The Power Metaphor Effect Of Posture And Its Influence On Fairness-related Decision Making

Body language plays an important role in social interaction.The body posture and movements of individuals can reflect their social status,motivation and emotions.At the same time,maintaining a certain body posture and movement can also change individual’s sense of power,motivation and emotions.A series of behavioral experiments confirmed that holding an expansive posture induce a higher sense of power than holding a contractive posture.This bidirectional metaphorical connection between body posture and power is known as the power metaphor effect of body posture or the power pose effect.A large number of studies have proved that the sense of power can promote individuals to reject the unfair distribution and strengthen the sense of unfairness.With the rapid development of economy,people’s social status and wealth resources are increasingly polarized.Therefore,it is worth exploring how power affects the individual’s perception of fairness in economic decision-making.However,no studies have examined the influence of the power metaphor effect of body posture on fairness-related decision making.However,the power metaphor effect of body posture has been questioned for years.The reason is that a considerable part of repetitive behavior studies cannot verify the metaphorical connection effect of body posture and power perception,including the influence of the power metaphor effect of body posture on economic decision-making.To sum up,this study investigated the power metaphor effect of body posture and its influence mechanism on fairness-related decision making through three studies,seven experiments.Study 1 used ERP to explore the metaphorical effect of power of different activation of body postures.Then,based on the current studies on the influence of the power metaphor effect of body posture on fairness-related decision making,Study 2 used different paradigms of fairness-related decision making from the perspective of behavior to verify the influence of the power metaphor effect of body posture on fairness-related decision making and its cognitive mechanism.Finally,on the basis of Study 1 and Study 2,and based on previous studies on the influence of power perception on fairness-related decision making,Study 3 used ERP technology to explore the mechanism of the power metaphor effect of body posture on fairness-related decision making.Embodied semantics have demonstrated the relationship between the sensorimotor system and semantic processes,but the important question about how the activation in the sensorimotor system affects language comprehension still lack empirical support.Study 1 investigated the electrophysiological mechanisms of embodied semantic processing on the power pose effect by activation in the physical body postures and priming of postures.In Experiment 1,participants were asked to maintain an expansive and a contractive sitting posture in 2 blocks,while judging a centrally presented Chinese word about a powerful,or powerless person(e.g.‘king’ or ‘servant’).In Experiment 2,we presented pictures of expansive and contractive postures before the power words discrimination task.In Experiment 1,the incongruent effect elicited bigger N400 components for powerless words compared to powerful words when participants were sitting in an expansive posture,the same as powerful words in contractive posture compared to expansive posture.However,in Experiment 2,for the priming of expansive posture,bigger N400 components were elicited by powerful words than powerless words.And for powerful words,pictures of expansive posture elicited bigger N400 components than pictures of contractive posture.These findings indicated that the physical posing and priming of postures differentially facilitate the semantic processing of power words.Furthermore,there were constraining conditions of the embodiment on the power pose effect.Study 2 used the ultimatum game and the impunity game to examine whether the metaphorical coupling effect of body posture and power affect the individual’s fair decision.In Experiment 3,the influence of the body posture on the proposer of the impunity game was examined.We instructed participants to keep expansive and contractive posture respectively in 2 blocks of being proposer which they were told that the game role was chosen by themselves.40 participants’ allocation of 30 RMB were analyzed in In Experiment 3.Experiment 4 manipulated participants’ postures and fairness type of offers in the ultimatum game.The manipulation of posture and experimental situation in Experiment 4 and Experiment 5 were as Experiment 3.Experiment 5 manipulated participants’ postures and fairness type of offers in the impunity game.Three experiments have controlled the risk factor,mood between blocks and other confounding factors.The results of Experiment 3 showed that participants in expansive posture condition allocated more money for themselves than in the contract posture condition.The results of Experiment 4 show that the rejection rate of the unfair distribution is higher in the expansive posture condition than in the contract posture condition,so as the rejection rate of the unfair offers during the expansive posture and the contract posture in Experiment 5.It suggests that the implicit power initiated by the expansive posture affected the rejection rate of unfair offers even participants can not punish proposer.On the basis of