to this explanation, there is no import-
ing of knowledge from one domain to another. One need not see goodness as
somehow akin to “highness” or “brightness.” Rather, highness and brightness
are simply attributes that covary with goodness in experience and are therefore
used heuristically to infer the presence of valued or desired attributes.

Evaluative Metaphors and Types of Goodness

In contrast, if evaluative–experiential mappings are metaphoric, and not

merely associations reflecting the physical correlates of goodness, what par-
ticular function might they serve? As many theorists have argued, affect is ulti-
mately about value—the goodness and badness of events, actions, and objects
(Clore & Tamir, 2002; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). Critically, there are
many ways in which something or someone may be good or bad. For example,
a person may violate a moral standard (e.g., by cheating) or a performance
standard (e.g., by failing a test). An observer would evaluate both of these
actions, and the individual, negatively. How the observer treats the individ-
ual, however, and the particular character inferences made, will depend on the
particular type of badness under consideration. Dimensional evaluative meta-
phors, by specifying a detailed set of entailments and associated attributes,
could play a particularly important role in this process. For example, if the
good thing—such as one’s elevated moral standing—is a state that is particu-
larly fleeting and hard to maintain, then a certain metaphoric framework may
encourage treating it as fragile and transient. Testable hypotheses like this one,
which outline a specific pattern of metaphor-consistent changes in emotional
thought, do not follow parsimoniously from a purely associative account. For
this reason, we think it is most useful to try to unpack the various dimensional
evaluative metaphors with regard to specific attributes and specific valenced
concepts, such as moral standing, social status, or intelligence. Importantly,
although the dimensions tend to line up in an affectively consistent way—
with higher moral standing, greater social status, and greater intelligence all
being typically considered good—this is not necessary. For example, one may
think that power is bad and yet still represent power metaphorically in terms of
greater size or elevated physical position. Mapping the social concept onto the
concrete experiential dimension clarifies the concept itself and not necessarily
its value. In other words, as we argue here, people associate greater social status
with greater physical size not because powerful people are good but because
powerful people are influential.
To explore the potential metaphoric function of the various evaluative–
experiential mappings, we consider three well-studied mappings (verticality,

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 brightness, and size), focusing on whether evidence supports the claim that
such mappings function as metaphors. First, we review evidence that the
mapping exists. We then ask what entailments of the experiential dimension
are psychologically salient (i.e., features that people grasp intuitively) and
therefore plausible as candidates for structuring concepts of goodness. These
entailments may be specific attributes or causal schemas associated with the
dimension (Morris, Sheldon, Ames, & Young, 2007). Finally, we propose ways
of testing these entailments and the extent to which metaphoric importing
occurs. In each case, the proposed studies would test whether (a) strength-
ening, or simply making salient, the low-level evaluative–experiential
associations or (b) giving participants direct physical experience with the
experiential dimension (e.g., brightness, verticality) increases the likelihood
that one thinks about goodness in a metaphor-consistent manner.
In their review of the role of metaphor in social cognition, Landau,
Meier, and Keefer (2010) articulated this empirical strategy, which they
called the metaphoric transfer strategy. We agree that this strategy is criti-
cal for providing support for CMT. We do not believe, however, that most
of the empirical studies conducted on evaluative–experiential mappings
qualify as tests of whether metaphoric transfer has occurred. Instead, these
studies primarily demonstrate the existence and relative automaticity of the
evaluative–experiential mappings. The question of whether metaphoric
transfer occurs in these cases is largely untested. Devising direct, compel-
ling tests of metaphoric transfer will be critical for evaluating whether these
associations operate as metaphors. When testing for metaphor transfer, the
choice of dependent variable is critical. The outcome cannot simply be a
measure of whether the target domain is active or accessible (e.g., elevated
vertical position facilitating judgments of positivity)—a purely associative,
nonmetaphoric link could account for the same effect. Instead, the outcome
must assess a particular feature or aspect of the target domain that directly
follows from one or more of the entailments of the experiential dimension.
In other words, the test should not be whether, for example, experiencing or
priming the idea of elevated physical position makes people think of positiv-
ity but rather whether doing so makes people think of positivity in a certain
way (i.e., as having similar attributes to elevated entities).

Verticality

In everyday language, it is common to refer to affectively valenced con-

cepts using language that references vertical space. The ubiquity of these
valence–verticality associations has been demonstrated numerous times.
Wapner, Werner, and Krus (1957) found that after experiencing success (vs.
failure), participants tended to adjust their gaze upward. Meier and Robinson

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 (2004) provided additional evidence that people automatically associate high
vertical position and positivity. They found that participants were faster to
recognize good words as good when those words appeared at the top of the
computer screen and faster to recognize bad words as bad when those words
appeared at the bottom of the computer screen. Later research demonstrated
that these associations can influence memory (Crawford, Margolies, Drake,
& Murphy, 2006): Participants viewed positive and negative images in vari-
ous locations. When asked to recall the location of each image, their memory
for positive images was biased upward, and their memory for negative images
was biased downward.
The influence of these associations can extend to other sensory modali-
ties. In one series of studies, participants categorized positive and negative words
(Weger, Meier, Robinson, & Inhoff, 2007). After each word, they heard and
judged a tone. Positive words biased judgments toward higher pitch. Testing
the opposite direction of influence, Horstmann and colleagues (Horstmann,
2010; Horstmann & Ansorge, 2011) found that the ability to mimic a smile
was enhanced by a high-pitch tone, whereas the ability to mimic a frown was
enhanced by a low-pitch tone. Supporting evidence also comes from research
taking an individual differences approach. For example, individuals prone to
depression are particularly likely to attend to lower regions of vertical space
(Meier & Robinson, 2006). Similar associations with vertical space have been
found for specific social concepts such as divinity (Meier, Hauser, Robinson,
Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007) and power (Giessner & Schubert, 2007; Schubert,
2005). That power shows the same pattern of associations is instructive because
high power is not universally considered good. Power’s consistent link to high-
ness regardless of its perceived valence suggests that the power–verticality link
emerges not because highness is a symbol or correlate of goodness but because
highness implies certain attributes, which are orthogonal to valence.
Because verticality involves spatial relations along a single spatial dimen-
sion, the most psychologically salient entailments of verticality are centered
on changes in physical position, such as the nature and origin of the forces
necessary to initiate a change in position and the ease of movement in differ-
ent directions. As a result, the good–up mapping may be representative of a
broader metaphor in which one’s level of an abstract, continuous, affectively
valenced attribute, such as moral goodness or social influence, is treated as
if it were akin to a “position” along a vertically oriented physical dimension
(Brandt & Reyna, 2011; Haidt, 2003; Schubert, 2005). In this metaphor, the
entailments of verticality provide structure for thinking about changes in
one’s position, which are treated as if they are movements along a vertical
dimension in space. One’s position may change; one may move up or down
on the dimension. Elevated position on this dimension is a status that may be
attained or lost, as people “rise” and “fall” along the dimension. This metaphor

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 gives life to phrases such as climbing the corporate ladder and a fall from grace. It
is clear that people talk about various forms of status in terms of vertical posi-
tion, but if this metaphor is a way of thinking about status and not just a way of
talking about it, then people’s basic conception of moral standing, power, and
similar concepts should be shaped by the various entailments of verticality.
We identify several psychologically salient features of verticality, many
of which derive from the fact the vertical dimension is aligned with gravi-
tational force. For example, on account of gravity, there is an asymmetry in
the ease of movement along the vertical dimension, such that moving up
(rising) is harder than moving down (falling). People appear to intuitively
grasp this asymmetry, given the frequency of metaphoric sayings that use the
term uphill to convey difficulty or resistance (e.g., “she’s fighting an uphill
battle”). This fact may influence how people conceive of certain forms of
social status such as power and moral standing. Descents—movements from
up to down—should be thought of as easier, more natural, and more likely
than ascents, which must work against the force of gravity. For example, a
loss of moral standing due to a moral transgression is commonly referred to as
a fall from grace. If a loss of standing is a fall, it should be thought of as rapid
and hard to reverse once initiated. This metaphoric mapping could lead to
the perception of power and moral standing as precarious states that are hard
to achieve and easy to lose (Rozin & Royzman, 2001).
In a similar vein, because gravity impedes ascents but facilitates descents,
movement up and down a vertical dimension may naturally engender differ-
ent causal schemas (Morris et al., 2007). That is, descents (e.g., falls) are
largely passive events and can happen without the aid of willful, intentional
intervention. Conversely, ascents may evoke an agentic causal model in
which movement up the dimension (e.g., a climb) is considered to be caused
by the internal motivation and attributes of the individual. Within this gen-
eral metaphoric framework, there may be some flexibility. For example, one
may conceive of an ascent as a rise rather than a climb, thereby implying a
more passive path to status in which the causal force may be attributed more
to external, than internal, forces.
Finally, physical highness may imply certain physical attributes that
are seen as consistent with that position, such as weight (highness implies
lightness, lowness implies heaviness; Yu, 1995). Likewise, because down is
typically anchored on the ground and up is anchored on the sky, lowness may
be associated with physical dirtiness (e.g., the phrase down and dirty) and
darkness.
Analyses of the various entailments of verticality, such as the one dis-
cussed here, provides a starting point for testing whether the tendency to
associate goodness with highness (Crawford et al., 2006; Meier & Robinson,
2004; Weger et al., 2007) reflects a metaphor. If these associations reflect the

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 conceptual structure of such valenced attributes as moral goodness, then they
should shape how one thinks about those attributes. A number of testable
hypotheses follow from this. For example, if individuals differ in the tendency
to associate morality with up and down, then individuals with accessible or
strong associations should regard moral goodness as a precarious state that is
hard to achieve and easy to lose. Moreover, priming the associations experi-
mentally may strengthen this particular conceptualization. Whereas most
previous research has focused on whether priming up activates virtue (and
vice versa), the critical question for the metaphor interpretation is whether
priming verticality changes how one thinks about virtue. For example, if ver-
ticality is primed, will people be especially likely to perceive a loss of moral
standing as like a fall (i.e., rapid, hard to reverse, etc.)? More generally, this
approach would seek to answer the question “When the experiential dimen-
sion is primed, is one more likely to make metaphor-consistent inferences
about the particular type of goodness (or badness) under consideration?”
This paradigm could be used to pit the two accounts against each
other. Specifically, one could include general outcome measures that assess
whether judgments of goodness are facilitated and specific questions that
assess whether specific metaphor-consistent ways of thinking about goodness
are facilitated. If the up = good mapping reflects not a metaphor but the use
of concrete physical attributes to infer goodness or badness, then priming
elevated physical position will facilitate judgments of goodness but will not
encourage one particular conceptualization of goodness over another.
In sum, it is clear that the associations exist and that they run deep; it
is not entirely clear that they reflect conceptual metaphor. Is the way people
think about goodness different because of these associations, as CMT asserts?
Answering this question requires an examination of the various entailments
of verticality that appear to be central to people’s experience of highness and
lowness. See Table 10.1 with reference to this point.

Brightness

Many studies have shown that people tend to associate positive con-
cepts with brightness and the color white and negative concepts with dark-
ness and the color black. Meier, Robinson, and Clore (2004) found that
participants were faster to categorize good words as good when those words
appeared in white and faster to categorize bad words as bad when those
words appeared in black. This effect extends to affectively valenced concepts
such as morality (Sherman & Clore, 2009) and can influence perceptual
judgments as well. For example, studies have found that participants judge
(a) smiling faces as brighter than frowning faces (Song, Vonasch, Meier, &
Bargh, 2012), (b) a shade of gray as darker after having categorized a negative

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Table 10.1
Entailments and Implicated Properties of the Experiential Dimensions of Verticality, Brightness, and Size
Experiential dimension

Brightness

Properties Verticality Luminance Reflectance Size

Physical Asymmetry of movement Effect on visibility (brightness Asymmetry and Asymmetry in influence
(it is easier to fall than illuminates) directionality of influence (large things assumed to
to rise) Differences in energy (light as (dark substances have be heavier and stronger
Visual salience energy source) disproportionate, than small things)
(high = salient) Visual salience (bright = salient) irreversible effect) Visual salience
(large = salient)

Psychological Precariousness, Ability to guide or reveal, Purity, fragility Influence, permanence,

prominence energy, prominence prominence
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 word (Meier, Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007), and (c) a room as
darker after recalling an unethical transgression (Banerjee, Chatterjee, &
Sinha, 2012).
The ability of the darkness to prime “immorality” extends to moral behav-
ior and decision making. In the domain of sports, several studies have found
that athletes wearing darker uniforms are more likely to engage in aggressive or
competitive behavior (Frank & Gilovich, 1988; Webster, Urland, & Correll,
2012). Likewise, another study found that participants were more likely to
engage in unethical behavior if they were in a dimly lit room or wearing sun-
glasses (Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010).
What are the psychologically salient features of the light–dark dimension
that might be applied metaphorically to understand the good–bad dimension?
Answering this question requires first recognizing that darkness may refer to
the (a) luminance, the amount of ambient light in a given space (e.g., a dimly
vs. brightly lit room), or (b) reflectance, the amount of incident light a surface
reflects (e.g., a black vs. white shirt).
In the former sense, darkness impairs visibility and, as a result, serves a
concealing function that may produce a sense of ignorance (e.g., “she was kept
in the dark”) or anonymity (Zhong et al., 2010). In this sense, light reveals
truth or insight (e.g., “my experience was illuminating”), providing a basis
for concepts such as enlightenment (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Additionally,
light is a form of energy and so brightness may suggest a high energy state.
Finally, bright things are highly visible, salient, and, therefore likely to grab
one’s attention. For example, to call someone a bright spot is to say that this
person stands out in his or her goodness.
In the second sense of darkness (i.e., the relative lightness or darkness of
physical material), the colors black and white play a central role, with white
implying physical purity and cleanliness as well as innocence, youth, and fra-
gility (Grieve, 1991; Sherman & Clore, 2009; Sherman, Haidt, & Clore, 2012;
Williams, Morland, & Underwood, 1970). Conversely, blackness may imply
physical contamination, decay, or filth (Duncan, 1994). On account of their
associations with cleanliness and filth, the entailments of white and black are
essentially the entailments of the psychology of purity and contagion. A cen-
tral feature of contagion is the marked asymmetry between positive and nega-
tive forces, with negative forces being far more potent (Rozin & Royzman,
2001). For example, as the principle of negativity dominance articulates, an
otherwise appetizing substance can be thoroughly spoiled by the introduction
of a negligible amount of an offending substance (Rozin & Royzman, 2001).
Indeed, people are largely insensitive to degree of contamination: One drop of
the offending substance is nearly as bad as 100 drops, a phenomenon termed
dose insensitivity (Rozin & Nemeroff, 2002). The upshot of negativity domi-
nance and dose insensitivity is that pure entities, often represented with the

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 color white, are regarded as fragile and easily ruined. Altogether, the white–
black dimension seems to readily imply various purity-related attributes.
On account of the purity-related entailments of the black–white dimen-
sion, any valenced concepts linked to that dimension should recruit the psy-
chology of purity such that these concepts are conceptualized and experienced
through the lens of purity. For example, a moral value that is extremely highly
valued may become linked to the color white, a metaphoric mapping that
would encourage thinking of that value as “sacred” or off limits from being
traded off with other kinds of value (Baron & Spranca, 1997; Tetlock, Kristel,
Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000).
The critical question becomes to what extent are these features of light-
ness, in either sense, applied to clarify various manifestations of positivity?
What types of goodness evoke the metaphor most commonly? There are two
types of goodness that seem most likely to be structured in terms of the light–
dark dimension: moral standing (“he has a black heart”) and intelligence (“she
is very bright”).

Morality
People typically conceive of knowledge in terms of brightness (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980). As a result, any domain that draws on the concepts of knowl-
edge and ignorance will typically make use of the luminance dimension. With
this in mind, the metaphor of moral goodness as bright may reflect a metaphor
in which good and evil are competing “forces.” In this battle, evil is a form of
ignorance that only the illuminating power of good can counteract.
Besides the metaphor of moral goodness as an illuminating force, there is
at least one other metaphor linking morality to darkness. Drawing on the sec-
ond meaning of darkness (i.e., reflectance, or the relative darkness of material),
the association of moral goodness with the color white (e.g., Sherman & Clore,
2009) may reflect a broader purity metaphor, in which moral virtue is regarded
as a “pure” state akin to physical cleanliness. There is ample evidence that
people indeed think of morality in this way (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008;
Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006; Zhong, Strejcek, & Sivanathan, 2010). The
critical question, however, is whether the concrete physical experience of
white and black and the automatic associations revealed in the aforemen-
tioned empirical research play a direct causal role in encouraging this con-
ceptualization of morality. For example, does giving people experience with
the colors black and white increase the tendency to think of moral transgres-
sions as imparting an irreversible stain on one’s moral reputation? Likewise,
would manipulations that strengthen the low-level mental associations
(virtue = white, sin = black), such as in an associative learning paradigm
(Paivio, 1969), similarly encourage one to think and reason about morality
in purity-centered ways?

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 The fact that there appear to be at least two moral metaphors linking
morality to the light–dark dimension provides an opportunity to use the alter-
nate source strategy (Landau et al., 2010), which pits two metaphors against
each other. In this case, one could randomly assign people to receive one
of two possible experiences: (a) an experience with luminance (e.g., have
participants attend to fluctuations in the amount of ambient light in a room)
or (b) an experience with reflectance (e.g., having participants attend to, or
interact with, white and black substances). Afterward, participants would be
asked to make a variety of judgments about a given moral transgression. The
particular physical experience that participants have should influence the spe-
cific moral inferences and judgments that they make. For example, because a
loss of brightness (as luminance) is experienced as reversible (e.g., one simply
needs to locate a light source to make a dark room bright), exposure to this
experiential dimension should encourage the view of a moral transgressor’s
reputation as reversible. A loss of whiteness (as reflectance), on the other
hand, is commonly seen as impossible to regain once lost (e.g., once even a
drop of black paint is added to a cup of white paint, there is nothing that can
be done to return it to a “pure” white state), so that exposure to reflectance
should lead participants to see such reputational damage as irreversible.

Intelligence
The association between good–bad and light–dark is not limited to
morality. Because brightness provides a metaphoric grounding for thinking
about knowledge, the trait of intelligence is frequently cast in terms of bright-
ness. To be smart is to be “bright.” It has been found, for example, that expo-
sure to an illuminated light bulb can increase the ability to solve problems that
require insight (Slepian, Weisbuch, Rutchick, Newman, & Ambady, 2010).
This mapping between knowledge and brightness may encourage thinking
of intelligence as a quality that illuminates. In this view, intelligence and
knowledge serve a guiding function that enables one to venture into other-
wise unexplored places. To test this possibility experimentally, one could give
people physical experiences with lightness and darkness, effectively priming
the experiential dimension, and then test whether these experiences increase
the likelihood that one will perceive intelligent individuals as capable of
serving as guides (i.e., leaders). Because luminance provides physical guid-
ance, priming luminance should increase the perception of intelligence as
congruent with leadership (a form of social guidance).
Additionally, light is a form of energy, and people experience the dim-
ming of brightness (e.g., a dying flame) as a loss of energy. Consequently, if one
conceives of intelligence as spanning a dimension from dim to bright, one may
infer that intelligent people are prone to high energy states. Thus, when the
metaphor is active, there may be a tendency to assume that bright individuals

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 are energetic and that dim individuals are slow, lethargic, or otherwise marked
by low energy.
Experimentally, one could test whether priming brightness increases the
perception of intelligence as congruent with high energy. However, if priming
brightness only facilitates judgments of intelligence but does not systematically
alter how one thinks about intelligence, it would lend support to the possibil-
ity that the mappings are merely associative, perhaps arising from an inherent
confounding of goodness and brightness in experience, and not metaphoric.

Size

In a common idiom, bigger is said to be better. Consistent with this

saying, people display a relatively basic size preference. Preference for larger
objects has been found even for abstract geometric shapes and even in chil-
dren as young as 3 years old (Silvera, Josephs, & Giesler, 2002). Other research
presented positive and negative words in different font sizes and found that
positive words could be identified as positive more quickly and accurately
when presented in a larger font (Meier, Robinson, & Caven, 2008). In addi-
tion, this study found that the intensity of evaluation was also affected by
size, with positive words presented in larger fonts being seen as more positive.
Although people associate positivity and largeness, it is not clear that
this means that they think of goodness as similar to largeness. If this associa-
tion is indeed indicative of a metaphor, what are the psychologically salient
attributes of largeness that might be used to clarify goodness? Compared with
small things, large things take up a lot of space and, as a result, are visually
salient. Given that people infer that large entities are heavy (Charpentier,
1891; Kloos & Amazeen, 2002), large things are also typically thought of as
capable of exerting substantial force on other objects. That is, all things being
equal, largeness may imply strong causal force. As a consequence, physical
size is used to convey information about importance and influence. To say
that someone is big in a social sense (e.g., “he’s a big shot”) implies that he or
she exerts great influence just as physically large objects do. Similarly, because
large entities are typically hard to move, physical largeness may imply some
degree of permanence.

