Psychological Consequences of Embodied and Metaphorical Thinking: Empirical Properties, Theoretical Implications, and Future Directions.

Abstract

The nature of mental life, especially its relation to the physical body, has intrigued philosophers of mind for centuries. It is at the core of psychological interest, too. Perspectives varied over the years, and only recently have we been able to make a wide range of precise predictions about which bodily experiences relate to which mental processes. As it turns out, these relations are reliably captured by the metaphors we use. Prolific experimental research in the past few years has demonstrated diverse psychological consequences of embodied and metaphorical thinking. They challenge cognitive sciences’ prevailing assumptions that mental life is disembodied and that metaphors matter little for ordinary thinking. This body of work, while advancing the paradigmatic view on mental processes, remains in its infancy. So far researchers have focused on demonstrating the existence of metaphorical effects but have done little to explore their empirical complexity and theoretical relations to well-established principles of social cognition. The primary goal of my dissertation is to tackle these problems and advance theoretical integration. To begin, I put the current work in historical perspective by outlining how psychological interests in mental processes have changed over the last century. After identifying what we know and what we need to know to make progress, I present three papers including eleven experiments that go beyond demonstration and reveal some boundaries, mechanisms, and other unknown properties of metaphorical effects. Using the moral purity metaphor as an example, I found that metaphorical effects can be (1) conceptually generalized from one abstract domain to another (from washing away your sins to a broader notion of wiping the slate clean) and (2) sensitive to the modality of experiences (“dirty hands” vs. “dirty mouth”). Turning to the something smells fishy metaphor, I found that metaphorical effects can (3) run bidirectionally between the abstract and concrete domains (with significant effects between fishy smells and social suspicion) and (4) be mediated by the accessibility and moderated by the applicability of metaphorically associated knowledge. Throughout I highlight the implications of each property for embodiment and metaphor theorizing. I conclude with theoretical integration and promising future directions.