Experiment 5,Experiment 6 added the measurement of power perception,and included the score of individual power perception into the analysis.The results showed that both body posture and fairness type of offers had significant effects on rejection rate and power perception.However,there was no interaction between body posture and fairness type of offers.Secondly,using Mplus7.0 will power as the mediating variable,fairness type of offers as independent variables,intermediary effect inspection rejection rate as the dependent variable,the results it is concluded that the mediation effect of power was not significant,fairness type of offers and body posture can independently affect individual sense of power,but fairness type of offers and body posture at the same time affect the sense of power and the rejection rate there is no causality.Study 2 proved that the implicit power initiated by the expansive posture make individual make more advantaged unfair distribution in the impunity game and more rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game than the contract posture condition.At the same time,the implicit power triggered by expansive posture strengthened the responders’ aversion to unfair distribution and make the aversion over the reason of profit,thus improved the rejection rate of unfair distribution of the impunity game’s responders.In the following part,the author further explored the influence mechanism of the power metaphor of body posture on fairness-related decision making by combining the results of Study 1 and Study 2.Study 1 showed physical body posture and body posture images primed the power metaphor effect.Study 2 used the higher ecological validity of body posture priming,next,Study 3 aimed to use ERP to explore the mechanism of body posture image of proposer influence on fairness-related decision making.Experiment 7 used ERP to study the mechanism of the influence of the body posture of the proposer on the fairness-related decision making of the individual as the responder.The experimental procedure was similar to experiment 4.In the formal experiment,participants chose the responder role of ultimatum game,and presented a photo of the proposer before each round of the proposer’s assignment.The results of behavioral data showed that the rejection rate of the proposer’s expansive posture condition was higher than the proposer’s contractive posture condition,and the proposer’s expansive posture condition responded longer than the proposer’s contractive posture condition.The results of EEG data showed that the main effect of posture and fairness type of offers was significant and there was interaction between them.The mean amplitude of FRN component in the proposer’s expansive body posture condition was larger than that in the proposer’s contractive body posture condition.For the condition of contractive body posture of proposer,there was no significant difference of FRN component amplitude among the fair distribution and unfair distribution.For the condition of expansive body posture,FRN component amplitude of unfair distribution types was bigger than fair distribution.It provided that proposed contractive posture can reduce the subjects of unfair allocation fairness perceptions.In general,the results of experiment 7 proved that the expansive body posture of the proposer significantly enhanced the unfairness of the unfair allocation plan compared with the contractive body posture,and also enhanced the punishment motivation of the proposer and increased the rejection of allocation plan.Combined with the results of the three studies,this study not only provided new evidence for the debate over the power metaphor effect of body posture for many years,but also provided the first behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the field of how the power metaphor effect of body posture affects fairness-related decision making.In this study,it was found that the priming of real body posture and body posture images had different promoting effects on the semantic processing of power words.The power metaphor effect of body posture has a significant influence on individuals’ fairness-related decision making in the impunity game and the ultimatum game.The proposer of the impunity game maintaining the expansive body position made more self-serving choices than contractive posture.At the same time,the implicit sense of power initiated by the expansive posture strengthened the respondents’ aversion to unfair distribution,the motivation to punish the proposer and control resources,then increased the rejection rate of the responders to unfair distribution.Both the body posture and fairness type of offers in the unpunished game have significant influence on the rejection rate and the sense of power.Body posture can independently influence the sense of power of the individual,but there was no causal relationship between the sense of power and rejection rate.Compared with the contractive body posture,the proposer’s expansive body posture significantly enhanced the subjects’ sense of unfairness to the unfair distribution,and also strengthen the subjects’ punishment motivation to the proposer and increase the rejection rate of the unfair distribution.The contractive posture of proposer reduced the participants’ unfairness of the unfair distribution.In sum,the power metaphor effect of body posture produced different effects in real body posture,body posture picture priming and decision-making situation.