The Vertical Spatial Metaphor Of Power Concepts And Its Influence On Judgment Bias

According to rich life phenomenon and language expressions, between powerconcepts and vertical position are closely linked. People often use the vertical spatialmetaphor to express power concepts. Based on previous researches, we choose somecollege students in Yan tai as the research objects.Study1was a forced-choice task in which participants saw a cartoon characterand two square boxes(one above and one below the character),and were asked to placedifferent power words into the top or the bottom box of their own will. A matchingeffect appeared both between the powerful words and the up space, and between thepowerless words and the down space.Reaction time task was used in Study2. It was programmed in DMDX. In thisexperiment, pairs of words with one powerful word and one powerless word appearedon the screen. Participants were randomly divided into high power and low powergroup. Participants were instructed to categorize words according to whether they werepowerful or powerless in meaning as quickly and accurately as possible. There weretwo conditions: metaphor congruence condition and metaphor incongruence condition.To be specific, response times were shorter when powerful words appeared at the topof the screen, and when powerless words appeared at the bottom.Participants were randomly divided into high power and low power group inStudy3a. It employed a implicit priming task in which participants first memorizedpowerful words or powerless words and then estimated the height of objects. Theresults showed that powerful words led to height overestimation while powerless onesled to underestimation. Study3b also employed a implicit priming task in whichparticipants first memorized powerful words or powerless words, but then they wereasked to draw a tree in the questionnaire. We measured the vertical height of the trees.The figures also tell us that powerful words led to height overestimation whilepowerless ones led to underestimation.Above all, the results suggest that,for Chinese language, there is psychologicalreality of” Powerful is up, powerless is down.”And the judgment of vertical distancecan be influenced by the spatial metaphor of power concepts subtly. To some extent, the conclusions provide experimental basis for the vertical spatialmetaphor of power concepts and support the metaphor theory of two-way transmission.Finally, this study attempts to apply the conclusion to many fields, such as the citylayout, advertising design and so on.