Research has shown that physical experiences can influence metaphorically related judgments. For example, the experience of physical weight influences estimates of value and importance. Careful examination of existing evidence suggests that how much knowledge people have about a target of a judgment determines whether the experience of physical weight influences that judgment. Three studies directly test this hypothesis, finding that participants evaluated a book as more important when it was heavy (due to a concealed weight), but only when they had substantive knowledge about the book.
In idiomatic English, people with serious problems “carry the weight of the world” on their shoulders and when faced with tough choices they may “weigh” the merits of alternative courses of action. These phrases reflect how significance or value is expressed through metaphors that suggest heft or physical substance. The association between weight and importance is old. The Latin verb pondus (to weigh or consider) lives on in the words ponderous and pensive that reflect the alternative meanings of physical and psychic weight. Likewise the Latin word gravis (heavy or serious) is survived by gravid, gravity, gravitas, and grave, all of which connote varying degrees of weight and importance.
Metaphorical associations like that between “importance” and “weight” are more than just poetic language, instead reflecting something deeper about how people think about the world. The concepts of weight and importance are tightly coupled to each other, so that when one comes to mind, the other is likely to follow. Just as the experience of physical weight (i.e. lifting a heavy book) brings thoughts related to physical weight to mind (“this feels heavy”), it also brings thoughts to mind suggestive of metaphorical weight (“this book is important’). Researchers have demonstrated this link through studies in which people who experience physical weight are faster to recognize importance related words, suggesting that related thoughts are already on their mind (Zhang & Li, 2012, for an early demonstration using a different metaphor see Meier & Robinson, 2004).
Once a physical experience brings thoughts to mind, these thoughts can in turn influence judgments that are related to it (Lee & Schwarz, 2012). Indeed, there are many demonstrations of physical weight influencing perceived importance, even when the source of weight is irrelevant to the judgment at hand. In one study researchers found that people estimated currencies as more valuable when the clipboard on which they wrote the estimate was made heavier through a concealed weight (Jostmann, Lakens & Schubert, 2009), while others have found that food seems more expensive when it is sampled from a heavier dish (Piqueras-Fiszman, Harrar, Alcaide & Spence, 2011) or when using heavier cutlery (Spence, Harrar & Piqueras-Fiszman, 2012).
Other studies have shown that the relationship between weight and importance extends beyond questions of monetary value, influencing estimates of more abstract forms of importance. Incidental experiences of physical weight lead people to ascribe more importance to abstract ideas, like fairness (Jostmann et al., 2009), and candor (Zhang & Li, 2012). People also perceive diseases as more severe (Kaspar, 2013) and allocate more money to fund policy decisions when providing their answers on weighted, as opposed to unweighted, clipboards (Ackerman, Nocera & Bargh, 2010).
Does knowing more influence the effect of weight on judgment?
Our gut reaction to the world around us is beyond our immediate control: when we experience something any number of thoughts or feelings may come to mind. However, whether we incorporate those feelings into judgments is at least partially under our control, and thoughts and feelings must be reconciled when forming an opinion. (for a discussion see Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Given all of the additional steps involved in turning a passing thought into a well-formed opinion, it seems plausible that how physical cues are incorporated into explicit judgments about the world should be highly context sensitive, occurring sometimes, but not always. So when do physical cues, like an object’s weight, influence people’s beliefs about the world?
How much somebody knows about something may influence whether the experience of physical weight will influence their opinion of it. Intuitively, if people know more about something, they must surely rely less on irrelevant cues like weight, either because they have already formed a firm opinion, or because they have other more relevant information to draw upon. This intuition is compatible with research that shows that when people do not have a readily available answer to a problem, they may rely on a heuristic to provide a solution (Kahneman, 2011; Meier, Landau & Keefer, 2010).
