Embodied Social Thought: Linking Social Concepts, Emotion, and Gesture

social and emotion concepts Are abstract social concepts also understood by analogy to experience-based domains, such as space and action? Indeed, available evidence supports this view. Consider the concept of social power. A number of studies indicate that power is understood by metaphorical mappings to space, via the metaphor POWER (CONTROL) IS UP, WEAKNESS (LACK OF CONTROL) IS DOWN. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) highlighted the experiential basis of this metaphor, noting that “physical size typically correlates with physical strength, and the victor in a fight is typically on top” (p. 15). This suggests that people conceptualize power relationships between social groups with the more powerful individual (e.g., boss) above and the less powerful individual (e.g., secretary) below. Experimental evidence supports the view that people’s representations of social power are structured spatially. Schubert (2005) showed that participants’ judgments about social power relationships were influenced by the relative vertical positions of the groups to be judged. When the task was to find the powerful group, participants 5698-Fiske-Ch11.indd 222 2/13/2012 9:59:14 AM SOCIAL CONCEPTS, EMOTION, AND GESTURE 223 were faster to respond when that group’s name was at the top of the computer screen, and when the task was to find the powerless group, participants were faster to respond when that group’s name was at the bottom. Similarly, participants were faster to make judgments of powerful groups (presented alone) when they responded with the “cursor up” key, and faster to make judgments of powerless groups (presented alone) when they responded with the “cursor down” key. There is also evidence that participants’ judgments about power are also affected by spatial cues. Schubert (2005) showed that participants rated powerful animals (e.g., lion, grizzly bear) as even more powerful when they were presented at the top of the screen than when they were presented at the bottom. Giessner and Schubert (2007) extended these findings to judgments of human leaders. They asked participants to evaluate a manager of a company, and provided participants with a short text and an organization chart. In the organization chart, boxes at the lower level, which represented employees, were connected by a horizontal line, and the middle box was connected by a vertical line to a box above it, which represented the manager. The length of the vertical line (short or long) was manipulated between participants, yielding either a small or a large vertical difference between the manager and employee in the organizational chart. Participants in the large vertical difference condition evaluated the leader as more powerful than participants in the small vertical difference condition. Moreover, these effects were not found for evaluations of charisma, which is not represented in terms of a vertical spatial schema. It is not only the case that spatial representations influence evaluations of power; the opposite also holds. That is, judgments of power can influence the spatial representations that people construct. Giessner and Schubert (2007) manipulated whether a leader was described as powerful or non-powerful, and investigated how participants represented the leader’s relationships to others spatially. In one study, participants were asked to place a box representing the leader in an organizational chart that included empty boxes to represent other employees the bottom. In another study, participants were asked to place a picture of the leader relative to a circle of six pictures representing the leader’s team members, to represent the relation of the leader to the followers. In both studies, participants placed the more powerful leader higher along the vertical dimension than the less powerful leader. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the abstract social concept of power is grounded by a metaphorical mapping to vertical space, via the metaphor POWER (CONTROL) IS UP, WEAKNESS (LACK OF CONTROL) IS DOWN. Thus, abstract social concepts can be grounded in embodied experience. Metaphoric structuring has also been investigated in terms of abstract emotion concepts; in particular, concepts regarding emotional valence. These concepts appear to be structured by metaphorical mappings to space, in terms of the broad-based metaphor GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN. Riskind (1983) showed that people retrieve emotional memories with positive valence more efficiently when sitting erect, and they retrieve emotional memories with negative valence more efficiently when sitting in a slumped position. Along similar lines, Casasanto and Dijkstra (2010) showed that, when participants were given neutral-valence prompts, they retrieved more memories with positive valence when they were instructed to move a set of marbles upward (from one box to another), and they retrieved more memories with negative valence when they were instructed to move marbles downward. Likewise, latency to recall memories with positive valence was shorter when participants were instructed to move marbles upward, and latency to recall memories with negative valence was shorter when participants were instructed to move marbles downward (Casasanto & Dijkstra, 2010). Embodiment of abstractions in language and gesture The studies described above are primarily experimental manipulations that have yielded evidence about the conceptual metaphors that underlie abstract social and emotional concepts. However, one need not conduct experiments in order to “see” the metaphorical structuring of abstract concepts. Conceptual metaphors that involve action, space, and other bodily experiences are commonly expressed in everyday language. