Why a Big Mac Is a Good Mac: Associations between Affect and Size

Abstract

Evaluation is a core topic of interest in both social psychology and linguistic theory, but there are relatively few social-cognitive studies examining the “online” consequences of affective metaphor. The experiments presented here sought to investigate such online consequences in relation to an understudied class of metaphors linking evaluation to size (i.e., “bigger is better”). Consistent with such metaphors, we found that positive (vs. negative) words were evaluated more quickly (Experiment 1) and accurately (Experiment 2) when presented in a larger (vs. smaller) font size. Parallel and opposite effects were found for negative words. A third experiment demonstrated that words presented in a larger font size were evaluated more favorably, thus extending size effects to evaluative judgments. Together, the studies converge on the importance of size metaphors for understanding evaluation from a social-cognitive perspective.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research in this article was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health (MH 068241).

Notes

¹Stimuli for Experiments 1 and 2 were identical to those reported in Meier and Robinson (2004).

^a N = 32

^b N = 36

^c N = 46

²Please contact the first author for the list of neutral words used in Experiment 3.