Power
Given these entailments, it is not surprising that power seems to be
the social dimension most commonly linked to physical size in figurative
language. Invoking the physical size metaphor may encourage thinking of an
individual as both influential and firmly entrenched in his or her position.
Empirically, an open question is whether priming individuals with physical
largeness, or strengthening the good = large association, facilitates thinking

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 about social status or power in this way. For example, one such study could
have participants handle objects of various size, making the small–large
dimension salient, and then have people estimate how difficult it would be to
remove a given high status individual from their particular position. The pre-
diction would be that priming people with physical size will encourage them
to think about social status in terms of physical size, and that this in turn will
lead them to regard high status individuals as particularly hard to displace.

Morality
Beyond its role in how people talk and perhaps think about power, refer-
ences to physical size are a common feature of how people talk about certain
forms of moral goodness. For example, terms such as largesse and magnani-
mous, which are derived from Latin terms for large (e.g., magna), are often
used to describe acts of generosity. These instances suggest that the metaphor
operates in morality as it does for power: as a way of implying impact or
influence. If so, then priming people with size before reading about an act
of charity could alter how they think about that act’s potential impact and
effectiveness. Moreover, if it is generosity in particular that is conceptualized
in terms of size, then priming size may not affect how people think about
other moral concepts such as honesty or compassion.

Metaphoric Transfer and Attribution

One way to distinguish the associative and metaphoric accounts we

have discussed might involve their relative susceptibility to attributional
alteration. It seems possible that a metaphoric mapping of concrete experi-
ence onto value might not be easily changed by an attributional manipula-
tion. Consider an example in which experiences of lightness and darkness
affect judgments of value. If a word (e.g., honesty) printed in a white font
were evaluated as more moral than otherwise, one might explain the effect
by assuming that the moral meaning implied by whiteness had been mis­
attributed to (and added to) the moral meaning already inherent in the word.
The process would be similar to the case in which positive affect elic-
ited by warm and sunny spring weather was found to influence judgments
of life satisfaction (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). That experiment included an
attributional manipulation in which the sunny weather was made salient for
one group just before participants rated their life satisfaction. Making salient
the true cause of their positive feelings in this way then eliminated any effect
of mood on judgments of life satisfaction. The authors concluded that the
mood effects had depended on misattributions so that affect from an irrel-
evant source (the weather) had been experienced as part of their assessment

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 of their life satisfaction. Returning to the font color example, would a similar
pattern be found if the whiteness (or the moral connotation) of the font were
made salient before participants made judgments of the moral meanings of
the words? Would participants be able to separate their experience of the
two sources of moral meaning? If a common pattern in such attributional
studies prevailed, it is possible that the word honesty, for example, would be
rated as less moral because the now-salient whiteness of the font would be
experienced as the source of the moral connotation.
Evidence is lacking concerning whether attribution plays a role in per-
ceptions of goodness as up, bright, or big. However, research has recently been
done on the effect of experiencing something as physically heavy or weighty
and inferring that it is therefore important (Chandler, Reinhard, & Schwarz,
2012). The experimenters found that handling a copy of a novel (Catcher in
the Rye) with a weight inside led people to see it as especially important in
American literature. Of special interest is the fact that the experimenters did
a subsequent study (Reinhard, Chandler, & Schwarz, 2012) in which they
cautioned participants that the book was a display copy with a weight in it
to allow it to stand unsupported in a display. When this alternative cause for
the experience of weightiness was made salient, it was not mapped onto the
idea of literary importance. It might be useful to determine the role of such
misattributions in other examples of the effects of perceptual grounding on
judgment, including those of the effects of experiencing things as up, bright,
and big on evaluation.
Of course, it is quite possible that such attributional manipulations
would have no effect in the examples we are considering. What if being up,
bright, and big were not merely associated with goodness but were linked
metaphorically? If an attribute suggests goodness metaphorically (white sug-
gesting purity, bigness suggesting influence, and elevated location suggesting
precariousness), then the source of one’s sense of purity, power, or precarious-
ness might not be apparent. Unlike mood that can be experienced as distinct
and rated explicitly, the purity implied by light color is perhaps only implic-
itly inferred and not really experienced, so that it is not easily discounted
through an attributional manipulation.
If the relationship is metaphoric, an attribution manipulation might be
successful only when applied upstream, with regard to whether the whiteness
is allowed to be experienced as purity rather than simply as a color in the first
place (and bigness as powerful, rather than just as sizable, and elevation as
dominance rather than simply a location). If so, perhaps part of the power of
metaphor lies in the fact that it is difficult for the buyer to be wary of what
he or she is buying because the entailments of metaphors are inherent in the
metaphoric meaning and cannot be easily appreciated once the metaphor has
transformed the object in the gestalt-like fashion that it has. Having seen the

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 object in the new light provided, one cannot easily go back or make after-
the-fact alterations.
The point of an attribution manipulation in such situations would
not be to get participants to undo the associations learned over a lifetime.
Attributional discounting might occur if one became aware that one’s percep-
tion of goodness might not have come from relevant qualities of the judgment
object but merely from the object being up, bright, or big. For an attributional
manipulation to have such a debiasing effect, however, the perceiver would
have to see, at some level, how such an extraneous factor might bias experi-
ence or judgment.
In a related way, misattribution manipulations tend to be ineffective
when the biasing stimulus is presented unconsciously (Winkielman, Zajonc,
& Schwarz, 1997) because without access to the biasing stimulus, there is no
way for it to be disaggregated from more relevant factors. It might be similarly
difficult for judges to perceive an experience as potentially biasing if the con-
nection that would create bias is a metaphor rather than a more transparent
association. For an attribution manipulation to be successful, it must provide
a basis for parsing potentially biasing experiences from judgment-relevant
experiences. All such parsing activity (whether before or after a judgment is
formed) should depend on the transparency of the connection that gives the
extraneous stimulus the potential for bias. We suggest the possibility, therefore,
that mere associations may be more transparent and hence provide a more
successful basis for attributional inoculation. In the Schwarz and Clore (1983)
weather study, the potentially biasing effect of foul weather on judgments of life
satisfaction was avoided when participants were asked to evaluate the weather
before evaluating their life satisfaction. To our knowledge, no investigator has
asked whether preliminary judgments of the goodness of being up, bright, or big
would serve to cleanse the affective palettes of judges in a similar way.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have reviewed three common mappings between

concrete experience and evaluative processing (good = up, good = bright, and
good = big). We have attempted to address the important question of whether
these mappings reflect (a) metaphors that help clarify the nature of the par-
ticular form of goodness under consideration or (b) associations between
value and physical attributes that aid in inferring the presence of desired enti-
ties. The basic experimental paradigms that we have outlined could provide
a starting point for future research that evaluates which account—the meta-
phoric account or the associative account—can best explain the observed
mappings. The rationale behind each proposed experiment is the same. If

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 a given mapping is merely associative, priming one aspect of the concrete
dimension (e.g., elevated position) should activate the corresponding aspect
of the abstract dimension (e.g., goodness), thereby facilitating relevant eval-
uative processing or judgment (e.g., categorizing positive words as positive).
It should not, however, affect the particular way in which one conceptualizes
the abstract dimension. In other words, it should affect whether one thinks
of that aspect or dimension but not how one thinks about it. Alternatively,
if the mappings are metaphoric, in the sense articulated by CMT (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980; 1999), we believe it will be because the experiential dimen-
sions imply specific attributes, such as precariousness, purity, and influence,
that are transferred to the target domain, shaping how one thinks and reasons
about abstract concepts such as intelligence, morality, and power.

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 11
Are There Basic Metaphors?
Simone Schnall

More than 20 years ago, Paul Ekman provocatively asked whether there
were basic emotions (Ekman, 1992a, 1992b). He argued that specific facial
expressions and underlying physiological reactions involved in emotional
experiences suggest that the answer to this question is yes. Ekman, and many
others who noted the universality of emotion, attributed to physical experi-
ence a fundamental role in emotion. Although some of the questions posed
at the time are still heavily discussed and disputed (Barrett, 2006; Panksepp,
2007), contemporary social psychologists have taken Ekman’s lead and con-
sidered the role of physical experiences not only in emotion but more gen-
erally in shaping the cognitive processing of social phenomena. Following
researchers in other areas of cognitive science (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2008;
Glenberg, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), social psychologists have started

The preparation of this chapter was supported by Economic and Social Research Council grant
RES-000-22-4453.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-010
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

225

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 to emphasize the benefits of an embodied view of cognition, based on the
notion that functioning in the world with specific bodily capabilities fun-
damentally constrains cognitive processes (e.g., Meier, Schnall, Schwarz,
& Bargh, 2012; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric,
2005; Smith & Semin, 2004; Spellman & Schnall, 2009).
In contrast to traditional theories of cognition, embodied approaches
posit that cognitive processes do not have the goal of arriving at a mirror
image of the world but rather serve to facilitate people’s action in their physi-
cal and social environments. This view has some early precursors (see, e.g.,
Gibson, 1979; Merleau-Ponty, 1962); however, cognitive scientists have
largely studied high-level cognitive processes as divorced from any low-level
perceptual or motor input processes (for a history of disembodied cognitive
science, see Johnson, 1987; Spellman & Schnall, 2009). In contrast, with con-
ceptual structures that are defined by interactional (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) or
experiential (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) properties of the world, the
boundaries between perception, cognition, and action become increasingly
fluid (Barsalou, 1999; Clark, 1997). Because mental representations that are
due to interactions with the environment retain the modality of perceptual
experience, the resulting concepts are considered to involve reenactments, or
simulations of such perceptual processes (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg, 1997).
One of the earliest embodied approaches originated within cognitive
linguistics in the form of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980, 1999), which proposed that bodily processes shape and constrain cog-
nitive information processing. Metaphor, defined as “understanding and expe-
riencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 5,
emphasis in original) does not only concern the use of language but is also
informative about underlying cognitive structure, because abstract concepts
that are described metaphorically often reflect basic physical experiences (for
more background on the theory, see Chapter 2, this volume).
Whereas early work on conceptual metaphor theory was primarily
confined to linguistics and involved cataloguing lists of metaphoric expres-
sions and their potential links to basic physical experience, recent empiri-
cal research in social psychology has increasingly confirmed the metaphoric
basis of many cognitive processes (for a review, see Landau, Meier, & Keefer,
2010). Testing the potential existence of embodied metaphors has become a
highly productive enterprise, with research papers on new metaphoric con-
nections between physical experiences and social phenomena accumulating
at a rapid pace. However, although this growing literature supports the notion
that embodied metaphors play a critical role in social thought and behavior,
a wide range of metaphors has been examined without much consideration
regarding which specific ones might constitute basic, or core metaphors.
Indeed, critical discussions have pointed to the short-lived strategy of moving

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 from metaphor to metaphor without taking into account what underlying
processes and mechanisms might be at play (Landau et al., 2010; Meier et al.,
2012). In particular, if metaphors are indeed the building blocks of cognitive
representation, how many and which such metaphors are required to arrive
at a comprehensive conceptual structure? Given the vast number of bodily
experiences to draw on for mappings of physical concepts onto abstract target
concepts, are there any bodily experiences that are more fundamental than
others? In other words, given the evidence, is there any reason to believe that
there are basic embodied metaphors?
The goal of this chapter is to extract a number of basic metaphors
to guide future empirical investigations. What is first needed, however, is
a working definition of what might make certain embodied concepts espe-
cially central, or basic. Ultimately, cross-cultural investigations and longi-
tudinal studies following children’s early development will need to establish
the extent to which some physical experiences, and their applications to
abstract concepts, are universal. To date, however, such investigations have
been scarce (but see Chapter 12, this volume). In the meantime, one pos-
sibility to determine which metaphors can be considered basic is to examine
the extent to which a given source concept, that is, a representation of a
concrete physical experience, can be used to understand a wide range of tar-
get concepts, namely, superficially dissimilar, relatively abstract concepts that
otherwise are difficult to understand. Thus, for a given bodily concept to be
a good candidate for a basic metaphor, it should have applicability to a wide
range of target concepts and therefore be instrumental in understanding and
influencing a variety of cognitive, behavioral, and social phenomena related
to those abstract concepts.
This chapter reviews the evidence for the existence of a number of
putatively basic bodily metaphors, based on the following two fundamental
observations: First, the body is a container with a clear boundary that keeps it
separate from other people and objects; second, the body is situated in space
and moves in it while maintaining varying distances to objects and people.
From these basic properties of the body, the following metaphors are derived
that may be considered as relatively basic: First, verticality provides a source
domain to distinguish between good and bad entities in multiple contexts;
second, the fact that the body is a container is implicit in the conceptualiza-
tion of many social and emotional processes; and third, spatial distance con-
trasts things and people that are close from those that are distant and remote.
Physical closeness in social relationships is also associated with physical
warmth and therefore indicates a positive social contact. Considerable evi-
dence has accumulated to support the existence of these metaphors. Before I
review this work, however, I discuss the theoretical framework that provided
much of the basis for such investigations.

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 Metaphoric Groundings:
Conceptual Metaphor Theory

According to the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson,

1980), the body is a source of knowledge, and by means of conceptual meta-
phors, basic embodied concepts are mapped onto more abstract concepts. For
instance, the spatial metaphor of verticality is used to contrast good and bad
things, such as emotional feelings. For example, I might say that “I’m on
top of the world” or “feeling up” or, in contrast, note that “I’m down in the
dumps” or “fell into a depression.” Those mappings of physical body states
are not arbitrary but are correlated with what happens with the human body
when one feels a certain emotion: an upright, relaxed posture when feeling
happy versus a slumped, drooping posture when feeling depressed.
Embodied metaphors are ubiquitous in everyday talk, even if the bodily
origin is often not easily evident. Those origins can be inferred, however,
by observing that metaphoric linguistic expressions are usually not isolated
instances but instead are organized into highly coherent and elaborate sys-
tems (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). For example, some expressions emphasize
that time is a limited resource (e.g., using up time, wasting time), whereas
other expressions emphasize that time is a valuable resource (e.g., Thank you
for your time). Both implications reflect aspects of the overall metaphor time
is money, which implies that people think of “using up” time in the same way
as “using up” other resources, such as money. Importantly, the metaphoric
expressions that treat abstract entities, such as time, as tangible things are not
arbitrarily constructed but are grounded in basic experiences of how the body
interacts with the physical world. For example, a body uses resources, such
as by eating and breathing, and thus, using up resources is a basic embodied
concept. Although some metaphors might at first glance not have much of
a bodily grounding, a closer examination can reveal that even seemingly
abstract expressions relate back to specific physical experiences: By likening
them to resources, abstract things, such as time, are talked about in the same
way as the concrete things that the body consumes, such as food or air.
However, the similarities used for mapping structural relations from one
concept to another are not objectively inherent in concepts or categories but
are the result of interactions with the world. This is a central point. Lakoff
and Johnson (1980) challenged the view that category membership is deter-
mined by objective, inherent properties of objects and instead proposed that
properties emerge from interactions with the physical and social environ-
ment. Those interactional properties of objects can include perceptual proper-
ties (e.g., what an apple looks like), functional properties (the apple satisfies
an appetite), motor-activity properties (what it feels like to hold an apple in
your hand while taking a bite of it), and purposive properties (eating fruit to

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 stay healthy). Categories based on interactional properties do not have sharp
boundaries but are relatively open-ended. For example, tossing an apple from
hand to hand can fall into the category “ball,” even though an apple typi-
cally does not normally fall into that category. Thus, in their experientialist
approach, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) claimed that objects can only be
understood in relation to a particular perceptual and conceptual apparatus of
the human body.
Central to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory is the concept of image schema
(Johnson, 1987), which describes a pattern of perceptual experience that
emerges from basic bodily activities and is nonpropositional and analogue
in nature. Image schemas result in mental representations with a level of
abstractness less concrete than a mental picture, or a “rich” image, but still
less abstract than propositional knowledge. The sensorimotor experience of
using resources is one example of such an image schema; additional examples
are the concepts of containment, which is derived from the basic understanding
of the human body as a container (some things are inside of the body, others
are outside of it) and verticality (people are usually situated in an upright posi-
tion within space, with a clear up–down orientation).
Of course, the proposal that sensorimotor experiences and actions
shape cognitive structure is not a new invention of cognitive science but has
been a prominent theme in developmental psychology for quite some time
(e.g., Werner & Kaplan, 1963). Based on a constructivist framework, Piaget
(1980) was one of the pioneers to argue that information does not exist inde-
pendently from the perceptual and interpretive cognitive system but that the
construction of meaning necessitates an active individual. Through direct,
physical action with an object, very young children are able to abstract cogni-
tive schemes that serve as templates against which new objects are standard-
ized or assimilated. New information derived from other objects allows for
the scheme to be modified or adapted, a process that becomes possible only
through the active, constructive role of the individual. Similarly, Mandler
(1992) outlined a theory of perceptual analysis through which children actively
restructure, or redescribe, conceptual information abstracted from perceptual
information. The outcome of this process, which takes place as early as in 3 to
4 month olds, is compacted preverbal information units and what Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) termed image schemas, which involve mappings from senso-
rimotor activities. Recent work in social psychology has built on such early
investigations, and, for example, has applied the developmental notion of
scaffolding (Bruner, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978) to the learning processes that map
physical experiences early in life to social phenomena (Williams, Huang, &
Bargh, 2009). However, as noted earlier, it would be helpful to know which
embodied metaphors matter most in the sense of influencing cognitive pro-
cesses with relation to many different abstract target concepts.

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 Table 11.1
Basic Embodied Source Domains and Corresponding Abstract
Target Domains
Source Aspect of source Target
domain domain domain Sample articles

Verticality
Valence Meier & Robinson (2004)
Power Schubert (2005)
Morality Meier, Sellbom, & Wygant
(2007)
Divinity Meier, Hauser, et al. (2007)
Container
Depth of Container Emotion Kövecses (2000)
Heat of Fluid in Container Anger Wilkowski et al. (2009)
Maintaining Boundaries Disgust Schnall, Haidt, et al. (2008)
Cleanliness Zhong & Liljenquist (2006)
Distance
Closeness Intimacy Argyle & Dean (1965)
Warmth Intimacy Williams & Bargh (2008)
Distance Abstraction Trope & Liberman (2010)

When examining the possibility of basic metaphors, it is useful to con-

sider which image schemas might enjoy a special status, based on which cer-
tain relatively universal metaphors might have evolved. On the most basic
level, the human body is a particular object—namely, a container with a
discrete surface that delineates it from other objects and other people. Two
fundamental properties of this container relate to how it is situated in space
and how it moves in space. Thus, the following three image schemas might
be especially central: First, the body functions in an upright, vertical position;
second, it is a container that is separate from other entities; and third, the
body maintains a given distance from other people and objects while moving
in space. The meaning and ramifications of these image schemas (listed in
Table 11.1) are now discussed in turn.

