Bidirectional associations of power and size in a priming task

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the size of a word's font affects people's judgements of its power. This result has been regarded as evidence for the association between power and size. It remains unclear, however, whether this association is bidirectional. The present study used a priming paradigm to determine whether processing power words was not only affected by processing size but also whether the reverse was true, consistent with metaphor representation being bidirectional. In Experiment 1, shapes in different sizes were used as priming materials, and power words were used as targets. In Experiment 2, to test the directionality of power and size, we tested two conditions using the exact same tasks but in reverse order: power words priming shapes and shapes priming power words. In Experiment 3, a significant priming effect was replicated when power words primed shapes in a lexical decision task rather than a powerful/powerless decision task. We found an interplay between power and size in all of the experiments. The bidirectional associations between power and size were in line with the strong version of Metaphoric Structuring, which claims that concrete concepts should influence abstract concepts and abstract domains should affect concrete domains. Thus, power is partially understood in terms of size, which demonstrates that abstract concepts are grounded in sensory motor processing.

Keywords:

• Bidirectional association
• Conceptual Metaphor Theory
• Grounded cognition
• Power
• Size

We thank Zachary Estes for the valuable comments on the previous manuscript, and we also thank Thomas Schubert, Rob Hartsuiker and one anonymous reviewer for reviews that significantly strengthened the work and the manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

We thank Zachary Estes for the valuable comments on the previous manuscript, and we also thank Thomas Schubert, Rob Hartsuiker and one anonymous reviewer for reviews that significantly strengthened the work and the manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Foundation of the Graduate, Scientific Research Foundation of the Graduate School of Psychology, South China Normal University and Forstering Project for National TOP Hundred Doctoral Dissertations [grant number PY2013002].