The Clean And Dirty Metaphor Of Moral Concepts And Its Influence On Moral Judgment

The essence of metaphor is using the familiar, concrete and tangible concepts to express and understand the unfamiliar, abstract and intangible concepts. Conceptual metaphor is universal, but moral concepts are so abstract that people can hardly represent and experience them through body perceptual organs. Therefore, metaphor is useful. A more important fact is that moral concepts may influence moral judgments and cognitive processes directly. In our daily lives, we often use physical cleanliness and dirtiness to express abstract morality. Hence, this linguistic link must have relevant psychological reality and physiological mechanisms. This established stable metaphorical link that cleanliness means good and dirtiness means bad will influence our superior moral activities—moral judgments as well.This study first reviewed the concept of embodied and conceptual metaphors, and concentrated on introducing moral metaphor and the empirical studies of moral metaphor’s influence on moral judgments. According to the metaphor of "clean is moral, dirty is immoral", the psychological reality of clean and dirty metaphor of moral concepts was proposed. Based on this psychological reality, the clean and dirty metaphor’s influence on moral judgments was discussed. Experiment 1 used the picture-word interference paradigm of Stroop Test and Event-related Potential technique to collect behavior data and computer data which can corroborate each other to prove the psychological reality of clean and dirty metaphor of moral concepts. On the basic of experiment 1, experiment 2 and.3 made further steps to discuss clean and dirty metaphor’s influence on moral judgments. Experiment 2 was based on the priming effect of the cleanliness and dirtiness of environment and discussed clean and dirty metaphor’s influence on moral judgments. However, the clean and dirty metaphor of participants would cause more complicated moral judgments than the clean and dirty metaphor of environment. Experiment 3 was based on the priming effect of cleanliness and dirtiness of bodies and discussed clean and dirty metaphor’s influence on moral judgments, and then further compared the difference between the clean and dirty metaphor of environment and the clean and dirty metaphor of participants to moral judgments. With these three systemic experiments above, we could expand the metaphorical moral theory, enhance the applicability of clean and dirty metaphor’s influence on moral judgments and improve the reference value to moral education environmental education.Above all, we could draw following conclusions:(1)The clean and dirty metaphor of moral concepts has psychological reality and physiological mechanisms.The representation of cleanliness and dirtiness will affect the processing and judging program of moral concepts. When being in a clean environment, individuals will recognize the moral words faster. While being in a dirty environment, they will perform faster to immoral words. If the environment is discordant with the representation of the metaphor of target words (moral vocabularies appears in a dirty environment and immoral vocabularies appears in a clean environment), it will induce larger P300 amplitude and N400 amplitude. P300 amplitude reflected a conflict of moral concepts’ processing, and N400 amplitude reflected the difficulty of extracting information from environment when discordance appeared.(2) The clean and dirty metaphor of moral concepts will affect individuals’ moral judgments to others. If the cognition of cleanliness and dirtiness is from environment, the moral judgments and reflection of metaphor to others will be accordant; if the cognition of cleanliness and dirtiness is from individuals themselves, the moral judgments and reflection of metaphor to others will be opposite.(3) The clean and dirty priming effect of environment and participants make different influence on moral judgments. The influence of clean and dirty priming on moral judgment are only caused from the judgments of moral dilemma stories, while the influence of clean and dirty priming of participants can be caused both from the judgments of moral and immoral stories.