Verticality: Being Upright in Space

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) articulated a theory on the basis of which

they developed a rich repertoire of metaphors. These include, for example,
describing an argument as war, love as a journey, or time as money. Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) proposed that a certain set of metaphors uses space as orga-
nizing principle in what they refer to as orientational metaphors. One central
orientational metaphor is verticality. Experience in space, and spatial meta-
phors, are likely to serve a central function within metaphoric structure. Some
of the spatial metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) were indeed

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 the earliest conceptual metaphors to be put to the test by social psychologists.
For example, Meier and Robinson (2004) demonstrated that people represent
good things as spatially up and bad things as spatially down. In their work, par-
ticipants were faster to categorize positive words such as love or candy as “good”
when they were presented in the top section of a computer screen, and negative
words such as danger or spider as “bad” when they were presented in the bottom
section. Similarly, being powerful is associated with being high up in space,
whereas being powerless is comparatively low (Schubert, 2005).
Consistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) early proposal, the verti-
cal dimension that pulls the mind up to higher values originates from the
basic physical experience of verticality: People use the vertical dimension to
contrast moral virtue and vice when talking about high-minded and upstanding
citizens, versus the lowlife of society. However, moral considerations and ver-
ticality are not as strongly associated for people who are not concerned with
social norms—namely, those scoring high on measures of psychopathy (Meier,
Sellbom, & Wygant, 2007). Furthermore, when people feel metaphorically
uplifted and elevated because of having witnessed another person’s morally
exemplary behavior, they are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior them-
selves (Schnall & Roper, 2012; Schnall, Roper, & Fessler, 2010). Moreover,
participants considering acts of moral excellence not only express more high-
level concepts such as abstract values, they also gaze up more in space while
doing so than participants considering acts of nonmoral excellence (Pavarini,
Schnall, & Immordino-Yang, 2012). Beyond valence, power, and morality, an
additional target concept that maps onto verticality is divinity: Participants
associate God with being high up in the sky, and the Devil as being down low
in the underworld (Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007).
All this evidence suggests that one single source concept, verticality, is
sufficient to make sense of a broad variety of target concepts. Thus, verticality
may be considered a central, core embodied concept, on the basis of which
many abstract concepts can be understood. Indeed, given the limited number
of direct physical experiences relative to the almost unlimited number of
abstract concepts, it is remarkable how efficiently the same source concept
can be applied to vastly different abstract concepts. Another such example of
an embodied source concept with wide applicability is the notion of the body
as a specific kind of object.

The Body As a Container

Drawing the Line Between In and Out

The fact that the body can be considered a container with an inside
and an outside has several implications. First, the language reflecting control

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 and responsibility often describes the lack thereof as a force coming over, or
getting into, a person (“What has gotten into him?!”). In particular, emotions
that are considered to involve the lack of rational thinking are talked about
as some force acting within the bodily confines of a person. Within cogni-
tive linguistics, the most comprehensive account of such embodied emotion
metaphors was developed by Zoltan Kövecses (1990, 2000). While investi-
gating the general metaphors used in talking about emotions, he noted the
centrality of the container metaphor in providing the basis for conceptual-
izing all kinds of objects as containers, with having an inside and outside. In
the context of emotions, two spatial metaphors make use of the image schema
of containment—namely, that emotions are fluids in a container and that
emotions relate to the heat of the fluid in a container. The latter is especially
important because it yields a number of metaphoric consequences, by describ-
ing emotions that involve a lack of control and that are often regarded as
“typical” emotions, because they interrupt and disturb everyday functioning,
such as anger or hatred.
The metaphors referring to anger tend to reflect its physiological
effects, such as feeling hot and flushed. Heat of a fluid in a container is
the source concept for the target concept of anger, and various entailments
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) follow from that mapping. For example, when a
person explodes, the inside of the person comes to the surface, suggesting
that an authentic aspect of the person emerges that was previously deep down
and hidden. Similar to anger, metaphors about fear correspond to physi-
ological and behavioral aspects of fear. The notion of fluid in a container is
used as well, but in contrast to anger, the fluid is not hot. Again, this is no
coincidence but correlates with the bodily experience of those emotions:
Anger is experienced as hot and is characterized by an increase in skin tem-
perature, whereas the opposite is the case for fear (e.g., Ekman, Levenson,
& Friesen, 1983). In the case of anger, the emotion develops inside the
container, whereas in the case of fear, the emotion appears to be indepen-
dent of the person and then moves into the body as a result of some force
(Kövecses, 1990).
If embodied metaphors indeed reflect the physiological experiences
when feeling an emotion, then the same source domain (e.g., heat, when
describing anger) should be used across cultures. Indeed, cross-language
comparisons show that the concept of heat is central in linguistic expres-
sions of anger not only in English but also in Chinese (Yu, 1995), Japanese,
Hungarian, Wolof, Zulu, and Polish (Kövecses, 2000). Similarly, if heat
and anger are conceptually related, then activating one should simulta-
neously activate the other, and this has in fact been shown. Participants
are better at categorizing anger-related word when presented with a back-
ground involving heat, compared with a cold or neutral background image.

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 Furthermore, participants primed with anger provided higher estimates
of average annual temperature for unfamiliar cities than participants
primed with fear, or neutral words (Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter, &
Feltman, 2009). The reverse relationship also holds: Priming participants
with heat activates thoughts related to anger and aggression (DeWall &
Bushman, 2009). Because one metaphoric entailment of anger and heat is
the association with the color red, priming participants with the concept of
anger, or inducing the emotional state of anger, facilitates the perception of
redness (Fetterman, Robinson, Gordon, & Elliot, 2011).
The container metaphor, especially when the fluid in the container is
conceptualized as hot, mirrors the control aspect of emotion: The level of a
fluid in a container rises as the intensity of the emotion rises, and as it gets
too intense, the container explodes, reflecting that the person has to give up
control over the emotion. Notably, it is perhaps less common to talk about the
body as a container for emotions that do not involve high levels of physiologi-
cal arousal, such as pride or respect (Kövecses, 1990), nor do they usually exert
a disturbing influence on everyday actions, and thus they are considered less
prototypical or less “good” examples of emotion.
Not only specific emotions are talked about with reference to the meta-
phor of the body as a container, but language used to talk about emotions more
generally consists of spatial language, such as deep feelings. The usage of this
particular type of language can be traced back to properties of a container,
because the deeper the container, the more substance in the form of fluid it can
hold (Kövecses, 1990). In addition to more intense, deep can also mean “more
sincere” and is reflected in the fact that points farther away from the container
surface are deep inside the container. Using the container metaphor thus exem-
plifies the more general principle of more is up: More fluid in the container
stands for higher intensity of the emotion, or conversely, a lack of fluid (“I feel
empty”) indicates a lack of emotion.

Keeping One’s Boundaries

The emotion that is most clearly concerned with maintaining the bound-
aries of the bodily container is disgust. On its most basic level, disgust has a
functional role in the context of food consumption, that is, when it comes
to which substances to physically incorporate by ingesting (Rozin, Haidt, &
McCauley, 2008). The rejection of potentially edible items that look, taste, or
smell bad is adaptive because it reduces the likelihood of consuming food that
may be harmful to one’s health. Similarly, the potential of coming into con-
tact with contaminated objects and surfaces is reduced in the face of reluctant
physical contact due to feelings of disgust and repulsion. Behavioral responses
of literally expelling bad-tasting food by spitting it out or pulling up the nose

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 in disgust to reduce the amount of airflow stemming from the contaminant
(Susskind et al., 2008) further ensure that potentially harmful substances do
not enter the bodily container. The role of disgust in protecting the body of
harm and contamination therefore has a clear bodily basis.
Built on this, however, is a sense of disgust that goes beyond the realm
of the bodily container because it extends to metaphoric contamination: It
is not only bad food that makes us feel repulsed and sick to the stomach,
the same is the case for bad people and their bad, repulsive behaviors. In
other words, in addition to physical disgust another sense of disgust involves
moral disgust (Rozin et al., 2008), and it is likely that the two have a close
metaphoric link. Indeed, functional neuroimaging studies suggest that the
same brain structures may be implicated in the experience of physical and
moral disgust (Moll et al., 2005; Schaich Borg, Lieberman, & Kiehl, 2008).
Furthermore, inductions of physical disgust change judgments and decisions
involving moral disgust (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008; Wheatley &
Haidt, 2005). For example, in one study, my colleagues and I exposed some
participants to a bad smell in the form of “fart spray.” Participants who sensed
this disgusting smell judged various moral transgressions, such as falsifying
a resume or not returning a lost wallet, to be more wrong than participants
who were not exposed to the smell. Similarly, in a different study, participants
who happened to sit at a disgusting table and were surrounded by dirty pizza
boxes and used tissues made more severe moral judgments than participants
sitting at the same table when it was clean and untainted (Schnall, Haidt,
et al., 2008). Furthermore, people’s spontaneous facial expressions are simi-
lar toward physically and morally disgusting stimuli (Cannon, Schnall, &
White, 2011; Chapman, Kim, Susskind, & Anderson, 2009). These findings
suggest that people often equate physical disgust and moral disgust, such as
when experimentally induced feelings of repulsion are taken as evidence of
moral condemnation. The conflation of physical and social disgust seems to
take place especially when the metaphor of the body as a container is made
salient. Landau, Sullivan, and Greenberg (2009) showed that after describing
the United States in ways that highlighted its properties as a bodily entity,
participants exposed to contamination fears were especially likely to express
concerns about foreign immigration. Thus, physical and metaphoric notions
of containment are closely linked (see Chapter 6, this volume).
Related to the function of disgust as guardian of the body’s actual and
metaphoric boundaries against physical and moral contamination, studies
have investigated the link between physical and moral purity. Experiments
have documented the Macbeth effect, named after Lady Macbeth, who
attempted to rinse off the imaginary stains of murder. After having consid-
ered their past immoral actions, participants found cleansing products to be
more attractive and expressed a greater desire to wash themselves (Zhong &

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 Liljenquist, 2006). Furthermore, different types of transgression lead to dif-
ferent kinds of cleansing desires: After speaking immoral things, people want
to use mouthwash, but after typing something immoral using a computer key-
board, people want to use a hand sanitizer (Lee & Schwarz, 2010a). Similarly,
being primed with words related to cleanliness or engaging in handwash-
ing can influence moral judgments and make them less harsh when partici-
pants interpret feelings of cleanliness to be relevant to specific transgressions
(Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008) but more harsh when the cleanliness is
seen as indicative of one’s own superior moral standing (Zhong, Strejcek, &
Sivanathan, 2010). Furthermore, cleanliness in other people may indicate
the fact that they possess close social contacts and that therefore they may be
good cooperative partners (Schnall, 2011).
Moving beyond the immediate need to protect one’s bodily boundaries,
recent findings suggest that the effects of cleansing can go beyond the moral
domain. For example, a form of cognitive dissonance—namely, nagging
doubts about whether one made the right decision, can be reduced by hand-
washing (Lee & Schwarz, 2010b; see also Chapter 5, this volume). However,
not only negative states can be removed; physical cleansing can also get rid
of positive states, such as one’s sense of having a lucky streak (Xu, Zwick, &
Schwarz, 2012). In this sense, physically cleansing the body can serve as a
“reset” button for the mind.

Actual and Metaphoric Distance in Space and Time

As reviewed in the previous section, on a basic level, the human body

is a container with a clearly delineated inside and outside. A related, also
basic embodied concept is self–other overlap: Once another person is “close,”
the distinction between self and body, and that of the other, breaks down
(Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991; Smith, 2008). Terms such as ingroup
and outgroup further denote the distinction between those who we keep so
close that they almost seem part of the self, compared with those who are not.
Because each person is separated from the surrounding world by a skin, we see
objects as possessing boundaries even if they are not clearly defined: A peak
in a mountain range might appear as a distinct entity and be labelled as such,
even if its boundary from the rest of the geological structure is fuzzy at best.
Overall, the tendency to impose real and metaphoric boundaries implies that
some things are close, whereas others are not.
On the most basic level, physical distance reflects the extent to which
objects and people are brought close and within reach or are kept at arm’s
length. Indeed, approach and avoidance are considered some of the most
basic behavioral tendencies (e.g., Elliot, 2008). Distance is further used

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 metaphorically to denote social relationships, for example, by speaking of a
close contact or a distant acquaintance. These metaphors reflect how people
move and act in space as a reflection of specific social relationships. Indeed,
people get close to intimate others to whom they feel close (Patterson, 1977;
Willis, 1966), but they literally distance themselves from others who are seen
as less attractive, such as people marked by a physical stigma (Kleck, 1968),
as if one is afraid that too close of a contact might literally pose the danger of
the stigma “rubbing off.”
In general, people feel highly protective of the area of space immediately
around them that has been termed personal space (Hall, 1968). Discomfort
results when this space is invaded, and people engage in compensatory
behaviors by reducing other indicators of intimacy, such as eye gaze (Argyle
& Dean, 1965). Thus, social factors constrain how people act and move in
physical space, and this has consequences for how this space is perceived.
Distances are perceived differently depending on whether they imply enti-
ties that are considered part of one’s ingroup or, instead, an outgroup (Burris
& Branscombe, 2005; Kerkman, Stea, Norris, & Rice, 2004). For instance,
distances that involve crossing the borders between one’s home country
(e.g., the United States) into a foreign country (e.g., Mexico) are estimated
as greater than distances within the home country (Burris & Branscombe,
2005). Similarly, study participants estimate distances between city pairs that
used to be separated by the Iron Curtain, with one city located within East
Germany and the other city located within West Germany, to be greater
than distances of cities located within the same areas of Germany (Carbon
& Leder, 2005). This overestimation was greatest for participants who had a
negative attitude toward the reunification of Germany, presumably reflecting
a strong personal sense of the country’s social and political boundaries.
Findings such as these suggest that rather than being objectively deter-
mined by a low-level modular process that takes place in a computationally
encapsulated (Fodor, 1983) manner, visual processes such as estimating small-
scale distances on maps are constrained by various contextual factors, which
can include social and cognitive variables. On a broader level, visual percep-
tions of various kinds, including those of the physical environment, relate
back to how people and their bodies use space and how they act in space.
Such considerations can shape how close or far objects appear because the
visual perception of distance takes into account how easy or difficult it would
be to reach a target object, given one’s bodily capabilities (Proffitt, 2006). For
example, while participants wore a heavy backpack, objects placed within
a few meters of them appeared farther away than when no such backpack
was worn (Proffitt, Stefanucci, Banton, & Epstein, 2003). Presumably, the
physical state of being weighted down is indicative of how easy or difficult it
would be to cover a distance, and it therefore shapes how close or far a given

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 target appears. Similarly, because the effort involved in throwing a heavy ball
is greater than the effort involved in throwing a light ball, after throwing the
heavy ball, distances appear to be farther (Witt, Proffitt, & Epstein, 2004). In
addition to relative difficulty or effort of engaging with an object, motivational
states relating to the desirability to objects also change perceptual affordances.
Balcetis and Dunning (2010) showed that desirable objects, such as a glass of
water when one is thirsty, appear closer than undesirable objects; such a per-
ceptual bias would presumably facilitate the goal-relevant action of approach-
ing the object, such as grabbing the glass of water to quench one’s thirst.

Psychological Distance

As this chapter has reviewed in detail, the theory of conceptual meta-

phor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) proposes that physical experiences are
linked with abstract concepts through embodied metaphors. Thus, there is
a basic distinction between a concrete experience, for example, the actual
distance to an object in space, and an abstract concept, for example, the sub-
jective valence assigned to this object. In a somewhat similar way, construal
level theory (Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope & Liberman, 2010) proposes
a fundamental distinction regarding what is termed psychological distance:
Experiences can be concrete, immediate and happening at the present moment,
or in contrast, be abstract, distant and remote. As a consequence, psychological
distance involves different mental representations of events, such that thinking
about the here and now involves concrete, low-level construals tied to direct
perceptual experience, whereas thinking about distant places, other people, or
one’s future self involves abstract, high-level construals that are detached from
current experience.
Accumulating evidence suggests that people process the same kind
of information differently depending on metaphoric distance and resulting
construal level. Relative to events and situations that are psychologically
close, taking a more removed psychological perspective facilitates abstract
and global processing (e.g., Henderson, Fujita, Trope, & Liberman, 2006;
Liberman & Förster, 2009). For example, abstract moral principles are more
likely to be emphasized over situational constraints when participants use
a high-level rather than a low-level construal (Eyal, Liberman, & Trope,
2008), and moral transgressions are condemned more in the distant future
than in the near future, presumably because high-level construals make
abstract moral values especially salient (Agerström & Björklund, 2009).
Furthermore, increased psychological distance can lead to better economic
decisions, such as a greater focus on long-term over short-term benefits (Kim,
Schnall, & White, 2013) or the enhanced goal of maximizing financial gains
in an economic game (Kim, Schnall, Yi, & White, 2012). These findings

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 suggest that a distant psychological perspective and its associated high-level
construal may literally help people “step back” from the immediate concerns
and instead, focus on more abstract, higher level goals.
Construal level theory notes that the central construct of psychologi-
cal distance manifests itself in various domains, including space (close vs.
far), time (now vs. later), social distance (self vs. other), and hypothetical
distance (likely vs. unlikely; Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007). Indeed,
all four dimensions of psychological distance are highly correlated (Fiedler,
Jung, Wänke, & Alexopoulos, 2012). Liberman and Förster (2011), how-
ever, raised the issue of whether spatial distance might be more primary and
therefore more basic than other types of psychological distance. As reviewed
above, this is likely to be the case, given that physical space provides the per-
ceptual source domain for many other target domains. Thus, spatial distance
serves as the source domain for other, more metaphoric types of psychologi-
cal distance, such as temporal distance or social distance. Indeed, the way in
which space facilitates thinking about time is well documented (Boroditsky,
2000; Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002). Overall, findings derived from the con-
strual level framework suggest that psychological distance is a fundamental
dimension that is used to organize experiences and concepts, thus lending
support to the notion that distance, whether concrete or abstract, constitutes
a fundamental embodied metaphor.

Being Close 5 Being Warm

As noted previously, physical and metaphoric closeness is indicative of

immediate experiences and concerns. Because it means potentially putting
oneself in danger, we only let those people get close toward whom we are
favorably disposed. Being close therefore often coincides with close bodily
contact, or touching. In his seminal work, Bowlby (1969) noted that the close
relationship between infant and caregiver provides a critical relationship tem-
plate for future romantic relationships, and such close primary relationships
are characterized by close physical contact and warmth. Thus, from very early
on in childhood, feeling warm becomes synonymous with being cared for and
loved by others. Indeed, Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick (2007) proposed that when
making evaluations about other people, one of the two most basic dimen-
sions, along with judgments of competence, is the judgment of how warm
and friendly that person is. Thus, warmth is a basic perceptual concept that
grows out of the understanding that, relative to one’s own bodily boundaries,
we keep those whom we like so close that we can sense the warmth radiating
from them.
Just like physical and moral purity can become conflated, as noted ear-
lier (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), physical

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 and interpersonal warmth can become conflated. For example, after holding
a cup containing a hot drink, research participants rated a neutral stranger as
more warm and friendly than they did after holding a cold drink (Williams &
Bargh, 2008). Similarly, research participants express more relational think-
ing in a warm relative to a cold room (IJzerman & Semin, 2009). Looking
at the reverse relationship, participants who were made to feel lonely and
excluded rated the ambient room temperature to be colder than those who
felt accepted, and presumably “warm” (Zhong, & Leonardelli, 2008). As a
means of emotional self-regulation, experienced loneliness can be amelio-
rated by seeking out warm comfort in the form of a hot bath or shower (Bargh
& Shalev, 2012).
Thus, interpersonal closeness seems to be closely associated with
warmth. Fay and Maner (2012) found direct evidence for precisely this link.
They had participants hold a warm or cold cup of coffee and then estimate
the distance to the cup. Participants low in avoidant attachment saw the
warm cup as closer than the cold cup, whereas participants high in avoidant
attachment showed the opposite effect. A second study showed that when
feelings of warmth were induced, participants were more likely to report a
desire to be close to others, but again this effect was moderated by attach-
ment style, with only participants low in avoidant attachment demonstrating
this connection. The association between warmth and proximity and the
moderating effect of attachment styles indicates that such a connection is
not innate or invariate but is at least to some extent shaped by specific expe-
rience. Thus, warmth originating from a caregiver early in life is the result of
being “close” to this person.

Other Basic Metaphors

I have argued for a given set of bodily image schemas and resulting
metaphoric concepts to be central. However, what is the reason to believe
that other embodied concepts are less central? Much of what was discussed
concerned potential basic metaphors derived from how the human body is
situated and functions within space. In addition, information from different
sensory modalities may provide fundamental source domains for potential
use with abstract target domains. Although human beings take in informa-
tion about the surrounding world through five distinct senses—vision, hear-
ing, taste, smell, and touch—it is well established that vision is much more
important for human beings than is hearing or smell. As a consequence, it is
likely that specific visual experiences, such as the light of dawn and sunshine,
are experienced positively across practically all cultures, whereas the dark-
ness and potential danger of night are universally experienced negatively.

