Black And White Concept Of Morality Metaphorical Representation Of Psychological Reality

The phenomenon of metaphors is popular in cultures around the world. Under the academic trends of embodied philosophy and embodied cognition, investigating metaphor from its cognition mechanism becomes one of the most influential research topics in the field of psychology.This study first reviewed the origin of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, introduced the present researches on conceptual metaphor in western psychology, and analyzed several key problems involving in these empirical studies. Then, the metaphor of "moral is white, immoral is black" was introduced, which existing in almost all cultures and languages. Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this paper proposed that there is psychological reality of the association between color concepts and moral concepts. At last, five series of experiments and ten sub-experiments were carried on to investigate the metaphor consistency effect referring to the white and black representation of moral concepts from different aspects.Study1investigated whether processing moral concepts could be affected by the perception of white or black. Using different pattern, study la and study1b demonstrated that white is more consistent with people’s mental representation about moral concepts, and black is more consistent with people’s mental representation about immoral concepts.Study2further investigated whether moral judgment could be also affected by black and white visual perception. Study2a and study2b showed that the black or white could bias people’s judgment on moral dilemma story in a metaphor-consistent direction.Study3investigated whether the process of moral concepts could work on lightness perception. Using different experimental material, study3a and study3b demonstrated that the moral quality of objects could impact on people’s lightness perception toward them.Study4explored the link between brightness perception and moral cognition. Study4a and study4b showed that a typical metaphor consistency effect exists in the two processes, which is consistent with the metaphor consistency effect between color perception and moral cognition.Study5explored the role of language experiences in shaping the white and black metaphor representation of moral conception. Study5a and study5b demonstrated that transcribing linguistic materials involving the metaphor of "white is moral and black is immoral" could enhance the metaphor consistency effect discovered in previous studies.Above all, through systemic empirical researches, this paper proved that there is psychological reality of ’white is moral’ and ’black is immoral’ metaphor. Not only human’s situation experiences connected with brightness perception but also language experiences should give rise to this metaphor association. The conclusion is of certain significance in deepening the researches on conceptual metaphor and clarifying a few divisive issues in this field.