No evidence for the influence of head-heart conceptual metaphor on moral decision making and personality

Abstract

In English, head is associated with rationality and logic, whereas heart is related to feeling and emotionality. In Chinese, these head- and heart-related metaphors also exist. Could these head- and heart-related conceptual metaphors influence people’s moral decision-making and personality? This seems so based on the previous findings that (a) simply pointing an index finger to heart (versus head) position caused participants to produce more emotional responses in a moral decision task, and (b) participants who believed themselves to be heart locators, relative to those who regarded themselves as head locators, scored higher in affect intensity, femininity, and intimacy related activities. The current study attempted to replicate these findings, following the same design and procedure of previous work, with Chinese participants from Hong Kong and Chinese mainland. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 203 participants performed the moral decision task on dilemmas with their index fingers pointing to head or heart. In Experiments 2a and 2b, 304 participants completed the scales of self-location, affective intensity, femininity, and intimacy related activities. In these high-powered experiments, we failed to replicate the findings of previous work. Bayesian analyses further showed that no head- and heart-related conceptual metaphor effect was likely to occur. Potential reasons for our inconsistent results with those of previous studies and the implications of our current findings were discussed.

Keywords:

• Conceptual metaphor
• moral decision
• replication
• self-location
• bayesian analyses

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

We thank Bingzheng Hu, Jingyu Jiang for their help on data collection and Adam K. Fetterman for providing questionnaires used in Fetterman and Robinson (2013). The first author want to thank her dad Zhou Wenlong for his great love, and wish him all the best in the heaven.

Data availability statement

The data of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/s6rvb/.

Notes

1 We thank Albert Lee for the initial form of these ideas, on which we elaborate to explain the current findings.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Science Foundation of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NYY221022; by Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications); General Program of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research in College and University in Jiangsu Province (2023SJYB0143, by Jiangsu Education Department); High-level Innovation and Entrepreneurship Talents Program of Jiangsu Province in 2022 (JSSCBS20220662, by Jiangsu Education Department et al.).