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 A reflection of this importance of telling light from dark, such as day from
night, is that all language communities studied to date have distinct terms for
black and white, even if they lack words for other colors (Berlin & Kay, 1969).
Thus, it is likely that findings with Western samples suggesting a positive
valence of brightness relative to darkness (Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004;
Sherman & Clore, 2009) also hold for non-Western samples. However, the
recent observation that a black and white visual contrast leads to more polar-
ized, extreme judgments (Zarkadi & Schnall, 2013) may be limited to cul-
tures that have specific linguistic expressions about black and white thinking.
Visual cues of light and dark are more likely to cross-culturally represent
similar metaphoric ideas than, for example, specific smells that are associated
with moral connotations. Indeed, Lee and Schwarz (2012; see also Chap­
ter 5, this volume) recently showed that although the specific smell of “fishy”
is linked with something being suspicious, this expression is not necessarily
universal across cultures. Thus, it may be that unpleasant smells of various
kinds are linguistically reflected as spelling trouble, but because the sense of
smell is less central than the sense of vision, there is cultural variability in
what particular type of smell has a suspicious meaning attached to it.
Most important in this context will be cross-cultural investigations using
the metaphoric transfer strategy described by Landau and colleagues (2010)
that has been so productively used with Western samples. As reviewed else-
where (Leung, Qiu, Ong, & Tam, 2011; see Chapter 12, this volume), some
findings already suggest that some embodied metaphors hold across various
cultural communities.

Conclusion

Embodied approaches to language and cognition propose that all

thought processes need to be conceptualized as taking place in the service of
embodied action that is contextually constrained. Such a view suggests that
cognition depends heavily on perceptual and interactional processes of the
human body in the physical world. The most fundamental such bodily experi-
ences are based on the fact that the body is a container that moves in space.
It is a bounded entity that has a surface. Objects and people are positioned
at varying distances to the body, and the distance to them is manipulated
depending on action goals. This chapter has proposed a list of potentially
basic metaphors that result from these sets of fundamental image schemas
that are grounded in physical experience. In contrast to Ekman’s (1992b)
forceful conclusion that there definitely are basic emotions, for now, the con-
clusion regarding the existence of basic metaphors needs to remain somewhat
more tentative and speculative. On the basis of existing evidence, a number

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 of metaphors seem to be basic in the sense defined here, but additional evi-
dence for such proposed universality is needed.

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 12
Experiential Origins of Mental
Metaphors: Language, Culture,
and the Body
Daniel Casasanto

People not only talk metaphorically, they also think metaphorically.

Where do our mental metaphors come from? Metaphor theorists posit that
hundreds of metaphors in language and thought have their basis in bodily
interactions with the physical world. Yet the origins of most mental meta-
phors are difficult to discern because the patterns of linguistic, cultural, and
bodily experience that could give rise to them appear mutually inextricable.
This chapter highlights three mental metaphors for which the contributions
of language, culture, and the body can be distinguished unambiguously. By
analyzing the distinct ways in which politics, time, and emotional valence come
to be metaphorized in terms of left–right space, it is possible to illustrate the

Thanks to Laura Staum Casasanto and Roberto Bottini for comments and discussion. This research was
supported in part by a grant from the Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía
and the European Regional Development Fund (P09-SEJ-4772) and by a James S. McDonnell Founda-
tion Scholar Award.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-011
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M. J. Landau, M. D. Robinson, and
B. P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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 distinct linguistic, cultural, and bodily origins of the mental metaphors that
scaffold our thoughts, feelings, and choices.

Metaphors Beyond Language

At one time, the claim that people think metaphorically was sup-
ported only by patterns in language (Clark, 1973; Jackendoff, 1983; Lakoff
& Johnson, 1980, 1999), but there is now behavioral evidence that source
domain representations are activated with a high degree of automaticity
when people think about abstract domains including time (Boroditsky, 2000),
number (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993), similarity (Casasanto, 2008),
emotional attachment (Williams & Bargh, 2008), and power (Schubert,
2005; for a review of more than 40 studies validating metaphor theory, see
Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). People think in mental metaphors even
when they are not using language (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Dolscheid,
Shayan, Majid, & Casasanto, 2013). That is, when people conceptualize
domains such as time, number, or emotion, their conceptualizations may be
partly constituted by mental metaphors: implicit, analog mappings between
nonlinguistic mental representations in a concrete “source domain” (e.g.,
space, force, motion) and a relatively abstract or unfamiliar “target domain.”1
Mental metaphors import the relational structure of source domains such as
space into target domains, allowing us to envision, measure, and compare the
“height” of people’s excitement, the “depth” of their sadness, or the “breadth”
of their compassion (Boroditsky, 2000; Casasanto, 2009; Lakoff & Johnson,
1999).
In their groundbreaking book, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) wrote: “We do not know very much about the experien-
tial bases of metaphors,” noting that “our physical and cultural experience
provides many possible bases” (p. 19). Two decades later, however, Lakoff
and Johnson (1999) were no longer circumspect about the origins of mental

1The term conceptual metaphor is often used ambiguously, even by metaphor theorists: Sometimes the
term refers to expressions in language, other times to hypothetical nonlinguistic mental representa-
tions, and still other times to both linguistic and nonlinguistic mappings. These ambiguities complicate
discussions of the relationship between metaphoric language and metaphoric thinking. I distinguish the
linguistic and nonlinguistic components of conceptual metaphors by using the term linguistic metaphor
to refer to words and expressions in language and the term mental metaphor to refer to the associations
between nonlinguistic source and target domains, which are hypothesized to underlie linguistic meta-
phors (Casasanto, 2008, 2009). This terminological distinction becomes particularly important when
discussing mental metaphors such as the left–right spatial mappings of time and of valence in left-handers,
for which no corresponding linguistic metaphors exist, and discussing linguistic expressions such as my
right hand man and the right answer, which people appear to use without activating any corresponding
mental metaphor.

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 metaphors. They advanced a forcefully argued theory of how hundreds of
primary metaphors, the basic building blocks of all mental metaphors, are
inevitably acquired on the basis of bodily interactions with the physical
environment.
On this proposal, mental metaphors arise due to the unavoidable con-
flation of two types of bodily experiences: subjective experiences in target
domains and perceptuomotor experiences in source domains. For example,
the metaphor affection is warmth arises in children’s minds as a consequence
of feeling the physical warmth of their caretakers’ bodies as they are held and
comforted. The metaphor time is motion arises as children subjectively experi-
ence the passage of time while watching moving objects travel through space.
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999),
We do not have a choice as to whether to acquire and use primary meta-
phor. Just by functioning normally in the world, we automatically and
unconsciously acquire and use a vast number of such metaphors. Those
metaphors are realized in our brains physically and are mostly beyond our
control. They are a consequence of the nature of our brains, our bodies,
and the world we inhabit. (p. 59, italics in original)
Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) earlier suggestion that at least some basic
metaphors could be grounded in cultural experiences was replaced by a
monolithic argument for an “embodied” basis for mental metaphors, echoed
subsequently by numerous books and papers in the literatures on embodied
cognition in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience
(for an overview, see Gibbs, 2006).

Reasons to Question the Embodied Basis

of Mental Metaphors

Although Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) proposal has been widely

accepted, there are at least four reasons to doubt that conflations between
subjective and perceptuomotor experiences, which occur inevitably and uni-
versally during the course of early cognitive development, give rise to all (or
any) of our basic mental metaphors. The first reason for skepticism is a simple
lack of evidence. The evidence offered by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) is their
interpretation of Christopher Johnson’s (1999) survey of a single metaphor
in a single child’s speech input and output. They suggested that purely meta-
phoric uses of to see meaning to know (e.g., “I see what you’re saying”) were
preceded by uses of see in which its literal (visual) and metaphoric (epis-
temic) meanings were conflated (e.g., “let’s see [and thereby come to know]
what’s in the box”). Lakoff and Johnson (1999) suggested that seeing and

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 knowing were initially fused in the child’s mind due to their conflation in
his experiences with vision and knowledge: Seeing things (perceptuomotor
source domain) was correlated with knowing about them (subjective target
domain), and thus seeing and knowing were “not experienced as separate”
(p. 49). Eventually, after this period of conflation and fusion, seeing and know-
ing can be differentiated, but a source–target association remains.
Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) interpretation of Christopher Johnson’s
study appears to be at odds with Johnson’s own interpretation: Johnson denied
that seeing and knowing are ever conceptually fused in the child’s mind (instead,
he simply noted that they are conflated in adults’ language).2 Moreover, the
logic by which the linguistic data support Lakoff and Johnson’s ontogenetic
claim about mental metaphors is elusive. The child used see most frequently in
its visual senses (Johnson, 1999, Table 1). Yet if the ideas of seeing and knowing
were initially fused, shouldn’t see have been used indiscriminately, either to
refer to acts of seeing or to acts of knowing? There may be a simple explanation
for the observed longitudinal pattern in the use of see: Children may be able
to talk, and think, about concrete acts of perception earlier than they can talk
and think about abstract mental states (e.g., Aksu-Koç, Ögel-Balaban, & Alp,
2009). More broadly, there is an inescapable circularity to arguments about
mental metaphors that are based on linguistic observations alone.
A second reason exists for skepticism about the proposed origin of men-
tal metaphors: Even if children go through a developmental stage at which
source and target domains are conflated in their minds, a proposal that is
compatible with Piaget’s (1927/1969) theorizing about cross-domain rela-
tionships, the existence of such a stage cannot be interpreted as evidence
that children learn these conflations on the basis of bodily experience. In
principle, source–target mappings that are important for reasoning about
the physical and social world could have become part of our mind’s “stan-
dard equipment” over the time course of human evolution, not of cognitive
development: That is, they could be innate (Casasanto, 2010; Casasanto,

2George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) appear to have interpreted Christopher Johnson’s survey dif-
ferently from how Johnson (1999) himself did. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), conflation is
at the levels of direct experience and of conceptualization: “For young children, subjective (nonsensori­
motor) experiences and judgments . . . and sensorimotor experiences . . . are so regularly conflated—
undifferentiated in experience—that for a time children do not distinguish between the two when they
occur together” (p. 46). For C. Johnson, however, the conflation is only at the level of language. Contra
Lakoff and Johnson, he wrote that his conflation hypothesis “does not rely on the idea that [correlated
experiences] are undifferentiated by children—more specifically there is no claim that children are inca-
pable of distinguishing visual and mental experiences . . . rather that visual situations provide a good
opportunity for adults to talk to children about mental experiences and as a result, children associate
‘see’ with situations that are both visual and mental” (1999, p. 168, italics added). Thus, it would appear
that for C. Johnson, the “conflation hypothesis” refers to a process through which adults’ use of meta-
phoric language influences the relationship between source and target domains in children’s minds—not
direct physical experience.

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 Fotakopoulou, & Boroditsky, 2010; Lourenco & Longo, 2011; Srinivasan &
Carey, 2010). Increasingly, developmental experiments reveal cross-domain
mappings that appear to function like metaphoric source–target relationships
in the minds of infants. Ten-month-olds make inferences about social inter-
actions that are consistent with the metaphor physical size is social dominance
(Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011). Four-month-olds
presented with visual and auditory stimuli appear to intuit the metaphor spa-
tial height is height in musical pitch (Walker et al., 2010). The fact that these
mappings are detectable in infants does not necessarily mean that they are
innate; innateness claims are exceptionally hard to support experimentally.
However, there is no evidence that many of the mappings Lakoff and Johnson
(and others) attribute to bodily experience are not innate.
A third reason for skepticism: There is a plausible, well-developed alter-
native to the proposed embodied origin of mental metaphors. Rather than origi-
nating in correlations in bodily experience, mental metaphors could originate
in correlations in linguistic experience. Consider the mental metaphor good
is up, bad is down. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), this mapping is
established as people implicitly learn associations between bodily actions and
the emotional states that typically co-occur with them (e.g., standing tall when
we feel proud, slouching when we feel dejected). As an alternative proposal,
however, mental metaphors could be established through experience using lin-
guistic metaphors. Using spatial words in both literal and metaphoric contexts
(e.g., on top of the building; on top of the world) could cause structural elements
of the source domain to be imported into target domain representations in the
mind of the language learner, via analogical processes that are not necessarily
“embodied” (see Boroditsky, 2000; Casasanto, 2009; French, 2002; Gentner,
1983). Linguistic conventions associating valence with vertical space are
reinforced by other nonlinguistic cultural conventions, such as the thumbs up
and thumbs down gestures that indicate approval and disapproval. Once these
symbolic conventions exist in language and culture, they can serve as the basis
for metaphoric mappings in the minds of individual learners, obviating any role
for direct bodily experience in constructing mental metaphors. As humans,
we learn a great deal from direct physical interactions with the environment,
but we also learn from symbols—and particularly from language. Exposure to
metaphors in language should be considered among the possible experiential
origins of mental metaphors in individual learners’ minds.3

3The proposal that correlations in linguistic experience give rise to mental metaphors such as good is up in
the individual learner raises the question of how such linguistic metaphors arose in the first place and why
they are so common across languages. It may be that correlations in direct bodily experience resulted in the
construction of these linguistic conventions over the time course of biological or linguistic-cultural evolu-
tion. Yet even if direct bodily experience is necessary on one of these timescales, it may not be necessary on
the timescale of conceptual development in the individual learner (Carey, 2009; Dehaene, 1999).

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 A fourth reason for skepticism: Some of the embodied experiential bases
of metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) are plausible (indeed,
there is a correlation between upright posture and positive mood, which could
give rise to the source–target relationship between vertical space and emo-
tional valence in principle), but for other source–target relationships that
are deeply entrenched in language and thought, this sort of embodied corre-
lational origin is implausible. For example, behavioral studies have explored
weight as a metaphoric source domain for importance. There is no doubt that
people use linguistic metaphors linking weight and importance in English and
other languages: a weighty opinion is an important opinion. Accordingly, in
one experiment, participants rated the importance of messages that they read
on either a heavy or a light clipboard. Fair decision-making procedures were
judged to be more important when people read about them on a heavy clip-
board than on a light one (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). Jostmann
et al. (2009) offered the following as the embodied, correlational basis of the
mental metaphor important is heavy:
Gravity is a ubiquitous force in nature that shapes people’s bodies and
behaviors in fundamental ways. . . . Depending on density and size, some
objects are heavier than others, and interacting with heavy objects pro-
vides different affordances . . . than interacting with light objects. Being
hit by a heavy object generally has more profound consequences than
being hit by a light object, and the energetic costs of moving a heavy
object are higher than those of moving a light object. Thus, on average,
heavy objects have a greater impact on people’s bodies than light objects
do. Through repeated experiences with heavy objects since early child-
hood, people learn that dealing with heavy objects generally requires more
effort, in terms of physical strength or cognitive planning, than dealing
with light objects. People may thus associate the experience of weight with
the increased expenditure of bodily or mental effort. (p. 1169)

All of this may be true, but none of this constitutes a plausible experiential
basis for the relationship between weight and importance. These experiences
could, in principle, form the embodied, correlational basis of a mapping such
as injurious is heavy or difficult is heavy, but not important is heavy.
A moment’s reflection suggests that if there is any experiential correla-
tion between weight and importance, it is a negative correlation. What do
people consider to be most important? Love, friendship, respect, meaning-
ful work, a sense of humor—all weightless. Among physical entities, what
do people consider most important: a wedding band, the photo of a soldier’s
sweetheart on his helmet, money (a $100 bill weighs four hundredths of an
ounce—the same as a $1 bill)? Someone’s car may be important, and it is
heavy, but it is probably not important because it is heavy, and a heavier car
would not necessarily be more important. How about the relationship between

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 weight and importance for children during a putative conflation stage: Is Dad
more important than Mom because he weighs more? Is the dictionary more
important than a Dr. Seuss book?
It does not appear to be the case that more weight correlates with more
importance in our ordinary physical experiences. It is possible that in previ-
ous eras, an experiential correlation between weight and importance was more
evident, at least in some symbolic domains such as salary (when it was literally
paid in salt) or coins (when they were made of precious metals of particular
masses) or when the value of commodities was determined by their weights on
balance scales. Expressions in modern languages that link weight with impor-
tance could be vestiges of these bygone physical experiences, and using these
linguistic expressions could invite language learners to construct a mental met-
aphor, in which case, the experiential basis of our importance is weight mapping
would be linguistic experience, not direct physical experience.
In summary, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) advanced the theory that basic
mental metaphors are learned obligatorily during the course of cognitive devel-
opment, on the basis of universally observable correlations between subjec-
tive experiences and perceptuomotor experiences. This proposal has been
embraced by many scholars and is widely considered to be a fundamental tenet
of metaphor theory and of embodied cognition. Yet this proposal has virtually
no empirical support, it is implausible in some cases (i.e., where no correlation
between source and target domains exists in our everyday experience), and
there are at least two credible alternatives to this proposal (i.e., at least some
mental metaphors are innate; at least some mental metaphors are learned via
linguistic or cultural experience).
Contrary to appearances, we are, as a field, in very much the same situ-
ation Lakoff and Johnson described in 1980: We do not know much about
the experiential bases of metaphors. And we are unlikely to make progress
on the question “Where do our mental metaphors come from?” unless we
acknowledge that (a) not all metaphors have an embodied basis and (b) this
question has only just begun to be addressed. In what follows, I describe three
metaphors that use the same source domain, the lateral (left–right) spatial
continuum, which provide unusual theoretical leverage on questions about
the experiential origins of metaphors in language and thought.

How Language Creates Mental Metaphors:

The Left–Right Spatialization of Politics

In the late 18th century, the French Legislative Assembly was arranged
such that the conservative members sat on the right side of the room and the
liberal members on the left (Oppenheimer & Trail, 2010). This arrangement

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 has had enduring consequences. More than 2 centuries later, liberal and con-
servative values are metaphorized on a left–right continuum, across many lan-
guages and cultures, as evidenced by English expressions such as “the liberal
left,” “centrist politics,” and “right-wing conservatives.”
These linguistic metaphors appear to correspond to active mental
metaphors. In one experiment, U.S. students were asked to sit in a “broken”
office chair while completing a political attitudes survey. Unbeknownst to
participants, a wheel had been removed strategically from one side or the
other, causing the chair to tilt leftward or rightward. Responses showed
that, on average, participants who had been assigned to sit in the left-
leaning chair expressed more agreement with Democrats (traditionally the
more liberal party), whereas participants assigned to sit in the right-leaning
chair tended to agree more strongly with Republicans (Oppenheimer &
Trail, 2010).
The automaticity with which people activate an implicit left–right
mapping of politics was confirmed in a series of reaction time studies in
Dutch participants. Although The Netherlands has many political parties,
which differ along multiple dimensions, the parties’ liberality or conserva-
tivism is often described using left–right metaphors (Bienfait & van Beek,
2001). Accordingly, when presented with parties’ acronyms, Dutch partici-
pants were faster to make judgments about more liberal parties with their left
hand (or when the acronym appeared on the left of the screen), and faster to
make judgments about more conservative parties with their right hand (or
when the acronym appeared on the right of the screen; van Elk, van Schie,
& Bekkering, 2010).
Where does this mental metaphor come from? Pointing to its historical
roots does not answer this question: That is, the arrangement of 18th century
French politicians does not explain how individuals come to intuit a map-
ping between politics and space today. The left–right mapping of politics is of
theoretical interest because it appears to function much like other orientational
metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)—and yet this mapping in language and
in thought cannot be acquired through incidental learning of correlations
between politics and space in the natural world. It is extremely unlikely, for
example, as we encounter others in our environment (e.g., at the dinner table,
in the classroom, at the cinema, on the bus) that we see people with liberal
views on our left and people with conservative views on our right with such
regularity that politics becomes “inevitably” mapped onto left–right space.
Rather than correlations in bodily experience, the obvious origin of this
mental metaphor is correlations in linguistic experience. Using the words
right and left in both literal contexts (e.g., the can is on the left of the shelf) and
metaphoric contexts (e.g., the candidate is on the left of the political spectrum)

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 could cause structural elements of the source domain to be transferred to tar-
get domain representations in individual language users’ minds, potentially
via analogical processes such as those proposed by Gentner (1983).
Before accepting the conclusion that linguistic experience instills this
metaphor in individuals’ minds, it is important to consider other possibili-
ties. First, in principle, the mapping could be innate (and this implicit men-
tal metaphor biased the arrangement of the French Legislative Assembly).
This proposal is dubious: It is unlikely that liberal and conservative political
ideologies, or even the concepts of left and right (which are absent from
some modern languages and cultures), arose early enough in human history
to have been encoded in our genes and neurally hardwired. Second, and
more plausibly, the mapping could arise via another source of experience:
the spatialization of politics in nonlinguistic cultural conventions. Could it
be the case that people acquire this mapping through exposure to graphic
representations in the media?
This suggestion presupposes that liberal and conservative political par-
ties or ideologies are, in fact, commonly represented on the left and right
respectively, in graphic representations on TV or in newspapers and maga-
zines. Is this true? For example, in the United States, donkeys and elephants
symbolize the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Often the
animals are depicted side by side, presumably to indicate opposition or
competition between the parties or to represent the voters’ two main alter-
natives. Is the donkey usually depicted on the left and the elephant on
the right?
To address this question, I conducted a brief survey. I ran two queries
of Google Images (http://www.google.com; August 24, 2012), using the
Advanced Image Search function to restrict the search to U.S. websites. The
search terms were donkey elephant for the first query and elephant donkey for
the second. Each search yielded more than 3 million images. Visual inspec-
tion of the first 10 pages displayed for each query confirmed that the majority
of the images conformed to the following criteria: (a) They showed exactly
one donkey and one elephant, (b) one animal was clearly located to the
right (or left) of the other, and (c) the depictions appeared to be intended to
symbolize the Democratic and Republican parties (i.e., they were not nature
photos that happened to contain these animals). For most images, this inten-
tion was clear from the blue and red colors of the donkey and elephant, stars
and stripes motifs, political slogans, pugilistic attitudes of the animals toward
each other, or the personification of the animals (e.g., dressing them in suits
and ties, placing them under the Capitol dome). The images appeared to
come from political cartoons, TV news backdrops, or campaign materials
(e.g., hats, T-shirts, bumper stickers, posters).

