Upright and Honorable: People Use Space to Understand Honor, Affecting Choice and Perception

Abstract

Honor is abstract. We predict that people make sense of honor metaphorically as an up–right position in space and that endorsing honor values makes this metaphor more accessible. Supporting our prediction, people in China (Study 1) and the United States (Studies 1–4) associate honor with up and right and dishonor with down and left, controlling for the association of positive with up–right (Studies 3, 4). We document downstream consequences for choice and perception of this metaphoric representation. Regarding choice, Americans who endorse honor values and voted for then-candidate Trump prefer photographs in which President Trump is positioned in the up–right quadrant (Study 5). Images from conservative news websites position the President’s face in the up–right quadrant more than nonconservative ones (Study 6). Regarding perception, Americans who rate President Trump as honorable are more likely to perceive him as facing up and to the right in news website images (Study 7).

Culturally fluent theories, metascience, and scientific progress: A case example: Commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023).

“…Culture is a human universal, a way of addressing the universal problems of social coordination, group loyalty, and the group need for innovation (Boyd & Richerson, 2005; Lin & Oyserman, 2021; Oyserman, 2017; Oyserman et al, 2009; Schwartz, 1992). Each society develops its own way of addressing these universal problems (e.g., Hofstede, 1991).…”

Culturally Fluent Theories, Metascience and Scientific Progress: A Case Example

“…Culture is a human universal, a way of addressing the universal problems of social coordination, group loyalty, and the group need for innovation (Boyd & Richerson, 2005;Lin & Oyserman, 2021;Oyserman et al, 2009;Oyserman, 2011Oyserman, , 2017Schwartz, 1992). Each society develops its own way of addressing these universal problems (e.g., Hofstede, 1991).…”

Situated Affectivity and Mind Shaping: Lessons from Social Psychology

“…Rather than being an entirely abstract affair, semantic understanding thus “reuses” or “re-deploys” representations in a sensorimotor format. This not only holds for concepts that are straightforwardly related to one’s body, such as “lick” or “kick.” Even the most abstract concepts exhibit a kind of “bodily relativity” (Casasanto, 2011) to the effect that, for instance, people across the world associate concepts like “honour” (Lin & Oyserman, 2021) or “power” (Lu et al, 2017; Schubert, 2005) with vertical “up-ness” and concepts like “important” or “high quality” with bodily experiences of heaviness or weight (e.g., Jostmann et al, 2009; Schneider et al, 2011; Zhang & Lu, 2012).…”