The metaphor of self/environmental cleanliness in the case of moral concepts: an event-related potential study

ABSTRACT

The clean metaphor of moral concept refers to the use of a clean experience to represent moral concepts. However, there are different influences on moral judgment between self and environmental cleanliness. The study used the separated Stroop paradigm and the event-related potential (ERP) to explore the metaphorical connection between a clean self/environment and morality. The Experiment 1 found that participants recognised moral words faster after reading environmentally clean sentences than neutral sentences, and the amplitude was more positive in the P300 and N400 time windows. The Experiment 2 found that participants estimated moral words faster after reading self-clean sentences than neutral sentences, and the amplitude was more positive in the P300 and N400 time windows. However, there was no significant difference between self and environmental cleanliness. The findings indicate the psychological reality of the clean metaphor of moral concept and the same effect on environmental and self cleanliness.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral
• clean metaphor
• self cleanliness
• environmental cleanliness
• ERP

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation to every member of our research group for their help in the experiment and their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Data available statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [DANS EASY] at https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/ui/datasets/id/easy-dataset:228741. DOI: 10.17026/dans-z55-bsqp

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31860283]; the Graduate Innovation Project of Ningxia University [GIP2021059].