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 To sample the images in an unbiased manner, I selected the first
50 images from each query that met the three criteria and that were not
redundant with any previously selected image. I then tabulated and com-
pared the number of images in which the donkey was on the left of the image
and the elephant on the right (metaphor-congruent images) and the number
in which the positions were reversed.
The results were clear. Of the 100 images sampled, 51 (51%) were
metaphor-congruent and 49 (49%) were metaphor-incongruent (sign test p =
.92). The order of the search terms did not significantly affect the metaphor-
congruity of the images (“donkey elephant”: 27 [54%] metaphor-congruent,
23 [46%] metaphor-incongruent; “elephant donkey”: 24 [48%] metaphor-
congruent, 26 [52%] metaphor-incongruent; c2(1) = 0.36, p = .55).
The donkey and the elephant, the most widely recognizable nonlinguis-
tic symbols of political orientation in U.S. politics, are often depicted side
by side. Yet according to this (preliminary) survey, these depictions do not
reliably spatialize the animals according to the left–right political metaphor
that is found in Americans’ language and thought. It is not clear why they
do not: In some cases, other design constraints might outweigh spatializing
the animals according to the left–right metaphor. Alternatively, unlike some
other spatial relationships (e.g., up–down), right–left depends on perspec-
tive. In many images, the donkey and elephant are facing out of the page,
toward the viewer. In such cases, an artist who wished to make their spatial
locations congruent with the left is liberal convention would have to decide
whether to place the donkey on the viewer’s left or on the elephant’s left
(i.e., the viewer’s right). The apparent randomness of the positions of the
animals in the images surveyed could reflect artists expressing the left–right
mental metaphor graphically but making different choices about whose left–
right perspective to adopt. The ambiguity introduced by a reversible spa-
tial perspective could also explain why candidates are not always placed in
metaphor-congruent locations on our TV screens: In the last debate of the
2008 U.S. presidential campaign the Democrat (Barack Obama) was on the
left and the Republican (John McCain) on the right, but in the first debate of
the 2012 campaign the Republican (Mitt Romney) was on the left and the
Democrat (Obama) on the right of the screen.4
Whatever the reason for the apparent lack of any systematic use of
left–right space in these political depictions, the implications for the present

4The U.S. Senate and House are arranged similarly to the 18th century French Legislative Assembly, but
people who are not members of the Senate or House are unlikely to be exposed to this spatialization of
the political “left” and “right” with sufficient frequency to give rise to an implicit mental metaphor. Fur-
thermore, the viewpoint from which the Senate or Congress are depicted varies between photographs
and videos, sometimes showing the Democrats and Republicans in metaphor-congruent and sometimes
in metaphor-incongruent sides of viewer-centered space.

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 question are clear. If political parties or ideologies are not systematically
spatialized in the media and in nonlinguistic graphic conventions, these
conventions cannot be responsible for establishing the spatial mappings in
people’s minds. It appears that talking about liberal and conservative politi-
cal attitudes in terms of space is what causes people to think about them that
way—a conclusion that awaits further experimental validation.

How the Body Creates Mental Metaphors:

The Left–Right Spatialization of Valence

Across many cultures, the right side is associated with things that are
good and lawful and the left side with things that are dirty, bad, or prohib-
ited. The association of good with right and bad with left is evident in positive
and negative expressions like my right-hand man and two left feet, and in the
meanings of English words derived from the Latin for right (dexter) and left
(sinister).
Do people think about good and bad things in terms of left–right space?
For example, do people tend to feel more positively about things that appear
on one side of space and more negatively about things that appear on the
other side? Until recently, the answer appeared to be no. According to
Tversky (2001),
despite the fact that most people are right-handed and terms like dexter-
ity derived from “right” in many languages have positive connotations
and terms like sinister derived from “left” have negative connotations,
the horizontal axis in graphic displays seems to be neutral. (p. 101)
Some links between right–left space and positive and negative evalua-
tion were documented (e.g., the preference for stockings hung on the right of
a clothes hanger; Wilson & Nisbett, 1978), but such effects were unpredicted
and explained post hoc in terms of temporal order, not spatial position.
More recently, however, studies have revealed that people do implicitly
associate “positive” and “negative” emotional valence with “right” and “left”
but not always in the way that linguistic and cultural conventions suggest.
Rather, associations between valence and left–right space depend on the way
people use their hands to interact with their physical environment (for a
review, see Casasanto, 2011). In one series of experiments, when asked to
decide which of two products to buy, which of two job applicants to hire, or
which of two alien creatures looks more honest, intelligent, or attractive,
right- and left-handers tended to respond differently: Right-handers tended
to prefer the product, person, or creature presented on their right side, but
left-handers tended to prefer the one on their left (Casasanto, 2009). This

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 pattern persisted even when people made judgments orally, without using
their hands to respond. Other experiments show that children as young as
5 years old already make evaluations according to handedness and spatial loca-
tion, judging animals shown on their dominant side to be nicer and smarter
than animals on their nondominant side (Casasanto & Henetz, 2012).
The implicit association between valence and left–right space influ-
ences people’s memory and their motor responses as well as their judgments.
In one experiment, participants were shown the locations of fictitious posi-
tive and negative events on a map and asked to recall the locations later.
Memory errors were predicted by the valence of the event and the hand-
edness of the participant: Right-handers were biased to locate positive
events too far to the right and negative events too far to the left on the
map, whereas left-handers showed the opposite biases (Brunyé, Gardony,
Mahoney, & Taylor, 2012). In reaction time tasks, right- and left-handers
were faster to classify words as positive when responding by pressing a
button with their dominant hand and faster to classify words as negative
when responding with their nondominant hand (de la Vega, de Filippis,
Lachmair, Dudschig, & Kaup, 2012).
Associations of handedness with valence and space have been observed
beyond the laboratory, in the speech and gestures of right- and left-handed
U.S. presidential candidates during televised debates in 2004 and 2008
(Casasanto & Jasmin, 2010). In right-handers (Bush, Kerry), right-hand
gestures were more strongly associated with positive-valence speech than
left-hand gestures, and left-hand gestures were more strongly associated with
negative-valence speech than right-hand gestures; the opposite associations
between hand and valence were found in left-handers (McCain, Obama),
despite the centuries-old tradition of training public speakers to gesture with
the right hand for good things and the left hand for bad things (or not to use
the left hand at all; Quintilianus, 1920).
Together, these data from studies using questionnaires, reaction time
tasks, map tasks, and spontaneous gestures suggest that the mental metaphor
good is dominant side–bad is nondominant side is habitually activated, with a
high degree of automaticity, when people evaluate the positivity of stimuli or
recall information with a positive or negative valence. These findings provide
one line of support for the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009),
which posits that people with different kinds of bodies should tend to think
differently in predictable ways, specifically due to the ways their bodies con-
strain their interactions with the physical environment.
Where does this mental metaphor come from? Casasanto (2009) pro-
posed that people come to associate positive with their dominant side of space
because they can usually interact with their physical environment more flu-
ently on this side, using their dominant hand. This proposal follows from the

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 finding that fluent perceptuomotor interactions with the environment gener-
ally lead to more positive feelings, whereas disfluent interactions lead to more
negative feelings and evaluations (e.g., Ping, Dhillon, & Beilock, 2009).
To test whether manual motor fluency drives associations between
valence and left–right space, Casasanto and Chrysikou (2011) studied
how people think about good and bad after their dominant hand had been
impaired, reversing the usual asymmetry in motor fluency between their
right and left hands. This reversal of motor fluency resulted in a reversal of
behavioral responses: Natural right-handers whose right hand was perma-
nently impaired by a unilateral stroke or temporarily by wearing a cumber-
some glove on the right hand in the laboratory tended to associate good
with the left side of space, like natural left-handers.
These results demonstrate a causal role for motor experience in deter-
mining the relationship between valence and left–right space in people’s
minds. In the short term, even a few minutes of acting more fluently with
the left hand than the right can cause natural right-handers to associate good
with left. The effects of short-term motor asymmetries are presumably tempo-
rary, but the same associative learning mechanisms that change people’s judg-
ments in the laboratory may result in the long-term changes found in stroke
patients and may establish natural right- and left-handers’ mental metaphors
for valence in the course of ordinary motor experience.
Do regularities in language or culture contribute to the implicit left–
right mapping of valence in people’s minds? So far, there is no evidence that
they do. Writing direction, for example, does not appear to have any effect
on the strength of this mapping, nor does the presence of stringent taboos
against use of the left hand, as evidenced by the finding of similar experi-
mental results in Moroccan Arabs as in American, Spanish, and Dutch
participants (de la Fuente, Casasanto, Román, & Santiago, 2011). It would
be reasonable to posit that within a culture, influences of motor fluency and
linguistic conventions could combine to shape people’s left–right meta-
phors for valence. In principle, people could have two mental metaphors
linking valence with left–right space: one based on patterns in language
and culture and the other on patterns of direct bodily experience. If so, the
two mappings would be congruent for right-handers (for whom both asso-
ciate good with right) but incongruent for left-handers (for whom language
and culture associate good with right but bodily experience associates good
with left). This conjecture makes a prediction: Assuming the influences of
the two metaphors on an individual’s behavior are roughly additive, the
good is right bias in right-handers should be stronger than the good is left
bias in left-handers. Yet this prediction is disconfirmed by the results of
numerous experiments (e.g., Casasanto, 2009; Casasanto & Henetz, 2012;
Casasanto & Jasmin, 2010). Across studies, the body-specific good is left

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 mapping tends to be stronger in left-handers than the good is right mapping
in right-handers. To date, there is no evidence that good is right idioms
in language or culture influence implicit left–right mental metaphors for
valence.
Overall, these results cannot be explained by experience with language
and culture, which consistently associate good with right. Linguistic and cul-
tural experience, therefore, cannot be the origin of the robust association
between good and left found in left-handers. Furthermore, the association of
good with one side or the other cannot be (entirely) innate, because it has
been shown to depend on long- and short-term motor experience. The body-
specific left–right mapping of valence provides one example—arguably the
only example to date—of a mental metaphor that can be shown to depend
on correlations between subjective experiences (i.e., of valence) and motor
experiences, learned implicitly as individuals interact with their physical
environment.
Does the discovery of a body-based mapping between space and
valence validate Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) proposal that mental met-
aphors originate in correlations between perceptuomotor and subjective
experiences? In the broadest sense it does, but in the details it does not.
There is no evidence, for example, that right-handed children go through
a developmental phase of source–target conflation, during which their con-
ceptions of bad and leftward in space are fused and gradually become dif-
ferentiated; it would be surprising if this were the case. It would be even
more surprising if such a process of conceptual conflation and differen-
tiation were responsible for the reversal of the left–right valence mapping
observed in unilateral stroke patients and in ski-glove-trained college stu-
dents (Casasanto & Chrysikou, 2011). Rather than illustrating the specific
process conflation-and-differentiation proposed by Lakoff and Johnson
(1999), the left–right mapping of valence illustrates a more general process
by which perceptuomotor and subjective experiences may become associ-
ated and used inferentially as a mental metaphor.

How Culture Shapes Mental Metaphors:

The Left–Right Spatialization of Time

The left–right mappings of politics and of valence are special cases: A

purely linguistic origin can be established for politics (or at least a largely
linguistic origin, allowing for the possibility of as-yet-undetected influences
of other cultural experiences), and a purely bodily origin can be established
for valence. There may be no comparable case in which nonlinguistic cul-
tural conventions can be shown to be responsible for establishing a mental

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 metaphor, de novo. However, the left–right mapping of time provides an
illustration of how culture can shape what may be preexisting mental meta-
phors, determining crucial aspects of implicit associations between time and
space.
Often, the way people talk about time using spatial metaphors corre-
sponds to the way they spatialize time in their minds. In English, spatial
metaphors for temporal sequences suggest that events in time flow along the
sagittal (front–back) axis: Deadlines lie ahead of us or behind us; we can look
forward to our golden years or look back on our greener days (Clark, 1973).
These linguistic metaphors appear to correspond to an active mental meta-
phor. In one study, for example, English speakers were found to lean forward
when thinking about the future and lean backward when thinking about the
past (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010).
Yet the way people use space to talk about time is not necessarily the way
they use space to think about it. No known spoken language uses the lateral
(left–right) axis to talk about time conventionally, and invented left–right
metaphors for time may sound nonsensical: Monday comes before Tuesday,
not to the left of Tuesday (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Cienki, 1998). Despite
the total absence of left–right metaphors in spoken language, however, there
is strong evidence that people implicitly associate time with left–right space.
Furthermore, the direction in which events flow along people’s imaginary
timelines varies systematically across cultures. Events flow rightward in cul-
tures whose literate members use a left-to-right orthography and leftward in
cultures that use a right-to-left orthography (e.g., Fuhrman & Boroditsky,
2010; Ouellet, Santiago, Israeli, & Gabay, 2010; Tversky, Kugelmass, &
Winter, 1991).
Does this mean that the left–right mapping of time in people’s minds
has its origin in the cultural practice of reading and writing? It is not possible
to make this causal inference on the basis of cross-cultural data, which are
correlational. In principle, a writing system could emerge with one direction-
ality or another as a consequence of culture-specific conceptions of time—not
a cause. Furthermore, cultural practices tend to covary. There are other well-
established nonlinguistic cultural conventions by which time is habitually
spatialized from left to right. These include spontaneous gestures and graphic
conventions in calendars, graphs, and timelines.
Casasanto and Bottini (2013) conducted a series of experiments to inves-
tigate whether experience reading a particular orthography can determine the
direction and orientation of the mental timeline. Dutch speakers performed
space–time congruity tasks with the instructions and stimuli written in either
standard, mirror-reversed, or rotated orthography. Reading requires scanning
the page in a particular direction. Normally, for readers who use the Roman
alphabet, reading each line of a text requires moving one’s eyes (and one’s

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 attention) gradually from the left to the right side of the page or the computer
screen. As such, moving rightward in space is tightly coupled with “moving”
later in time. If the habit of reading from left to right contributes to an implicit
left-to-right mapping of time in readers’ minds, then practice reading in the
opposite direction should eventually reverse this mapping. By the same logic,
reading top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top should cause the usual space-time
mapping to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise.
Consistent with these predictions, when participants judged temporal
phrases written in standard orthography, their reaction times were consistent
with a rightward-directed mental timeline. After exposure to mirror-reversed
orthography, however, participants showed the opposite pattern of reaction
times; their implicit mental timelines were reversed, like those observed in
members of right-to-left reading cultures. When standard orthography was
rotated 90 degrees clockwise (downward) or counterclockwise (upward),
reaction times indicated that participants’ mental timelines were rotated
accordingly. These results show that reading can play a causal role in shaping
people’s implicit time representations, even when other cultural, linguistic,
and environmental factors are held constant. Exposure to a new orthogra-
phy can change the direction and orientation of the mental timeline within
minutes—even when the new space-time mapping directly contradicts the
reader’s usual mapping—illustrating both the automaticity and the flexibility
with which people activate spatial schemas for temporal order.
The data showing that reading experience is sufficient to determine the
orientation direction of the mental timeline should not be interpreted as indi-
cating that reading or writing experience is necessary for fixing its direction or
that reading and writing are the only cultural practices that could contribute
to the specifics of the mental timeline beyond the laboratory. For the present
discussion, it is important to note that the direction of the mental timeline
could not be due to correlations in linguistic experience because time is not
mapped to left–right space in spoken language. It could not be due to cor-
relations in bodily experience with the natural environment because natural
space–time correlations are not direction-specific (i.e., it is not the case that
earlier events tend to occur on our left and later events on our right, or vice
versa). The orientation and direction of the mental timeline must depend on
some aspect (or aspects) of nonlinguistic cultural experience.

Conclusion

It is widely accepted that mental metaphors have an embodied origin:

According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), they are inevitably learned during
the course of cognitive development, on the basis of correlations between

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 subjective experiences and perceptuomotor experiences as children interact
with the physical environment, due to universal properties of the body, brain,
and world. Yet despite widespread acceptance of this view, there is little evi-
dence to support it, and there is some clear evidence against it.
It may be difficult to determine the experiential origins of most of the
mental metaphors that have been studied. Many metaphors are like good is
up: They could be innate, or they could have their basis in linguistic experi-
ence (e.g., using expressions such as feeling up or down), cultural experience
(e.g., using gestures such as thumbs up), or bodily experience (e.g., standing
upright when we feel proud). Behavioral experiments validating the good
is up mapping are consistent with all of these possibilities and are therefore
uninformative about the origins of this mental metaphor, or others like it.
Fortunately, for at least a few mental metaphors, the experiential ori-
gins can be determined unambiguously, thus illustrating a range of possible
origins for other mental metaphors. The left–right mapping of politics could
not be based on correlations between subjective and perceptuomotor experi-
ences with the natural environment, it is not likely to be innate, and it does
not appear to be grounded in nonlinguistic cultural conventions; rather,
it appears likely to arise, largely or entirely, on the basis of correlations in
linguistic experience. By contrast, the left–right mapping of emotional
valence could only arise from correlations in bodily experience (although
not necessarily on the “conflation” of space in valence in early childhood, as
posited by Lakoff & Johnson). The left–right mapping of time, in contrast,
illustrates the role of nonlinguistic cultural practices in shaping preexisting
source–target mappings and demonstrates how mental metaphors can be
culture-specific at one level of analysis but may be universal at another.
Determining the experiential origins of our mental metaphors requires
looking beyond the body and considering how our experiences of interacting
with both the physical environment and social environment shape our minds.

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 13
Metaphor Research in
Social-Personality Psychology:
The Road Ahead
Mark J. Landau, Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggested that people think, feel, and behave
in metaphoric terms. This is a fascinating perspective on human nature but
one that has only recently been put to the test empirically. Despite the fact
that such investigations have been recent—arguably less than 10 years old—
an impressive body of evidence has supported conceptual metaphor theory
(CMT; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). Each chapter in this volume shows,
in its own way, that this emerging research area enhances our understand-
ing of diverse social phenomena and, more generally, the cognitive under-
pinnings of human meaning making. Yet with each discovery, new research
questions and theoretical controversies come to light. In this final chapter,
we offer some suggestions that researchers might find useful as they create,
refine, and test theories of metaphor’s significance in social life. Some of these
suggestions are inspired by CMT; others are based more generally on a critical

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14278-012
The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, M.â•–J. Landau, M.â•–D. Robinson, and
B.â•–P. Meier (Editors)
Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

269

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 survey of the contemporary empirical landscape. When possible, we discuss
how researchers have already applied these suggestions to launch new and
fruitful lines of empirical inquiry.

