The Horizontal Spatial Metaphor Of Moral Concepts And Its Influence On Moral Judgments

In the long course of civilization development,the Chinese nation has nurtured the traditional moral values.The 18 th national congress of the communist party of China has put forward socialist core values,among which patriotism,devotion to work,honesty and friendliness,as the basic moral standards of citizens,are the basic values for evaluating citizens' choice of moral behavior.As an abstract concept,we can't see or touch it.In daily life,we mainly understand morality through metaphor,that is,we use figurative and concrete concepts to represent morality.Then,can the familiar left-right spatial orientation be associated with the moral concept? Is there any difference in the performance of different hands under the influence of sports experience? Based on this,three experiments were set up to explore the metaphorical connection and directivity between moral concept and horizontal space.Experiment 1,on the level of consciousness,adopts the word-translation matching paradigm to explore the metaphorical representation between the two and the mapping from the origin domain(left and right)to the goal domain(moral concept).The results showed that the left-hander tended to choose the Greek non-words on the left as the corresponding translation of moral words,while the right-hander tended to choose the Greek non-words on the right as the corresponding translation of moral words.When the subjects read the words and judged them to be immoral,the left-hander tended to choose the Greek non-words on the right as the corresponding translation of the immoral words,while the right-hander tended to choose the Greek non-words on the left as the corresponding translation of the immoral words.Experiment 2,on the basis of experiment 1,adopts Stroop paradigm to explore whether metaphorical psychological reality and its mapping orientation exist in moral concept and horizontal space on the unconscious level.The results show that for theright-hander,the metaphorical representation of the horizontal space of the moral concept has a mapping from the target domain to the source domain,and this mapping is automatic and unconscious.In experiment 3,subjects were asked to judge the morality of neutral emotional pictures of people's faces on the left or right side of the screen,to explore the influence of horizontal space position on people's moral judgment,and to verify the mapping of target domain to origin domain.The results showed that when the picture was presented to the left of the screen,the left-hander subjects tended to think the figure was moral,while the right-hander subjects tended to think it was immoral.When the picture is displayed on the right side of the screen,left-hander subjects tend to think that the figure in the picture is immoral,while right-hander subjects tend to think that the figure in the picture is moral,which further indicates the bidirectional mapping of moral concept horizontal space metaphor.In this study,the following conclusions were obtained through three experiments:1.There is a metaphorical connection between moral concept and horizontal space on the level of consciousness and unconsciousness;2.The direction of moral concept and horizontal space metaphor mapping is bidirectional,which can be mapped from the original domain to the target domain or from the target domain to the original domain;3.The metaphorical representation of horizontal space of moral concept will affect the individual's judgment of character's morality;4.In the horizontal space metaphor of moral concept,the left handedness has the phenomenon of "left good right bad",while the right handedness has the phenomenon of "right good left bad".