Much as when people try to estimate the probability of an event (“how likely is it that X will happen”) they inadvertently draw on feelings of familiarity (“can I think of a time that X has happened before”), when trying to estimate the importance of something (“how much is this coin worth?”) people may inadvertently draw on feelings of weight (“how heavy does it feel?”). While weight may be correlated with value or importance often enough to make this a reasonable inference (e.g. Piqueras-Fiszman, & Spence 2012), this relationship will extend to situations where physical heft is irrelevant to the question of value or when it emanates from an irrelevant source like weights concealed inside the clipboard holding a questionnaire.
I became interested in the interplay between prior knowledge and physical cues when a student of mine found a perplexing experimental result. He approached students around campus with a copy of the novel The Catcher in the Rye and asked them to rate how influential it was. Half of the people rated a regular hardcover copy, and half rated a copy with metal plates taped inside the cover. Overall, the results were encouraging, but as we examined the data we noticed that the effect seemed to be especially strong among people who had actually read the book, and was virtually absent among people who had not. The opposite of what would intuitively be expected and what would be predicted by heuristic explanations of metaphor effects.
As it turns out, there are also reasons to predict that knowing more about something may increase the influence of irrelevant cues. If one assumes that physical weight matters because people have a heuristic that “heavy things are important”, knowledge should reduce the effect of weight. However, an alternative theory with a slightly different explanation makes a different prediction. From a semantic priming perspective physical weight matters because the experience makes it more likely that people will bring importance related concepts to mind. Concepts are more like passing thoughts than rules, and like other thoughts they will only influence a judgment if they seem applicable to the judgment at hand (Higgins, 1996).
An older study of semantic priming that brought concepts to mind by presenting verbal cues demonstrates this principle well. It found that people evaluated the behavior of a person who enjoyed activities like mountain climbing and kayaking as positive if previously exposed to positive trait words applicable to this context (e.g. “adventurous”), and as negative if previously exposed to negative applicable traits (e.g. “reckless”). However, their evaluations of the person were not influenced by exposure to traits that were not applicable to the person’s description (e.g. “grateful” or “sly”; Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977). Adventurousness has certain connotations that make kayaking seem desirable, while gratitude does not. By a similar logic, a heavier copy of a book may lead one to interpret facts about a book as bearing on its importance, provided that one has relevant facts to be interpreted. For people who know little about the book, a heavy book may still bring importance related concepts to mind, but they are unlikely to be related to the book itself.
Despite this line of reasoning, our initial finding seemed counterintuitive and we were skeptical. However, a reexamination of prior research suggested that contrary to our initial expectations but in agreement with our finding, the existing literature on weight and importance actually seemed to support the idea that knowledge was necessary for physical heft to influence judgments of importance. In the study that investigated the effect of weight on political attitudes (Ackerman et al., 2008), the authors found that while the experience of weight made people supportive of spending money on some issues like economic development, it did not influence support of other issues, like regulating the use of AM radio wave bandwidth, about which they presumably knew little.
A closer examination of the study on weight and currency values revealed a similar pattern (Jostmann et al., 2009). Although people generally estimated coins as more valuable when holding a heavy clipboard, there was considerable variance across currencies, ranging from estimates of the Japanese Yen, which showed a strong effect, to the Ethiopian Birr, which showed no effect. The authors reported that economic importance of countries did not determine whether clipboard weight influenced estimates of value, but a secondary analysis of their data revealed that the impact of the clipboard weight on a currency’s estimated value increased in direct proportion to the number of Google indexed web pages mentioning the country that issued it. In other words, the more familiar the country was to the general public, the greater the effect of weight on estimates of the value of its currency.
We were also able to replicate these findings in more rigorous replications of the first experiment. In one study, we replicated the basic finding from our first study by measuring knowledge directly, rather than simply assuming that people who read The Catcher in the Rye knew more about it. As before, participants held either a regular or a weighted copy of the novel and rated its importance. This time, we also asked people to answer a number of factual multiple choice questions about it. We found that in general, people rated the heavier book as more important. We also found that this effect was strongest for people who scored average to above average on the knowledge test and non-existent for people who performed poorly. This supports the hypothesis that people need to know something about a target of judgment - as opposed to merely believing that they know something about it – in order for physical weight to influence their judgments of importance.