Widening the Empirical Lens on Metaphor

In 2004, Meier and Robinson showed that people’s judgments of affec-

tively charged words such as evil and hero were influenced by the words’ ver-
tical position on the computer monitor (up is good, down is bad; Meier &
Robinson, 2004) and font color (white is good, black is bad; Meier, Robinson,
& Clore, 2004). The following year, Schubert (2005) reported a series of
studies showing that groups and individuals were viewed as more powerful
when they occupied higher regions of vertical space (powerful is up, powerless
is down). These were among the first published studies that applied experi-
mental methods to test CMT’s claim that representations of abstract social
concepts (referred to as targets) are partly structured around knowledge of
superficially dissimilar, relatively more concrete concepts (sources).
This early work helped set the stage for the formalization of a broad
empirical strategy for testing CMT-derived hypotheses, labeled the meta-
phoric transfer strategy (Landau et al., 2010). As we discussed in Chapter 1 of
this volume, using this strategy (along with a toolbox of established meth-
ods) has enabled researchers to hurdle the limitations of previous research
that looked for signs of conceptual metaphor in language use. In a nutshell,
evidence for conceptual metaphor derived from the study of word etymology,
patterns in metaphoric linguistic expressions, and language comprehension is
regularly critiqued on the grounds that it tells us more about metaphor’s prev-
alence in communication than its active influence in cognition and represen-
tational processes (see Chapter 2). Metaphor research in social psychology
has sidestepped this critique by showing that people’s perceptions, attitudes,
and memories bear the stamp of metaphor’s influence even in contexts in
which people are not communicating or otherwise primed with metaphoric
language.
As evidence for conceptual metaphor has increased, the metaphor-
related basis of previous findings has increased as well. For example, hot
temperatures render individuals more aggressive (Anderson, 2001), and we
now know that at least part of this influence could be mediated by meta-
phors linking anger to heat (Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter, & Feltman,
2009). Aron, Aron, and Smollan (1992) showed that a nonverbal measure
of interpersonal closeness—indicating the degree of overlap between circles
representing the self and a relationship partner—is a powerful predictor of
relationship outcomes. This effect likely derives from metaphoric influences

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 linking physical and relational closeness (Williams & Bargh, 2008b). An
early demonstration that the adjectives warm and cold are powerful influences
on the favorability of personality impressions (Asch, 1946), too, has been
reinterpreted in terms of the influence of temperature metaphors in form-
ing impressions of others (Williams & Bargh, 2008a). We recommend that
researchers continue to reexamine recent and classic findings in the literature
through the lens of CMT.
Because CMT addresses the processes by which people make sense of
abstract concepts, it can be applied to enhance the study of virtually any social
and personality psychological phenomenon that involves people thinking,
feeling, and acting in relation to abstract concepts. One need only observe
the diversity of outcomes discussed in the chapters of this volume—ranging
from consumer product choices to moral judgments—to appreciate CMT’s
broad relevance. As such, a straightforward future direction for metaphor
research is to continue using the metaphoric transfer strategy to examine
metaphors that have not yet been examined experimentally (e.g., does a sour
taste experience lead to dissatisfaction with an interaction?) or outcomes that
have not yet been investigated (e.g., do cold temperatures lead us to infer that
crimes were committed in a “cold-blooded,” calculating, and manipulative
manner?).
Toward this end, a useful tool for hypothesis generation is to observe
the expression of metaphor in ordinary language, images, ceremonies, and
other practices by which people construct and communicate systems of
cultural meaning. Researchers can turn to penetrating analyses of ordinary
conversation (e.g., Gibbs, 1994; Kövecses, 2010; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;
Lakoff & Turner, 1989), commercial messaging and visual media (Forceville
& Urios-Aparisi, 2009), and gesture (McNeill, 2005), or they can just listen
carefully the next time they or anyone else opens their mouth, to observe
how individuals and groups use metaphors to communicate about events, cau-
sation, emotion, social organization, and many other abstract social concepts.
From there, researchers can formulate hypotheses about how those meta-
phors influence cognitive processes (e.g., inference making, attitude forma-
tion, memory) and behavior, and can then test those hypotheses using the
metaphoric transfer strategy.
Such a focus on individual metaphors is necessary but limited. Although
CMT inspires us to look for metaphors in every corner of social life, it leaves
researchers all too free to jump from metaphor to metaphor—and there are
plenty of them. Kövecses’s (2010) introduction to contemporary metaphor
research lists 347 conventional metaphors in its index, the majority of which
are relevant to social thought, feeling, and action. The online master metaphor
list compiled by Lakoff, Espenson, and Schwartz (1991) lists dozens more. Do
people think about balanced political policies in terms of physical balance?

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 Do they conceptualize ideas as bits of food that that can be chewed up, swal-
lowed, and regurgitated? Is guilt really experienced as a weight on one’s shoul-
ders? These are certainly interesting questions, but the totality of research
along such lines may merely create a scattered list of isolated observations.
In this context, we recommend that researchers complement the study
of individual metaphors with a more phenomenon-focused approach (for
a further discussion, see Landau et al., 2010). This entails starting with a
phenomenon of social- or personality-psychological interest, identifying the
multiple metaphors observed in discourse surrounding that phenomenon,
and then examining their disparate influences. For example, romantic court-
ing may be viewed as a game, a dance, or a conquest (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).
Individuals viewing courting as a game should have shallower romantic rela-
tionships (e.g., Hendrick & Hendrick, 2006), those viewing courting as a
dance should be more sensitive to their potential relationship partners, and
we might expect Machiavellian individuals, as well as those prone to sexual
harassment (Lee, Gizzarone, & Ashton, 2003), to more greatly endorse the
idea that courtship involves conquest.
Although these specific predictions have not yet been tested, there are
some empirical precedents for the alternate source strategy, which involves
testing whether priming different metaphors for the same target (or a meta-
phor vs. a nonmetaphoric interpretation) produces divergent effects on tar-
get processing (Landau et al., 2010). In one relevant investigation, Landau,
Sullivan, and Greenberg (2009) studied how metaphor influences Americans’
attitudes toward immigration into the United States. A nation is often con-
ceptualized metaphorically as a physical body (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and
because bodies are known to be vulnerable to contaminating foreign agents,
it is possible that people’s motivation to protect their own bodies from con-
tamination leads them to be vigilant about immigrants entering their nation.
To test this possibility, Landau et al. (2009) manipulated contamination
concern by priming participants to view airborne bacteria in their environ-
ment as either harmful to their physical health or innocuous. Participants, all
of whom were U.S. citizens, then read an ostensibly unrelated essay describ-
ing the United States. For half of the participants, the essay contained state-
ments metaphorically framing the United States as a body (e.g., “The United
States experienced an unprecedented growth spurt”); for the other partici-
pants, those metaphoric expressions were replaced with literal paraphrases
(e.g., “The United States experienced an unprecedented period of innova-
tion”). As expected, heightening participants’ concerns with bodily contami-
nation led them to express more hostility toward immigrants if they were
primed to think of their nation as a physical body; in contrast, contamination
threat did not influence immigration attitudes when the nation was framed
in nonmetaphoric terms.

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 A phenomenon-focused approach to studying metaphor recommends
the alternate source strategy in future research. It also recommends exam-
ining the factors of the person’s social environment and personality that
determine whether metaphors (vs. nonmetaphoric representations) are
used to process information related to that phenomenon and which meta-
phors are used.

Conceptual Metaphor Versus Other

Potential Mechanisms

We do not believe that the range of findings reviewed in the present

volume can be understood in terms that are not metaphor related. However,
other potential mechanisms are at least somewhat plausible, at least in rela-
tion to some findings. For this reason, and to highlight metaphor’s unique
influence on social thought, feeling, and behavior, we compare and contrast
this mechanism with two other mechanisms that might be invoked.

Metaphoric Influence and Spreading Activation Processes

When many psychologists first hear about metaphoric transfer effects,

they ask, “Aren’t these just demonstrations of spreading activation?” We
suspect that the reader is familiar with associative network models of seman-
tic priming and spreading activation, given their central place in contem-
porary social psychology (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2008). The gist is that the
activation of one thought in memory spreads to activate other thoughts
that came to be associated through repeated pairings over time (Collins &
Loftus, 1975). For example, priming the thought salt will likely render the
thought pepper more accessible, presumably because these thoughts share a
well-learned association. Perhaps metaphoric transfer effects simply involve
spreading activation. More pointedly, embodied source primes (e.g., the
sensation of physical warmth) may simply activate a polysemous concept
(e.g., warm), which in turn influences perceptions related to abstract con-
cepts (e.g., friendliness), potentially independent of metaphoric influences
as characterized by CMT.
Can metaphoric influences be understood in terms of spreading activa-
tion processes? We believe that the most accurate answer to this question is
“yes and no.” Understood broadly, metaphor involves patterns of associations
between pieces of knowledge, and metaphoric transfer effects involve spread-
ing activation across some of these associations. A closer look, however,
reveals three unique features of metaphor. The first thing to notice is that

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 the concepts that participate in metaphor are dissimilar, at least at the surface
level. It is sufficient to point out that most people interact with, say, salt and
pepper in similar ways—both are commonly used as granulated substances
for seasoning food. By comparison, consider a typical metaphor: theories are
buildings. Although theories and buildings share some abstract qualities in
common (e.g., both are created by human beings), people generally relate
to exemplars of these categories in different ways. Despite this, metaphor
enables people to use their well-structured knowledge of buildings as a frame-
work for thinking about analogous aspects of theories: Theories must have a
solid foundation and be well-supported by the data or they will crumble, and you
can construct them from the ground up, buttress them with new findings, and
then have your opponents tear them down brick by brick.
A second, related feature of metaphor is that the mapping between
the source and the target is partial, meaning that not all elements of the
source are used to structure representations of the target (e.g., people do not
conventionally think about whether a theory’s restrooms are handicapped
accessible). Third, metaphors typically map structure from a concrete source
to a relatively more abstract target but not the other way around. We can
get a better grasp on theories by conceptualizing them in terms of buildings,
but we do not normally rely on our knowledge of theories to think and talk
about buildings. Although some (but not all) models of spreading activat-
ing could be retrofitted to accommodate these features—in sum, a partial
and unidirectional mapping between dissimilar concepts—CMT specifies
them a priori. In short, metaphoric transfer effects are indeed due to spread-
ing activation but of a particular kind hitherto unappreciated in schema-
based models of social cognition.

Metaphoric Influences and Embodied Simulation

There is considerable interest in embodied simulation in social psy-

chology, typically following the lead of embodied theories of cognition. The
best-known one, advanced by Barsalou (1999, 2008), holds that concepts
contain representations of bodily states that regularly occur during interac-
tions with relevant stimuli. As a result, processing those concepts involves
the simulation, or reactivation, of associated bodily states. Conceptual meta-
phor and embodied simulation are both mechanisms by which representa-
tions of bodily states are informative concerning how people understand and
process abstract concepts. Yet they are distinct. Embodied simulation is an
intraconceptual mechanism—bodily states and experiences are represented as
part of the concept they refer to, and they got there through direct percep-
tual and motor experiences with the surrounding environment. For example,

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 smiling may trigger happy thoughts, and grasping may trigger thoughts con-
sistent with tool use.
Metaphor does not necessarily possess either of these features. Most
important, metaphor is an interconceptual mechanism—two concepts operate
independently, but one can be used as a coherently organized schema for think-
ing about analogous elements of the other. Second, one does not need direct
embodied experiences with the concrete concepts to use them in metaphor. For
example, people can use their knowledge about computer hardware as a frame-
work for thinking about how the mind works, or they can understand marital
discord in terms of courtroom proceedings, even if they have no direct embod-
ied interactions with motherboards or jury boxes. In these examples, thinking
about abstract concepts is partly structured by schematic knowledge of a source
concept’s features, properties, and the relations that hold among them, and not
necessarily the sensory and motor representations associated with them.
There are certainly embodied influences that are not metaphor related.
For example, Niedenthal, Winkielman, Mondillon, and Vermeulen (2009)
showed that participants making judgments about words related to emotion
concepts (e.g., joy) exhibited facial muscle activity associated with those
emotions. This evidence suggests that facial muscles that are customarily
activated in response to emotion-eliciting stimuli constitute a portion of
the content of respective emotion concepts. This evidence does not show,
however, that these patterns of facial muscular activity are separate concepts
that are used to think and talk metaphorically about emotions. In addition,
there are also metaphoric influences that are not embodied. For example,
people conceptualize their anger in terms of explosions (Gibbs, 1994), and
yet bodies do not typically explode (if they did, such individuals would be
dead rather than angry).
Thus, embodiment and metaphor-related theories both share the idea
that perceptual representations are often co-opted to understand abstract
concepts (e.g., emotions). In this important sense, both theories counter the
idea that social cognition can be understood in terms of abstract, symbolic
information processing independent of having the particular types of bodies
that we have. Yet the mechanisms involved are conceptually distinct in many
important respects, and it will be important to acknowledge these distinc-
tions as theory and research on embodied social cognition progress.

Future Research Directions

There are discrepancies in the literature that need to be resolved. For

example, Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008) found that cleansing the self
resulted in more lenient moral judgments, whereas Zhong, Strejcek, and

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 Sivanathan (2010) found that cleansing the self resulted in harsher moral
judgments. Williams and Bargh (2008a) found that a warm temperature
experience resulted in greater perceptions of interpersonal warmth, but Bargh
and Shalev (2012) found that more lonely people (who presumably lack
interpersonal warmth in their lives) preferred and took longer warm baths
and showers. Unpublished work in the Robinson laboratory has shown that
people who prefer “light” to “dark” believe in God to a greater extent, but a
subsequent manipulation of perceptual darkness resulted in higher levels of
belief in God. What is missing is a systematic comparison of such apparently
divergent effects in single research designs. In the present section, however,
we emphasize more fundamental future research directions.

Personality Processes

Experimental demonstrations of CMT are valuable, but the effects may

be short-lived. Therefore, there is a real need to show that metaphoric cogni-
tion can be used to understand relatively longer-lasting variations in thinking,
feeling, and behavior, the focus of personality psychology. In their chapter,
Robinson and Fetterman (Chapter 7, this volume) presented one general
strategy for research studies of this type. Briefly, individuals can be asked
which of two bipolar opposites that prominent metaphors suggest should be
consequential—such as heart versus head, sweet versus bitter, light versus
dark, and warm versus cold—they prefer. Individuals will naturally differ in
their preferences and such differences should possess explanatory value in
understanding and predicting a wide range of personality variables and out-
comes. Extant studies using this strategy have shown that people higher in
the personality trait of agreeableness prefer and perceive higher temperatures,
relatively more dominant individuals prefer up to down, depressed individu-
als prefer down to up, people who have a higher preference for sweet foods
are more prosocial, and people who view themselves as head-related entities
are smarter. The evidence is preliminary, however, and a great deal more work
would be useful in establishing what we term a metaphor-enriched view of
personality psychology.

Metaphors and Relationship Outcomes

Many metaphors possess implications for relationship functioning. For

example, we would typically prefer to interact with warm relative to cold
people, and more intimate couples are described as close rather than distant.
Experimental research confirms that priming perceptual warmth or close-
ness results in personality impressions consistent with perceiving people as
friendly and promotes relationship attachment, respectively (Williams &

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 Bargh, 2008a, 2008b). Yet there have been no forays of CMT into the per-
sonal relationship literature that we know of.
The same metaphoric preference strategy identified earlier (see Chap-
ter 7, this volume) can be used in the relationship domain. Among other
predictions, we would expect warm-preferring individuals to display greater
intimacy in their social interactions and to have romantic relationships that
are longer-lived. It is in fact striking how seemingly metaphoric prominent
relationship measures are (Aron et al., 1992; Berscheid, Snyder, & Omoto,
2004; Fletcher, Simpson, & Thomas, 2000; Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna,
1985). Accordingly, there are good reasons for thinking that metaphoric
preferences and perceptions may possess considerable value in understanding
relationship functioning, but the relevant studies have not been conducted.

Cross-Cultural Comparisons

We think it is an established fact that all cultures thus far examined

use metaphors frequently in their everyday discourse (Asch, 1958; Kövecses,
2005). Furthermore, they often do so in a way that suggests equivalence across
cultures. For example, there are reasons to think that multiple cultures con-
ceptualize power in terms of higher vertical positions (Schwartz, 1981) and
conceptualize interpersonal warmth in terms of physical warmth (Williams,
Huang, & Bargh, 2009). Yet there are important differences across cultures as
well. Anger is apparently viewed as a gas rather than a fluid in Eastern cultures
(Yu, 1995), Eastern cultures apparently view linear time in terms of vertical
rather than horizontal dimension (Boroditsky, 2001), and there may be rea-
sons for thinking that perceptual redness has different connotations across
cultures (Elliot & Maier, 2007). We therefore call for CMT-motivated studies
in which cross-cultural comparisons are of central interest (see Chapter 12,
this volume). Studies of this type may be invaluable in understanding whether
metaphoric influences are culturally universal or vary by culture in accordance
with the linguistic expressions that also vary by culture.

Light–Dark Metaphors and Racial Prejudice

In many of the major religious texts across the world, light–dark met-
aphors figure prominently. Darkness is associated with evil and ignorance,
whereas lightness is associated with goodness and wisdom (for a partial
review, see Meier et al., 2004). Such associations presumably occur because
we are diurnal creatures who function effectively in daylight but ineffectively
at nighttime (Tolaas, 1991). Such light–dark metaphors have systematic
implications for understanding racial prejudice, but these systematic impli-
cations have yet to be pursued. What is known is that implicit evaluations

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 of dark-skinned individuals are often negative (Fazio & Olson, 2003), some-
times even among African Americans (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz,
1998), and that dark-skinned (e.g., Black) individuals are most definitely dis-
criminated against (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004). We suggest that conceptual
metaphors may be implicated in these findings. If so, for example, individuals
who prefer light to dark to a greater extent should be more racially prejudiced.
Additionally, individuals who display priming effects consistent with white
= positive and black = negative reaction time effects (Meier et al., 2004)
should exhibit behaviors consistent with greater racial prejudice against
black-skinned individuals. Again, such studies have not been performed.

The Multifaceted Nature of Conceptual Metaphor

Mappings between source and target concepts are likely multifaceted in

nature. The same source concept (e.g., heat) appears to be recruited in under-
standing multiple social inferences (e.g., intimacy & hostility), and target
concepts are often understood in terms of multiple source concepts. In some
cases, the source concepts might result in similar inferences. For example,
whether positive valence is understood in terms of whiteness or higher verti-
cal positions, positive affective inferences are facilitated (Meier & Robinson,
2004; Meier et al., 2004). As a caveat, the positivity of upness may be more
status-oriented (Schubert, 2005), whereas the positivity of whiteness may be
more morality-based (Sherman & Clore, 2009).
More detailed investigations of these dynamic mappings would
likely provide a richer picture of metaphoric influences on social behav-
ior. Researchers should also focus more attention on variability in knowl-
edge about concrete source concepts. To clarify, following the lead of CMT,
metaphor research in social psychology has generally proceeded from the
assumption that although abstract target concepts are ambiguous and open
to multiple interpretations, everyone has more or less the same knowledge of
concrete source concepts. This assumption is plausible because many aspects
of our bodies and sensorimotor functioning are shared universally (e.g., we
all generally face the direction in which we move; we experience warmth
through physical contact with others). Still, social psychologists have long
known that even “concrete” bodily experiences are subject to social and cul-
tural influence (e.g., Bruner & Goodman, 1947). Thus, there may be room
in metaphor research for even more contextual variability than has been
examined thus far.
For example, metaphor theorists propose that knowledge of journeys—
goal-directed motion along a path—is used to metaphorically conceptualize
the time course of goal pursuits such as romantic relationships and business
ventures. Furthermore, although some aspects of movement along a path

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 are experienced universally, there are certainly important cultural and indi-
vidual differences in people’s knowledge of journeys. For example, individu-
als raised in rural settings, in which residences are located far apart, may be
more likely than their urban-raised counterparts to expect journeys to require
sustained effort, whereas urban individuals may expect journeys to be rela-
tively more dangerous or unpleasant. Aside from physical ecology, experience
with transportation technology likely changes how journeys are understood.
Individuals with ready access to cars, trains, and airplanes may view journeys
as relatively common.
The upshot of this variability in representations of concrete concepts
is that when people apply these concepts to make sense of abstract concepts
and experiences, they may exhibit different patterns of belief, attitudes, and
behavior, despite using the “same” metaphor.
Along these lines, Zhong and House (Chapter 6, this volume) discussed
how situational and dispositional variation in people’s views of physical dirt
influence their moral reasoning and judgment in a metaphor-consistent
fashion.

