Research On The Weight Metaphor Of Moral Concepts

Morality is a set of principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior,which serves as an important guide for our lives.Conceptual metaphor theory(Lakoff&Johnson,1980)and models of grounded cognition(Barsalou,1999)predicted that perceptual experiences could influence thoughts and feelings in ways.Based on these theories,the current study introduced the metaphor of "moral is weighty" and proposed that the metaphorical association between weight and morality had psychological reality.Five studies supported these assumptions.In Study 1,participants were presented with a picture of a pair of unbalanced weighing scales and were forced to put moral/immoral character traits on either side of the scales.The results showed that participants were more likely to put moral traits on the heavier side and immoral traits on the lighter side,indicating an association between morality and weightiness as well as an association between immorality and lightness.In Study 2,all participants completed a Single-Attribute IAT(SA-IAT)task that compared the difference between the reaction time of heavy/morality pairings and heavy/immorality pairings.The results indicated that responses towards heavy/morality pairings were much faster than heavy/immorality pairings,which suggested that moral concepts were more strongly associated with heaviness at the implicit level than immoral concepts.Study 3 further investigated whether cognitive representations of moral concepts were grounded in the sensory experience of weight.In this study,participants reported their attitudes toward moral compromises while they held either a heavy or a light clipboard.It was revealed that holding a heavy clipboard increased the harshness of moral judgements and made participants less likely to make moral compromises.These findings presented evidence that the link between weight and morality existed not only on a conceptual but also on a semantic level.Study 4 investigated whether the moral valence of an object influenced the perceptions of its weight.Two experiments were conducted,in which participants were given morally relevant information of an object(e.g.,book,lunch-box,canvas bag,etc.).After that,they were asked to estimate the weight of the object in the position of holding it.It was found that participants who received moral information perceived the object to be heavier than participants who received immoral information(Study 4a)and who received amoral information(Study 4b).These findings showed that the activation direction from weight to morality could be reversed.In Study 5,moral attentiveness was introduced as a potential moderator of the association between moral concepts and weight concepts.Participants were asked to complete the same forced-choice task used in Study 1 and then the Chinese version of the Moral Attentiveness Scale(Dong&Ni,2017).The results indicated that the more participants were morally attentive participants,the more likely they were to put moral character traits on the heavier side of the weighing scales and immoral traits on the lighter side,which supported the hypothesis that moral attentiveness affects the strength of the metaphorical association between weight and morality.Taken together,the current research which included 6 total experiments,using a whopping 765 participants,suggests that there is a psychological reality of the metaphorical association between weight and morality.Besides,moral attentiveness plays a moderating role in predicting the strength of the metaphorical association.