Embodied information affects judgements about politicians: The impact of haptic weight sensations and hand cleansing

Abstract

P oliticians' characteristics attract voters' attention and dominate impression formation. Thereby, social judgements are deduced from different information being available in a certain situation. The literature suggests that incidental bodily sensations can influence judgement processes. Here, two bodily treatments-the haptic sensation of weight and the act of hand cleansing-simultaneously contribute to judgements about politicians. This study expands previous works by (a) investigating potential interactions of two haptic information cues, (b) providing evidence for the significant role of conceptual closeness between embodied cues and judgement dimensions, (c) showing that hand cleansing leads to harsher moral judgements independently of whether a misconduct has been committed or not, and (d) showing that the familiarity of the target to be judged does not moderate the effect of embodied information. The results demonstrate that judgements can be modulated by basal sensorimotor experiences. We discuss implications and the important issue of result generalisation and replicability.

A clean self reduces bribery intent

“…The results of Study 3 imply that not everyone could adopt the conceptual metaphor smoothly to construe the concrete experience, thus resulting in the failure of embodied cognition. As Kaspar and Klane () argued, certain failure of replication in this field (e.g., Johnson, Cheung, & Donnellan, ) might not necessarily represent the biased results in the original studies, and some hitherto undiscovered moderation mechanism could be one of the reasons for that failure.…”

“…Besides conceptually priming self‐cleanliness, we further explored the effect of the real physical cleansing (i.e., taking a shower) in Study 3. We selected participants who were going into or out of a public bath and measured their bribery intent in a scenario concerning government officials' misconduct, which was similar to the work by Kaspar and Klane (). Furthermore, the moderating role of PNS measured by the scale was investigated.…”

Wipe it off: A meta-analytic review of the psychological consequences and antecedents of physical cleansing.

“…If an effect was expected by either the original researchers or the meta-analysts or both to be significant, it was included. For example, an experiment examined the effect of physical cleansing on judgments of politicians (Kaspar & Klane, 2017). Some judgments were designed to be related to cleanliness; we included these in the meta-analysis.…”

Cognitions about bodily purity attenuate stress perception

“…Such failures of replication challenge the general validity of reported effects. However, as pointed out recently37, “failed replications in this field might not always be a signature of biased results in original studies” but instead they might reflect “hitherto undiscovered moderation and mediation processes” (p. 8). Indeed, a recent study18 revealed an indirect effect of a cleanliness manipulation on one’s self-ranked moral character in the absence of any direct or total effect.…”