A Call for Further Research on Alternate Sources

The alternate source strategy is based on CMT’s claim that multiple dif-
ferent source concepts can be recruited to understand the same sort of tar-
get concept (Landau et al., 2010). For example, love can be likened to an
irresistible force (“she was swept off her feet”) or an entity that needs to be
nurtured (“she fueled his passion”). The latter view of love is far more agentic
in nature, and we would therefore expect that dispositional endorsement
of that metaphor would positively predict proactive efforts to maintain and
improve one’s romantic relationships. In addition, we would expect that situ-
ationally priming different source concepts for a target concept will result
in divergent, metaphor-consistent effects on target processing. Such effects
have been demonstrated in a few previous studies (e.g., Landau et al., 2009;
Morris, Sheldon, Ames, & Young, 2007; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011), but
more lines of research are necessary.
In particular, although there is strong evidence for immediate change in
thought and behavior due to priming alternative metaphors, there have been
few attempts to examine possible long-term consequences of such primes.
Clinical practitioners often encourage their clients to change the established
repertoire of metaphors with which they understand themselves and con-
duct their lifestyle, and they report that this approach is effective at least
over the course of therapy (e.g., Kopp, 1995; Loue, 2008; McMullen, 2008).
Nevertheless, we lack conclusive evidence that adopting different metaphors
causes long-term change in the person. More refined methods (experiments

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 and longitudinal designs) must be brought to bear on this question to address
not only the length of time that an activated metaphor affects the individual
but also the situational factors that may prolong or diminish this duration.
On the one hand, there are good reasons to think that the effects of an
activated metaphor may be somewhat ephemeral. New embodied experi-
ences are commonplace, as is exposure to new, and even competing, fram-
ings of abstract social concepts. We might expect that the effect of any
given metaphor cue to be quickly subdued under a torrent of new cues.
On the other hand, because metaphor can be used to actively struc-
ture knowledge, its effects may persist indirectly by influencing how people
respond to certain situations. For example, if individuals use the metaphor
that love is a journey, they may find it easier to work through a particular
conflict with their significant other, thereby resulting in long-term positive
consequences for both them and their partner that might not have been
possible without the metaphor. Even if the effect of a given embodied cue or
framing may not extend beyond a given situation, that momentary change
could have meaningful long-term consequences.

Motivation to Use (and Reject) Metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is arguably relied on because it reduces uncer-

tainty in thinking about a target construct (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). If so,
individuals motivated to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity (Kruglanski,
1989) should be more likely to rely on metaphors that serve such valuable
epistemic needs. In a test of this hypothesis, Keefer, Landau, Rothschild,
and Sullivan (2011) primed need for closure among one group by asking
partcipants to write about uncertainties concerning their personal identity.
Following this manipulation, and orthogonal to it, participants were assigned
to a journey-metaphoric framing condition (in which they visualized episodes
from their past as progressing along a path) or to a control (nonmetaphor)
condition. As hypothesized, the two manipulations interacted such that the
benefits of viewing one’s life as a journey for perceived continuity and mean-
ing were seized on to a greater extent among individuals motivated to reduce
uncertainty about their identity. Future research should extend this analy-
sis. For example, we might expect individual differences in need for closure
to moderate metaphoric transfer effects. Crawford (Chapter 4, this volume)
offered other suggestions for further studying metaphor’s uncertainty-reduction
function.
Future research could also look beyond the motive to reduce general
uncertainty to examine the motive to maintain specific beliefs and attitudes.
We know from social cognition research that schema use is heavily influenced

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 by this motive: Schemas are most likely to be activated and applied to inter-
pret the present situation when they accord with previously held beliefs and
attitudes. We would expect people to be similarly motivated to adopt meta-
phors that are compatible with their worldview, while rejecting metaphors
that conflict with their worldview. For example, an individual with strong
anti-immigration attitudes may be particularly drawn to thinking about
their nation as a body, thereby supporting an inference consistent with their
attitudes. Conversely, someone with more pro-immigration attitudes may
be quick to point out relevant dis-analogies between a nation and a body.
For concrete suggestions for future research along these lines, see Ottati,
Renstrom, and Price (Chapter 9, this volume) and Maass, Suitner, and Arcuri
(Chapter 8, this volume).

Implications for Attitude Stability and Change

As Ottati, Renstrom, and Price (Chapter 9, this volume) pointed out,

metaphorically framed messages are commonly used in public discourse to
communicate about practically important topics. They can be found in cam-
paign slogans, consumer advertisements, news reports, educational materials,
and the courtroom. Research is beginning to show that these messages are
more than figures of speech—they lead people to unconsciously recruit their
knowledge of a concrete concept to interpret and evaluate a target topic,
even though the two concepts are unrelated at a surface level. This suggests
that these widespread communications have powerful but largely unrecog-
nized consequences for how people make judgments and decisions about
practically important matters.
Research also suggests that, through the unconscious use of metaphor,
people rely on their current bodily experiences to form attitudes and make
decisions about practically important matters. Given the relatively subtle
procedures that researchers have used to prime embodied experiences (e.g.,
holding warm coffee, being in a dirty office), physical ecology may play an
underappreciated role in creating situational variability in people’s thoughts
and beliefs as they move from one physical setting to another. We can imag-
ine, for instance, a person at the polls voting for tougher immigration policy
based partly on bodily contamination concerns elicited by the funny-smelling
tuna sandwich he or she just ate.
In short, exposure to metaphorically framed messages and embodied
experiences can bias people’s attitudes toward abstract issues by leading
them to base their attitudes on knowledge of familiar concrete concepts,
without due consideration of the unique properties and features of the
abstract issues. The practical implication is that interventions designed to

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 reduce bias in attitudes should pay particular attention to the metaphors
individuals and groups use to frame discourse as well as individuals’ physi-
cal ecology.
In addition to creating unrecognized sources of change in attitudes,
metaphor may also create stability in attitudes. That is because metaphor
transfers not only bits of knowledge from a concrete concept to an abstract
concept but also the sheer self-evident nature of one’s knowledge about the
concrete concept. When people use that concrete knowledge as a frame-
work for making sense of an abstract issue, they may be equally confident
that their beliefs and attitudes toward that issue are correct.
To illustrate, it is obviously true that a baby requires constant care
to survive and thrive. So what happens when people encounter a message
that metaphorically frames the handling of the national economy in terms
of baby care? We’ve already discussed the possibility that they will transfer
knowledge of infant care to make sense of the economy, perhaps forming
the attitude that the economy needs federal regulation to operate. Here
we are adding a more subtle point: that the beliefs and attitudes they form
about the economy using that metaphor will feel just as obvious, just as self-
evident, as their beliefs and attitudes about what infants need to survive.
This presents a paradox to consider when applying metaphor research to
understand attitudes and attitude change: Metaphor can play a role at both
ends of the continuum of ideological malleability, promoting change but,
once in place, infusing attitudes with a subjective confidence that makes
that highly resistant to change.

Conclusion

The picture emerging from this book is clear: People think, feel, and
behave in terms of conceptual metaphors to a much larger extent than appre-
ciated previously in social and personality psychology, and the cognitive
mechanisms involved appear to be unique. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980)
surmised, metaphors are not merely about language use but also capture
important ways in which the human social animal thinks. This concluding
chapter highlights multiple ways in which CMT can be extended in domains
such as personality, relationship functioning, and intergroup dynamics.
Furthermore, we advocate research designs that can move the field forward
in understanding when, why, who, and to what effect conceptual metaphors
are used by people in making sense of their social lives. At the risk of speak-
ing metaphorically about metaphor, we envision a bright future for metaphor
research in social-personality psychology.

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 Index

Abstract concepts, 3 Aron, E. N., 270

Ackerman, J. M., 90, 93 Asch, S. E., 46, 57
Activated representations, 187–188 Associative network model (memory), 75
Affect. See also Emotion Attachment, avoidant, 239
attributed to metaphoric transfer, 217 Attitude stability and change, 281–282
and brightness, 9, 51–52 Attributional alteration, 217–219
of infants, 66 Authority-respect (moral domain), 112
in personality psychology research, Autobiographical memory, 71–72
144–145 Avoidant attachment, 239
and posture, 71 Awareness, 102
resulting from metaphor use, 169–170
Affection, 251 “Bad is dirty” metaphor, 29, 31
“Affection is warmth” metaphor, 29 “Bad is down” metaphor, 29, 210, 231
African Americans Balcetis, E., 236
implicit stereotypes about, 52, Balint’s syndrome, 78
167–169 Bargh, J. A., 10, 52–54, 56, 90, 146, 276
racial prejudice against, 278 Barsalou, L. W., 115, 274
Agenda-setting, 182 Bar-Tal, D., 166, 167
Agreeableness, 139 Basic emotions, 225
Ahlvers, W. J., 51 Basic metaphors. See Embodied
Aldao, A., 98 metaphor(s)
Allbritton, D. W., 169, 172, 173 Beck Depression Inventory, 137
Allport, G. W., 135 Bekkering, H., 161
Alternative source strategy Bemba people (Africa), 120
empirical precedents for, 272–273 Benton, J., 112, 275
methods for using, 11 Berry, Anthony, 33
pitting metaphors against one Berry, Jo, 33–35
another with, 215 Bhalla, M., 146
reasoning behind, 9 Bilz, K., 91
in social-personality psychology Boccato, G., 167
research, 279–280 Bodily experiences, in social cognition.
Ames, D. R., 11 See Embodied cognition research;
Amygdala, 52 Embodied metaphor(s)
Andrighetto, L., 167–168 “Body as container” metaphor, 22, 26,
Anger 231–235, 272
in Eastern cultures, 277 Body metaphors. See Embodied
as fluid in the body, 22, 26, 232–233 metaphor(s)
perceptions of, 145–146 Boroditsky, L., 76, 78, 171, 185, 191
provocations of, 112 Bottini, R., 263
Animal metaphors, dehumanizing with, Bowdle, B. F., 154
166–168 Bowers, J. W., 186
Arcuri, L., 173 Brightness metaphors
“Arguments are wars” metaphor, 21, and affect, 9, 51–52
22, 160 as basic embodied metaphors,
Arms race (expression), 171 239–240
Aron, A., 270 and decision making, 92

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 Brightness metaphors, continued Cognitive style, 194–196
and emotional thought, 211–216 Cohen, J. D., 111
and person perception, 51–53 Cohn, S., 73
and racial prejudice, 277–278 Communication, 134
and religious beliefs, 276 Compactness, of metaphors, 158
social-personality psychology Compromise choice, 98–100
research on, 277–278 Conceptual mapping. See also Source
Bruner, J. S., 135 concept; Target concept
Burns, Robert, 20 defined, 6
examples of, 6–8
Cameron, L., 35, 169 function of, 46
Cancer metaphors, 181 Conceptual metaphor(s). See also specific
Capozzo, D., 167 headings
Career of metaphor hypothesis, 154 defined, 66
Casasanto, D., 71, 76, 260, 261, 263 development of, 32–35
Castelli, L., 173 linguistic analyses of, 18–20
Caste system, 121 types of, 66–67
Category membership, 228–229 Conceptual metaphor in thought and
Caucasians, implicit stereotypes about, 52 social action, 17–38
“Causes are physical forces” metaphor, 20 and criticisms of conceptual metaphor
Chandler, J., 93 theory, 20–24
Chartrand, T. L., 114 and development of metaphors,
Chasing Dirt (Suellen Hoy), 124 32–35
Children, 110, 229, 251–253 and evidence supporting conceptual
Choice, compromise, 98–100 metaphor theory, 24–30
Christianity, 51 experimental research on, 25–26,
Chrysikou, E., 261 86–87
Chulvi, B., 167 linguistic analyses of, 18–20
Clark, M. S., 90 recommendations for further
Cleanliness metaphors research on, 36–38
and history of cleanliness, 124–125 rhetoric in, 18
in Judeo-Christian religions, social nature of metaphoric though
116–117 as basis for, 30–31
for moral and physical purity, 29, 32, types of, 134
91–92, 101, 120, 234–235 Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT),
for moral financial issues, 116 4–8
for washing away good or bad luck, basic tenets of, 115–116, 157, 205,
94–96 226
for washing away postdecisional conceptual mapping in, 6–8
dissonance, 97–99 criticisms of, 20–24
Clore, G. L., 9, 51, 146, 211, 219 and embodied metaphor, 228–230
CMT. See Conceptual metaphor theory empirical evidence supporting, 7, 8,
Cognition 24–30, 276
distributed, 36 formation of, 5
models of, 114–115 historical rise of, 18–19
situated, 36 and metaphoric transfer strategy, 208
social. See Social cognition and morality, 114
Cognitive dissonance, 235 perceptual and nonverbal elements
Cognitive linguistic analyses, 86, 232 of, 13

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 and person perception, 46–58 Depression, 136–137, 209
and real-life discourse, 38 “Desire is hunger” metaphor, 26
representation of self in, 47 Developmental psychology, 229,
significance of metaphor in, 5 252–253
and social psychology, 36–37 Dijkstra, K., 71
uses of, 4, 271 Dimensional evaluative metaphors.
Concrete experience, 115 See Evaluative metaphors and
Conflation hypothesis, 251–252 emotional thought
Constraint-satisfaction view (language Dionne, S., 49, 56
processing), 23 Direct application hypothesis (metaphor
Construal level theory, 238 effects), 187–189
Contagion, 121–122 Dirt, and morality, 116–118, 120,
Containment metaphors 123–125, 279
“body as container” metaphor, 22, Discourse dynamic approach, 33
26, 231–235, 272 Disease-related metaphors, 171
as primary concept, 66, 229 Disembodied cognitive science, 226
target domain corresponding with, Disgust
230 adaptive function of, 116, 233–234
Contamination and decision making, 91
and brightness, 213 and dehumanization, 168
and immigration, 186, 234, 272 facial expressions of, 116, 234
and intergroup relations, 155 and morality, 112, 113, 120, 146
and morality, 116, 234 Distance metaphors
Core metaphors. See Embodied with space and time, 235–239
metaphor(s) target domain corresponding with,
Correll, J., 52 230
Crawford, L. E., 51, 69, 70, 73, 280 Distributed cognition, 36
Crime, 119–120 Divinity, 209
Cross-cultural comparisons, 227, 277 Dominance-submission, 137–138
Cross-domain mappings Donaldson, T., 110
enduring knowledge of, 32 Dose insensitivity (negativity
of marriage metaphors, 31 dominance), 213–214
Cross-language comparisons, 232 Douglas, M., 123
Cuddy, A. J. C., 238 Dovidio, J. F., 52
Culture, 262–264. See also Cross-cultural Drake, J. T., 69
comparisons Dual coding (memory), 76
Cuomo, Mario, 181 Duguid, M. M., 165
Dunning, D., 236
Damasio, A. R., 115, 141 Durante, F., 167–168
Darley, J. M., 111
Dastjerdi, H. V., 157 Eastern cultures, 277
Davidoff, D., 161 Eberhart, J. L., 167
Davies, I. R. L., 161 Edelman, M., 190
Decay, blackness as sign of, 213 Edwards, D., 32
Decision making. See Judgment and Ekman, P., 225, 240
decision making Embodied cognition research
Dehumanization, 166–169 on autobiographical memory and
Delegitimization, 166–169 posture, 71–72
De Los Reyes, A., 98 emphasis on, 226

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 Embodied cognition research, continued Evaluative metaphors and emotional
greater focus on, 13 thought, 205–220
types of, 65 attributional alteration with,
Embodied metaphor(s) 217–219
body as container as, 22, 26, 231–235, brightness metaphors, 211–216
272 and physical attributes, 206–207
and conceptual metaphor theory, size metaphors, 216–217
228–230 structuring abstract thought with,
debate over existence of, 225 206
and decision processes, 96–101 verticality metaphors, 208–212
and depression, 136–137 Evolutionary function
distance in space and time as, of disgust, 116, 233–234
235–239 and mating strategy, 49
effects of, 87 Expectations, violation of, 73, 75
experimental research on, 27–28 Experiential thinking, 98, 229
future directions for research on, Experimental research, 9–10, 25–26,
146 28–30, 86–87
history of research on, 225–227 Extraverted behaviors, 139
and intergroup relations, 154, 162,
163 Facial expressions
with memory, 68 and autobiographical memory, 71
and mental construal, 88–96 and brightness metaphors, 52–53
mental metaphors as, 251–255, of disgust, 116, 234
259–262 emotions activating, 275
in person perception, 47, 56 as indicators of basic emotions, 225
prevalence of, 181 muscular feedback with, 114
related to visual experiences, Fairness-reciprocity (moral domain), 112
239–240 Fairy tales, universality of, 157
ubiquity of, 228 Falvo, R., 167
verticality as. See Vertical orientation Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas
metaphors Hardy), 123
Embodied simulation, 27–28, 274–275 Fay, A. J., 239
Emotion(s). See also Affect Fear, 112, 232
basic, 225 Fetterman, A. K., 141, 144, 147, 276
evaluative metaphors’ effect on. See “Final solution” (Nazi Germany), 171
Evaluative metaphors and Fiske, S. T., 138, 238
emotional thought Fitzsimons, G. F., 121
and morality, 109 Fleeson, W., 139
in personality psychology research, FMRI (functional magnetic resonance
145 imaging) studies, 111
Emotional intelligence, 141 Foroni, F., 161
Emotionality, 140–144, 147 Förster, J., 73, 238
Encoding specificity (memory), 71 Framing, metaphoric. See Metaphoric
Espenson, J., 271 framing model
Estes, Z., 160 Frank, M. G., 51, 52
Ethics, 110 French politics, 156, 255–256, 258n4
Ethnic cleansing, 170 Frontal lobe, 116
Ethnicity. See Race and ethnicity Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Etymology, the word, 270 (fMRI) studies, 111

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 Gabbiadini, A., 167–168 Henze, R., 171
Galinsky, A. D., 92 Higgins, E. T., 45
Gallese, V., 57 High-level cognitive processes, 226
Gambling studies, 95 Homogeneity, group, 161–162
Garrido, M. V., 72 Homosexuality, 122, 124
Gender differences, in emotionality, Horizontal orientation metaphors, 156,
141–142 160–161, 165
Gentner, D., 154, 159 Horstmann, G., 209
Germany, 236 House, J., 279
Gibbs, R. W., 158 Hoy, S., 124
Giessner, S. R., 48–50, 163 Hua people (New Guinea), 206
Gilovich, T., 51, 52 Hung, I. W., 94
Glenberg, A. M., 47, 57
Glick, P., 238 IAPS (International Affect Picture
Glucksberg, S., 159 System), 69–70
Goff, P. A., 167, 169 IAT. See Implicit Association Test
Goncalo, J. A., 165 IJzerman, H., 134
“Good is clean” metaphor, 29 Image schema, 229
“Good is up” metaphor, 29, 134, Immigration, 186, 234, 272
209–211, 231 Immune system, 124–125
Graesser, A. C., 75 Implicit assessment of personality,
Graumann, C., 169–171 135–136
Gray, J. R., 90 Implicit associations, 48, 52, 167–169
Greenberg, J., 234, 272 Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Greene, J. D., 111 and stereotypes about Africans
Grounded cognition research. See Americans, 52
Embodied cognition research studying dehumanization with,
Group homogeneity, 161–162 167–168
Guided attribution (metaphor effects), “Important is big” metaphor, 20
192 Impression formation tasks, 72–73
Guided elaboration (metaphor effects), India, 121
192 Indigenous cultures, dehumanization
Guided interpretation hypothesis of, 167
(metaphor effects), 192 Individual differences
Guilt, 101 in daily social functioning, 140
Gustatory disgust, 112 in depression, 136–137
Gypsies, 167 in need for closure, 280
in perceptions of public policy, 187
Haidt, J., 112–113, 146 in personality psychology, 135, 147
Hammack, P. L., 166 in spirituality, 138
Hardy, T., 123 Ingroups, 112
Harm, 123–124 Intelligence
Harvey, S., 112, 275 brightness metaphors related to,
Haslam, N., 166–168 215–216
Hauser, D. J., 51, 70 emotional, 141
Head-heart metaphor, 140–144, 147 Interactional properties, of objects, 228
Heat metaphors, 232–233. See also Intergroup relations, 153–173
Warmth metaphors delegitimization and dehumanization
Helzer, E. G., 117 in, 166–169