While this finding supported our initial observation, it was also ultimately correlational. People who read literature and remember it in detail may differ in important ways from people who do not. Perhaps this group was simply smarter or more observant and realized that the books contained concealed weights, or perhaps they differed in some other way. To rule out these concerns, we conducted a third experiment, in which we experimentally manipulated how much knowledge participants had about the target.
All participants were given a book that they were unlikely to be familiar with (Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy). Half of the participants received a regular hardcover copy of the book, and half received an otherwise identical copy with a concealed weight inside it. To experimentally manipulate participants’ knowledge of the book, we gave half of them the book face up, so that they could only see the unfamiliar title and author name. The rest were asked to hold the book back up, so that they could also see a few reasonably informative endorsements (“in exploring what it might be like to be a dog from a human perspective, Dog Boy sheds much light on what it is like to be human”). We found that people who only knew the title of the book were unaffected by its physical weight, but those who had read the additional information on the back of the book were influenced by the physical weight of the book, thinking that the heavier book was more likely to make the New York Times bestseller list, indicating more interesting in reading it, and reporting a willingness to pay more money for the opportunity to read it.
What can be learned from the influence of knowledge
A growing body of research has demonstrated that the thoughts that physical sensations can lead metaphorically related thoughts to come to mind. The fact that these associations exist tells us something interesting about how concepts are stored in the mind. However, when the influence of physical sensations extends beyond thoughts to influence the judgments and decisions people make is also important because it tells us something about how information stemming from bodily sensations is integrated with other information to form opinions about the world. The studies discussed here suggest that while the experience of weight may activate the concept of importance, activation alone is not enough to influence judgment. People must also have some reason to apply this information to a target of judgment for it to have an effect. This could include information about the target itself (e.g. having read the book) orinformation from other contextual cues (e.g. a belief about the kind of book that might be found in a specific place or shared by a specific person) .
It is possible that knowledge influences the metaphorical use of other physical sensations in a similar way. If true, then many of the principles already known to influence semantic priming effects are likely relevant to physical experiences as well. For example, embodied weight cues should not influence targets that are unambiguously important or unimportant on a clearly specified dimension. This would suggest, for example that attitudes toward “environmental regulation” may be influenced by incidental cues, because there is a great deal of latitude in what this might actually include, but that attitudes towards specific and frequently discussed policies – like monitoring the mercury dumped into rivers – may be less susceptible. Further, details like whether people are aware that they physical experience may influence on judgment, whether the physical experience is intense enough to become blatant and thus suspect and the presence of alternative interpretations of a relevant meaning of the physical experience (e.g., that there are plates concealed inside the book) could all undermine their use in metaphorically related judgments. It is also possible that it is too much to assume that all physical experiences influence judgment in the same way, simply because they are experienced through a common sensory channel. If this is the case, then there is much work to be done in understanding how different physical experiences influence thinking and deciding.
Practically, this research suggests that the influence of experiential cues on everyday decisions is not a given, and rather depends on the correct circumstances to occur. This is an important caveat for marketing, public policy and other disciplines that use psychological research to guide real-world decisions. Manipulations of physical sensations are unlikely to matter for products unless they are provided in conjunction with relevant information about the product itself. Additionally, heavier products may be evaluated more favorably when they are in a product category that is complex, or highly uncertain (e.g., wine; Piqueras-Fiszman & Spence, 2012), but not in product categories that lend themselves to unambiguous judgments of quality (e.g., flash drives). More generally, this finding serves as a reminder that human decision making is the product of many complex features, rather than knee-jerk responses to stimuli in the environment and that it may be overly optimistic to assume that beliefs and opinions can be consistently and uniformly influenced through changes to a single variable.
References
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