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) based their arguments on evidence from everyday linguistic expressions. For example, the POWER IS UP, WEAKNESS IS DOWN metaphor (described above) is manifested in expressions such as “your highness,” “high and mighty,” and “he’s moving up in the ranks. ” As another example, consider the metaphor FRIENDSHIP IS PHYSICAL CLOSENESS. This metaphor is manifested in everyday expressions that describe physical closeness, such as “we are really tight” or “he’s being distant. ” Conceptual metaphors that involve action, space, and bodily experiences are also commonly expressed in spontaneous gestures. McNeill (1992) was among the first to observe that representational gestures sometimes depict abstract 5698-Fiske-Ch11.indd 223 2/13/2012 9:59:14 AM THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL COGNITION 224 concepts metaphorically; this insight has spawned a large body of research on metaphor in gesture (Cienki & Müller, 2008). One metaphor that McNeill discusses at length is the “conduit” metaphor (see Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Reddy, 1979), which holds that IDEAS, CONCEPTS, MEANINGS (and so forth) ARE OBJECTS; WORDS, SENTENCES AND OTHER LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS; and COMMUNICATION IS SENDING AND RECEIVING. This metaphor is commonly expressed in gestures that represent holding or transferring objects. For example, a speaker might extend her hand as if holding something, while saying, “I have an idea” or “How shall I say this? ” Metaphors that involve spatial image schemas are also readily expressed in gestures. Consider spatial metaphors for time, as considered at the outset of this section. Nú ñ ez and Sweetser (2006) studied conceptual metaphors for time in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia, southeastern Peru, and northern Chile. In Aymara, the word for front is also used to mean “past” and the word for back is also used to mena “future. ” Nú ñ ez and Sweetser examined the gestures that Aymara speakers produced to accompany verbal expressions about time, and found that Aymara speakers used the space behind them to represent the future, and the space in front of them to represent the past. Furthermore, Aymara speakers used locations in front of and closer to their bodies to represent more recent past times, and locations in front of and farther from their bodies to represent less recent past times. These gestures complement data from Aymara linguistic expressions to show that metaphoric construals of time in Aymara are quite different from those in other languages, including English. Many other studies have documented gestures that reflect the metaphoric structuring of abstract concepts in terms of space and action. A few have investigated metaphoric gestures for abstract mathematical concepts. Nú ñ ez (2005) presents examples drawn from mathematics professors teaching at the university level. In one example, a professor describes an unbounded monotonic sequence that “goes in one direction,” and he represents this sequence using a circular motion of his hand, which he produces while walking forward across the front of the classroom. This case illustrates the NUMBERS ARE LOCATIONS IN SPACE metaphor (Lakoff & Núñez, 2001). In another study, Alibali and Nathan (in press) present examples drawn from middle-school mathematics lessons. In one case, a teacher presents a figure of a (balanced) pan balance with two spheres on one side, and two cylinders and a sphere on the other side, and below it, the associated equation, s + s = c + c + s. The teacher first describes removing identical objects from both sides of the balance, saying, “I am going to take away a sphere from each side,” while making a grasping motion over the spheres on each side. She then says, “Instead of taking it off the pans, I am going to take it away from this equation. ” With this utterance, she first mimes removing a sphere from each side of the pan balance figure, and then makes the same grasping handshapes over the s symbols on the two sides of the equation. With this last gesture, she expresses the metaphor of taking objects away − reflecting the ARITHMETIC IS COLLECTING OBJECTS metaphor described by Lakoff and Núñez (2001) − to give meaning to the abstract principle of subtracting