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 Intergroup relations, continued Judgment and decision making, 85–103
functions of metaphors in, 157–159 embodied metaphors in, 96–100
future directions for research on, future directions for research on,
172–173 100–103
hiding and deemphasizing reality in, and moral meanings of metaphorical
169–171 cues, 91–92
perception of group homogeneity in, perspectives on role of metaphor in,
161–162 86–88
public policy decisions on, 171 and social meanings of metaphorical
role of stereotypes in, 153–154, cues, 88–90
162–166 and superstitious beliefs, 94–96
social categorization in, 158–161 weight metaphors for describing, 93
types of metaphors in, 155–157 willpower metaphors for describing, 94
International Affect Picture System
(IAPS), 69–70 Kang, Y., 90
Interpersonal dynamics, 10, 134. See also Kaspar, K., 95
Relationships Keefer, L., 72, 77, 78, 173, 208, 280
“Intimacy is closeness” metaphor, 20 Keysers, C., 57
Irish Republican Army (IRA), 33 Knowledge, 101, 251–252
Kohlberg, L., 110
Jackson, Jesse, 181 Kövecses, Z., 232, 271
Jackson, M. C., 167 Krugman, Paul, 85
James, W., 115 Krumdick, N. D., 192
Japanese people, 155 Krus, D. M., 208
Jaynes, Julian, 5 Kundey, S. M. A., 98
Jews, 155, 166, 168, 170–171
Johnson, B. T., 52, 250–252 Labroo, A. A., 94
Johnson, C., 251, 252 Lakoff, G.
Johnson, M. basic ideas of, 66, 269
basic ideas of, 66, 269 and category membership, 228, 229
and category membership, 228, 229 and concrete experiences, 115
and concrete experiences, 115 and creation of conceptual metaphor
and creation of conceptual metaphor theory, 5, 18–19
theory, 5, 18–19 and definition of metaphor, 226
and definition of metaphor, 226 and image schemas, 229
and image schemas, 229 and master metaphor list, 271
on mental metaphors, 254, 262, on mental metaphors, 250–252, 254,
264–265 262, 264–265
metaphor representation perspective metaphor representation perspective
proposed by, 134 proposed by, 134
and metaphors in thought processes, and metaphors in thought processes,
282 282
and systematic use of metaphors, 86 and mirror neurons, 57
and vertical orientation metaphors, and systematic use of metaphors, 86
230 and vertical orientation metaphors,
Jones, C. R., 45 230, 231
Jones, L. L., 160 Landau, M. J.
Jordan, A. H., 146 and autobiographical memory, 72
Jostmann, N. B., 254 and intergroup relations, 173

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 and metaphoric transfer strategy, Mapping, conceptual. See Conceptual
208 mapping
and personality research, 144 Margolies, S. M., 69
research on contamination meta- Mari, S., 167–168
phors, 186, 234, 272 Marriage metaphors, 31
research on need for closure, 280 Martin, L. L., 114
and schemas, 74 Master metaphor list, 271
and self-perception, 55 Mating strategy, 49
Langer, S., 5 McClelland, D. C., 135
Language, as source for mental McMillan, D., 75
metaphors, 255–259 McNiel, J. M., 139
Lawyers, stereotypes about, 163–164 Mead, G. H., 36
Lee, B. G., 98 Meier, B. P.
Left-handedness, 259–262 and emotional thought, 211
Left-wing political orientation, 156, and metaphoric transfer strategy,
160–161, 165, 255–259 208–209
Liberman, N., 238 and personality psychology, 134,
“Life is a journey” metaphor 137–140, 144, 145, 147
function of, 19 research on brightness and affect, 9
research on vertical orientation,
memories for, 26
48–53, 56, 70, 231, 270
and metaphoric speaking in
Memory, 65–79
context, 35
autobiographical, 71–72
in speech by President Obama, 18
and cognitive functions of
Life satisfaction, 217, 219
metaphors, 75–76
Light-dark metaphors. See Brightness
future directions for research on,
metaphors
77–79
Liljenquist, K., 91–92
in metaphoric influence, 273
Linguistic analyses purpose of researching, 67–68
cognitive, 86 role of schemas in, 74–75
of conceptual metaphor, 18–20 spatial, 69–71
on social suspicion, 88–89 for stimulus content, 72–74
Lippmann, W., 153 and types of metaphors, 66–67
Logic, circular, 22 Memory ability, 77–78
Loneliness, 146, 239, 276 Mental metaphors, 249–265
Lougan, S., 167 automaticity of, 250
Loughnan, S., 168 body as creator for, 259–262
“Love relationships are journeys” culture as factor in, 262–264
metaphor, 28 language as source for, 255–259
Low-level cognitive processes, 226 origins of, 251–255, 264–265
Luck, 94–96, 235 reasons for questioning embodied
Luminance. See Brightness basis of, 251–255
Metaphor(s)
Macbeth effect, 234 cognitive functions of, 75–76
Magee, Patrick, 33–35 as cognitive tool, 4
Magical thinking, 121–122 common usage of, 4–5
Mahapatra, M. M., 113 conceptual. See Conceptual
Mandler, J. M., 229 metaphor(s)
Maner, J. K., 239 defined, 155, 226

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 Metaphor(s), continued Miller, A. G., 153–154
evaluative. See Evaluative metaphors Millman, L., 121
and emotional thought Minimal effects era (mass media), 182
types of, 66–67 Mirror mechanism, 57
Metaphor action, 37 Mischel, W., 135
Metaphor comprehension, 188–189 Mnemonic devices, 76
“Metaphor for communication” Moeller, S. K., 53, 56, 137–138
argument, 32, 33 Molina, S., 98
“Metaphor for thought” argument, 32, 33 Moller, A. C., 50
Metaphoric attribution, 217–219 Mondillon, L., 275
Metaphoric-enriched personality Moral development model, 110
psychology. See Personality Morales, A. C., 121
psychology Moral foundations theory, 112
Metaphoric framing model, 183–196 Morality, 109–126
activated representations in, brightness metaphors related to,
187–188 213–215
activation of root metaphor in, 179, and cleanliness metaphors, 29, 32,
184–187 91–92, 101, 120, 234–235
method of, 10–11 and dirt, 116–118, 120, 123–125, 279
and political judgment, 188–194 discrepancies in research on,
and process style, 194–196 275–276
Metaphoric language identification, and disgust, 112, 113, 120, 146
24–25 and effects of cleanliness obsession,
Metaphoric speaking in context, 33–35 124–125
Metaphoric transfer, 208, 217–219, 270 and emotions, 109
Metaphor processing in judgment and decision making,
cognitive style of, 194–196 91–92, 101, 111–114
conceptual metaphor theory’s claims metaphoric basis of, 114–118
regarding, 23 moral reasoning for determining,
of idioms, 27 110–111
in metaphor transfer research, 10–11 role of contagion in, 121–122
Metaphor rejection, 192–193 role of harm in, 112, 123–124
Metaphor representation perspective, role of permanence in, 119–121
134–135, 147. See also Conceptual size metaphors related to, 217
metaphor theory (CMT) in thought and social action, 29, 32
Metaphor research vertical orientation metaphors
in social psychology, 9–11 related to, 231
supporting conceptual metaphor “More is up” metaphor, 20
theory, 7, 8, 24–30 Morris, M. W., 11
value of, 14 Moscovici, S., 167
Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff Motion, time as, 251
and Mark Johnson), 5, 18, 66, 250 Motion Picture Association of America,
Metaphor transfer research strategy 122
experimental paradigms for, 9–10 Motivational resonance model, 195
reasoning behind, 9 Much, N., 113
Method of loci (memorization Multimethod assessment of personality,
technique), 76 147
Metonyms, 155–156 Multitasking, 99
Mill, John Stuart, 112 Murphy, M. E., 69

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 Natural-catastrophe metaphors, 171 Permanence, in morality, 119–121
Neal, D. T., 114 Personality psychology, 133–148. See
Negativity dominance, 213–214 also Social-personality psychology
Nemeroff, C., 121 research
The Netherlands, 256 depression and vertical attention in,
Neuroscience research, 57, 234 136–137
Niedenthal, P. M., 275 dominance-submission and vertical
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5 attention in, 137–138
Nocera, C. C., 90 future directions for research on, 276
Nuer people (Africa), 117, 120 and metaphor representation per-
Nussbaum, M. C., 113 spective, 134–135, 147
Nystrom, L. E., 111 and person perception research, 56–57
prosocial personality and sweet taste
Obama, Barack, 17–18, 28 preferences in, 138–140, 145,
Objectification, of humans, 166 147
Ode, S., 137–138 rationality vs. emotionality and
Operation Desert Storm, 185–190 head-heart metaphor in,
Oppenheimer, D. M., 165 140–144, 147
Orientational metaphors support for a metaphoric-enriched,
defined, 66, 230 135–136, 144–146
examples of, 67 Personal space, protection of, 236
functioning of, 256 Person perception, 43–57
verticality. See Vertical orientation and conceptual metaphor theory,
metaphors 46–53
Ortony, A., 158, 159 defined, 44
Osborn, M. M., 186 future directions for research on,
Other. See also Person perception 57–58
identification and labeling of and personality psychology, 56–57
emotions in, 115 pitfalls of conceptual metaphor
metaphoric descriptions of, 56 theory and, 54–56
Ottati, V. C., 192, 195, 281 promises of conceptual metaphor
Outgroups, 155, 235 theory and, 56–57
and schemas, 44–46
Paivio, A., 76 Person-situation controversy, 135
Palin, Sarah, 181 Phillips, N., 138
Palma, T. A., 72 Physical attributes, 206–207
Parietal lobe damage, 78 Physical experiences
Park, L., 113 involved in person perception
Pearson, A. R., 52 metaphors, 46–47
Perception with memory encoding and retrieval,
and cognition, 115 76
influence of values on, 135 and self-perception, 55
and memory, 75, 76 Physical purity. See Cleanliness
spatial. See Spatial perception metaphors
visual, 236, 239–240, 251–252 Piaget, J., 229
Perceptual analysis, 229 Pizarro, D. A., 117
Perceptuomotor experiences, 251, 252, Political communication, 179–197
261, 262 activated representations in,
Pérez, J. A., 167 187–188

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 Political communication, continued Psycholinguistic research
activation of root metaphor in, 179, on embodied metaphor, 27
184–187 on social nature of metaphoric
agenda-setting in, 182 thought, 30
and metaphoric framing model, on thinking and verbal metaphor
183–196 use, 26
nature of metaphor in, 180–181 Psychological distance, 237–238
and political judgment, 188–194 Public policy
prevalence of metaphor in, 180 individual differences in perception
priming in, 182–183 of, 187
and process style, 194–196 on intergroup relations, 171
use of multiple metaphors in, 196–197 metaphoric communication used in,
Political orientation, 156, 160–161, 180–181
165, 255–259 Purity. See Cleanliness metaphors;
Pollution metaphors Morality
and morality, 116–119, 122–125 Purity-sanctity (moral domain), 112
in political communication, 180
Race and ethnicity, 52, 124
Postdecisional dissonance, 97–98
Racial segregation, 121
Posture, 71–72
Ramscar, M., 78
Power
Rationality, emotionality vs., 140–144,
associations between vertical orien-
147
tation and, 160, 209, 230, 270 Rational thinking, 98
individual differences in, 138 Read, S. J., 195
representations of, 207 Reading, as cultural practice, 263–264
size metaphors related to, 216–217 Reagan, Ronald, 189–190
Prejudice, 277–278 Reality, 169–171
Price, E., 281 Reinhard, D., 93
Primary metaphors Relationships
appeal of, 20 as games, 272
mappings underlying, 26 outcomes of, 270–271, 276–277
Priming Religious concepts
in dehumanization research, 167 about washing and purification, 120
in metaphor transfer research, 10–11 and brightness, 276
in personality research, 137 cleanliness metaphors, 116–117
and person perception, 45, 46 vertical orientation metaphors in,
in political communication, 50–51, 67, 70
182–183 Renstrom, R. A., 192, 281
possible long-term consequences of, Resemblance metaphors, 154
279–280 Rholes, W. S., 45
and processing of idioms, 27 Riemer-Peltz, M., 53, 138
in research on relationship outcomes, Right-handedness, 259–262
276 Right-wing political orientation, 156,
in social-personality psychology 160–161, 165
research, 273–274 Riskind, J. H., 71
Processing. See Metaphor processing Risk-taking behavior, 95–96
Process-oriented research, 55 Rizzolatti, G., 57
Proffitt, D. R., 146 Roberson, D., 161
Projective measures, 135 Robinson, M. D.
Prosocial personality, 56, 138–140, and personality psychology, 134,
145, 147 137–138, 141, 144, 147

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 research on brightness and affect, Sivanathan, N., 276
9, 211 Size metaphors
research on vertical orientation, 48, and emotional thought, 216–217
51, 53, 208–209, 231, 270 for social dominance, 253
Ronquillo, J., 52 Smell, 88–89, 101, 112, 240
Root metaphor, 179, 184–187 Smith-McLallen, A., 52
Rothbart, M., 161 Smollan, D., 270
Rothschild, Z., 72, 172, 280 Social action, conceptual metaphor in.
Roughness, 90 See Conceptual metaphor in
Rozin, P., 121 thought and social action
Rubin, D. C., 76 Social categorization, 158–161
Social cognition
Saminaden, A., 167 fundamental role of metaphor in,
Schema-pointer plus tag model 11, 154
(memory), 75 methodological advances in, 9
Schemas schema-based perspectives of, 13, 44,
image, 229 280–281
and memory, 74–75 traditional themes of, 101
and person perception, 44–46 Social dominance, 253
in social cognition research, 13, 44, Social experience, 28–30
280–281 Social intuitionist model of moral
Schnall, S., 112, 146, 275 judgment, 112
Schubert, T., 48, 49, 137, 160, 163, 270 Social-personality psychology research,
Schwartz, A., 271 269–282
Schwarz, N., 93, 95, 219, 240 alternate source strategy in,
Segregation, 121–122 279–280
Selective processing hypothesis on attitude stability and change,
(metaphor effects), 190–192 281–282
Self cross-cultural comparisons in, 277
identification and labeling of on light-dark metaphors and racial
emotions in, 114 prejudice, 277–278
metaphoric descriptions of, 56 metaphoric influence and embodied
representation of, 47 simulation in, 274–275
stereotyping of, 165 metaphoric influence and spread-
Self-control. See Willpower ing activation processes in,
Self-other overlap, 235 273–274
Self-perception, 55 multifaceted nature of, 278–279
Semin, G. R., 72, 134, 160 on personality processes, 276
Sensory perception, 47, 76. See also on relationship outcomes, 270–271,
Vertical orientation metaphors 276–277
SES (socioeconomic status), 48 types of, 270–273
Sexual content, 122 on uncertainty, 280–281
Shalev, I., 54, 56, 146, 276 Social psychology. See also Social-
Sheldon, O. J., 11 personality psychology research
Shweder, R. A., 113 and conceptual metaphor theory,
Side effects (war metaphor), 171 36–37
Simulation, embodied. See Embodied evidence for conceptual metaphor
simulation in, 8
Sinigaglia, C., 57 experimental research in, 26
Situated cognition, 36 metaphor research in, 9–11

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 Social psychology, continued Stigmatization, 124
schism between personality psychol- Stimulus content, memory for, 72–74
ogy and, 135 Strack, F., 73, 114
value of metaphor research in, 14 Strejcek, B., 275–276
Socioeconomic status (SES), 48 Structural metaphors
Sommerville, R. B., 111 defined, 66
Song, H., 52 examples of, 66
Source concept Subjective experiences, 251, 252, 262
characteristics of, 5 Submission, vertical attention metaphors
defined, 5, 227 for indicating, 137–138
function of, 155 Sullivan, D., 72, 173, 234, 272, 280
matching of target concept and, 159, Sun, P., 168
160 Sun, Y., 55–56
in mental metaphors, 250 Superstitious beliefs, 94–96
in metaphor comprehension, Surface utterances, 185
188–189 Suspiciousness, 88–89, 101, 240
multifaceted mapping between target Sweet taste preferences, and personality,
concept and, 278 56, 138–140, 145, 147
partial mapping between target con- Systematicity, of metaphor use, 67,
cept and, 7, 274 86, 159
priming of, 10
understanding a target through, 6, 46 Taboos, 206
Spacial deficits, 78 Talebinejad, M. R., 157
Spatial memory, 69–71 Target concept
Spatial metaphors. See also Orienta- characteristics of, 5
tional metaphors defined, 5, 227
distance in space and time, 235–239 function of, 155
for labeling social groups, 155–156 matching of source concept and,
lateral axis of space and time, 263 159, 160
Spatial perception. See also Vertical in mental metaphors, 250
orientation metaphors in metaphor comprehension,
with memory recall, 72, 76–77 188–189
with person perception, 47 multifaceted mapping between
with temporal concepts, 115–116 source concept and, 278
Sports metaphors, 181, 195 partial mapping between source
Spreading activation. See Priming concept and, 7, 274
Srull, T. K., 75 understanding of, 6, 46
Stains, 120 Temporal concepts
Stangor, C., 75 distance in space and time, 235–239
Stefanucci, J. K., 146 lateral axis of space and time, 263
Stepper, S., 114 motion metaphor for, 251
Stereotypes spatial perception with, 115–116
about African Americans, 52, Temporal lobe, 116
167–169 Thibodeau, P. H., 171, 185, 191
about Caucasians, 52 Thinking. See also Conceptual metaphor
about lawyers, 163–164 in thought and social action
defined, 153 cognitive models of , 114
and intergroup relations, 153–154, negative, 137
162–166 rational vs. experiential, 98

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 Time. See Temporal concepts Wapner, S., 208
“Trade is war” metaphor, 191 War metaphors
Trail, T. E., 165 “arguments are wars” metaphor, 21,
Traits, 164 22, 160
Trapnell, P., 138 in political communication, 181
Tversky, B., 259 side effects as, 171
“trade is war” metaphor, 191
Uncertainty, 77, 280–281 Warmth metaphors
“Understanding is seeing” metaphor, 20 and decision making, 93
Urland, G. R., 52 expressing affection with, 251
U.S. Bureau of Justice, 119 expressing closeness with, 238–239,
U.S. House of Representatives, 258n4 276–277
U.S. Senate, 258n4 for interpersonal relations, 10, 134,
239
Valence, 52, 211, 259–262, 278 and loneliness, 146, 239, 276
Values, 135 and person perception, 53, 54
Van Elk, M., 161 and trust, 89–90
Van Quaquebeke, N., 50 Watson, M. E., 76
Van Schie, H. T., 161 Weather, 217, 219
Verbal metaphor use Webster, G. D., 52
embodied metaphor in, 27–28 Weight metaphors
experimental research on conceptual for describing decision making, 93
metaphor in, 25–26 for describing importance, 254–255
Vermeulen, N., 275 for describing judgment and decision
Vertical orientation metaphors making, 93
as basic embodied metaphors, “Welfare queens,” 191–193
230–231 Werhane, P. H., 110
and depression, 136–137, 209 Werner, H., 208
and dominance-submission, Wheatley, T., 112
137–138 Wiggins, J. S., 138
and emotional thought, 208–212 Williams, L. E., 10, 53, 54, 90, 276
and image schema, 229 Williams, M. J., 167
and intergroup relations, 160, 163 Willpower, 94
and memory, 66, 67, 70 Winkielman, P., 275
and morality, 231 Wolff, P., 159
and person perception, 47–51, Worley, Charles L., 122
55–56 Writing, as cultural practice, 263
and power, 209, 230, 270 Wyer, R. S., 75
target domain corresponding with,
230 Xu, A. J., 95
Viki, G. T., 167
Violence, 122 Young, M. J., 11
Visual imagery, 144, 169 Yugoslav Wars, 170
Visual perception, 236, 239–240,
251–252 Zabelina, D. L., 137–138
Volpato, C., 167–168 Zhong, C.-B., 91–92, 117, 275–276, 279
Vonasch, A., 52 Zogmaister, C., 173
Vygotsky, L., 36 Zwick, R., 95

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 About the Editors

Mark J. Landau, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at the University

of Kansas. He received his doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2007.
Dr. Landau has published many articles and chapters focused on metaphor’s
influence on social cognition and behavior and the role of existential motives
in diverse aspects of human behavior. He has received funding from the
National Science Foundation and serves on the editorial board of the Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General.
Michael D. Robinson, PhD, is a professor of psychology at North Dakota
State University. He received his doctorate in social psychology from the
University of California, Davis, in 1996. Subsequently, he was trained in
emotion in a 3-year national National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
postdoc (advisors Richard Davidson and Gerald Clore). He has received
funding from both the National Science Foundation and NIMH and has
extensive editorial experience. Specifically, he has been an associate editor
of the Journal of Personality and Cognition & Emotion and is now an associate
editor of Emotion, the motivation/emotion section of Social and Personality
Psychology Compass, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He
publishes frequently in the areas of personality, cognition, and emotion.
Brian P. Meier, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at Gettysburg
College, where he teaches courses on general psychology, social psychology,
and statistics. He received his doctorate in social psychology from North
Dakota State University in 2005. His research is focused on social and person-
ality psychology topics including embodiment, emotion, aggression, prosocial
behavior, self-regulation, and mindfulness. Dr. Meier is a consulting editor
for multiple journals and his research has been funded by multiple agencies.

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