The Psychological Reality And Mapping Relationship In Sizemetaphor Of Moral Concepts

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the psychological reality of the size metaphor of the moral concepts and their mapping relationship.Experiment 1 used Stroop paradigm to inspect whether there is a common mental representation between big size with moral vocabularies, small size with immoral words. We asked participants to classify the vocabulary which was represented randomly in the middle of the screen, the results showed that the interaction of the vocabulary and font size was significant.Compared with the small font, when the moral vocabulary was represented in a larger font size the reaction of the participants was more quick; When the immoral word was represented in a smaller font size(vs. larger), the reaction of the participants was more quick. It showed that the subjects’ judgment was facilitation under the condition of matching, there is metaphor connection between moral concepts with the size.Experiment 2 used the same paradigm as the experiment 1 except the limit of the reaction time. We asked subjects classify the vocabulary in a very short time.The results was consistent with the experiment 1 and showed that connection of the metaphor is automatic.In experiment 3, we used the priming paradigm to explore the mapping mode of the size metaphor of the moral concepts, which mapped from the source domain to the target domain. After priming participants’ moral concept, we compared subjects’ reaction time of judging the size, the result showed that the interaction between moral concept and size were significant. Further analysis of simple effects found that: the subjects’ reaction on the bigger squares was faster after judging moral vocabularies, as well as, the reaction on the smaller squares was more quick after judging immoral vocabularies. Consequently,we hold the opinion that the mapping from the source domain to the target domain in size metaphor of the moral concepts was existent.In experiment 4, we used the same paradigm as the experiment 3 to explore the mapping mode of the size metaphor of the moral concepts, which mapped from the target domain to the source domain. After priming participants’ size perception, we compared subjects’ reaction time to judging the moral concepts, the result shows that interaction between moral concept and size was not significant.The mapping from the target domain to the source domain in size metaphor of the moral concepts was not existent.The research showed that the size metaphor of moral concepts have psychological reality and their connection was automatic.The mapping was only from the source domain of the size to the target domain of moral concepts.