Two studies examine the grounding of gender by the alignment of the female–male with the bipolar dimension of light–dark (most likely due to sexual dimorphism in skin pigmentation). We hypothesized and showed that in a speeded classification task male names are processed faster when they are presented in a black typeface (Exp. 1) or a dark color (Exp. 2) than when they are presented in white or a light color, with the opposite pattern for female names. The applied relevance of these findings is investigated in study 3 where lightness and darkness of consumables are revealed to drive gender specific preferences for foods and drinks, with the lighter consumables being female and darker ones being male preferences. Study 4 shows that gender preferences for consumer goods are uniformly driven by whether the good is in black or white, the former being male and the latter being female preference. The implications of these findings are discussed for theory formation in relation to the grounding of abstract concepts and in terms of how to design targeted marketing of products.
In two experiments, we examine and find support for the general hypothesis that memory for behavioral information in the context of an impression formation task depends on where that information is located in vertical space. These findings extend earlier work showing that memory for location and shifts of spatial attention are influenced by the ''good is up'' metaphor. Specifically, we show that person memory is better for behavioral information in metaphor compatible locations (positive in upper space and negative in lower space) than in metaphor incompatible locations (positive in lower space and negative in upper space). These findings show for the first time that person-specific information, and person memory in general, is structured spatially. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The impressions we form of others constitute important markers guiding the way we navigate our social world. Not surprisingly, the subject of impression formation has occupied center stage in social psychology from its early beginnings (Allport & Allport, 1921;Anderson, 1965;Asch, 1946;Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980a;Hastie, Ostrom, Ebbesen, Wyer, Hamilton, & Carlston, 1980;Srull, 1981). A focus on the nature of the mental representations underlying how we think about persons and analyses of the processes driving such thinking shaped the course of the field, leading to the development of increasingly sophisticated bodies of theory about the nature of mental representations, their impact on judgments, and the nature of variables affecting information processing (e.g., Wyer & Srull, 1989; for reviews see Smith, 1998;Wyer & Carlston, 1994). In this view, person cognition became the construction and manipulation of inner representations, with the implicit assumption that knowledge about persons is dissociated from any sensory base and thus amodal (e.g., Wyer & Srull, 1989). However, cognition is constrained by the properties of our evolved brains and bodies (Semin & Smith, 2002Smith & Semin, 2004). Adopting an embodied view of person cognition casts this field in the active context of navigating the social world suggesting that like other cognitive processes, impressions are structured by the incorporation of sensorimotor and affective elements.The current research was designed to investigate the general hypothesis that valenced behavioral information acquired in the course of our daily social interaction can be anchored spatially. These experiments extend earlier work (cf. for a review Crawford, 2009) that has demonstrated that memory for location and shifts of spatial attention are influenced by the ''good is up'' metaphor, and that memory is better for valenced stimuli that appear in metaphorcompatible locations (positive in upper space and negative in lower space) than those that appear in metaphor-incompatible locations (positive in lower space and negative in upper space). We will do so by exploring for the first time the ''good is up'' metaphor in a standard person memory paradigm. Specifically, we examined in two exp...
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