Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
Social context modulates the effect of hot temperature on perceived interpersonal warmth:
a study of embodied metaphors
Francesca M.M. Citron1,2* , Adele E. Goldberg2,1
1 Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2Humanities Council, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Address correspondence to:Francesca Citron
Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”
Freie Universität Berlin
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Word count: 2996
Running head: Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
Abstract
Physical contact with hot vs. iced coffee has been shown to affect evaluation of PERSONAL WARMTH of a hypothetical person. HEATisalso metaphorically associated with ANGER. In 3 studies, we investigated whether the manipulation of social context leads to the activation of one metaphor over another.We expected that PERSONAL WARMTHas HEAT would be more relevant and therefore activated when ahypothetical person represents an ally, whereasANGERas HEAT would be activated when the person represents an adversary. Unexpectedly, we found no evidence that the metaphor ANGER as HEAT was activated. But results showed that social context did modulate the activation of PERSONAL WARMTHas HEAT:adversaries were judged as possessing more personal warmthwhen participants had experienced heat, whereas no effect emerged in the ally condition. These studies suggest that context can modulate metaphorical activation, with out-group (adversary) members being affected more strongly by the physical heat manipulation.
Key words: embodied metaphors, personal warmth, anger, impulsivity, temperature, heat, group membership
1. Introduction
Physical experiences have been shown to implicitly affect judgments, through associations between a physical domain and a more abstract domain (e.g., Williams & Bargh, 2008). According to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT),people think about abstract concepts partially in terms of more concrete vehicles(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980); e.g.,in the metaphor positive as up, good feeling is associated with high spatial position and sad feeling is associated with low spatial location (e.g., she’s feeling up; He’s down today). While these mappings are primarily evident in language, they affect our non-linguistic behavior as well. For example, previous research has shownthat people are quicker to judge positively valenced words as positive when they are presented high on the screen, and negatively valenced words as negative when they are low on the screen (Meier & Robinson, 2004).
At the same time, multiple target domains are typically associated with the same source domain across-languages and even within a single language. For example, English speakers talk about TIME is terms of HORIZONTAL POSITION, whereas Mandarin speakers are more likely to associate TIME with VERTICAL POSITION (Fuhrman et al., 2011). Furthermore, English-speaking right-handed people associate RIGHT with GOOD, and LEFT with BAD, in line with their language use, but left-handed people show the opposite implicit association (Casasanto, 2009).In both English and German, HEAT can be associated with personal warmth, or with ANGER(Kovecses 1986). Both metaphors have been shown to affect judgments(Williams and Bargh 2008; Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter and Feltman 2009).
A question that has not been investigated so far is whether social contextual cuescan determine which metaphor is activated by a physical experience and to what extent. This is the aim of the present paper.
Williams and Bargh (2008)gave participants a neutral description of a hypothetical person after they had held either a hot or iced cup of coffee. In a subsequent questionnaire, participants evaluated the person as more kind if they were in the hot condition than if they were in the cold condition. In the debriefing, people saidthey were unaware of the association between the temperature of the drink and the evaluation.
The present experiment aimed to replicate this finding while adding a contextual manipulation that was intended to make either PERSONAL WARMTHas HEAT orANGER as HEATrelevant. In particular, we aimed to determine whether viewing the hypothetical person as part of an ad hoc in-group might elicit HEAT as PERSONAL WARMTH, while viewing the hypothetical person as a member of an ad hoc out-group might elicit HEAT as ANGER. Therefore, after contact with a hot vs. cold beverage and before reading the neutral description of a hypothetical person, participants were told they were going to play a computer game on the same teamor against the hypothetical person.
In the evaluation questionnaire, participants ratedthe degree to which the hypothetical person tended to be impulsive, irritable, etc., and the degree to which the person was agreeable, sociable, etc. along with filler questions about unrelated personal qualities. We expected participants assigned to the “ally” condition to implicitly activate the metaphor PERSONAL WARMTH as HEAT,which would replicateWilliams & Bargh (2008). At the same time, we expected participants in the “adversary” condition to activate the metaphor ANGERas HEAT and therefore evaluate the hypothetical person as more impulsive or prone to anger if given the hot beverage.
2. Experiment 1
2.1. Material and methods
2.1.1. Participants
Thirty-six native German speakers took part in the experiment in Berlin (M = 32 years, range = 20-65; 21 women). Participants received5€ or course credit.
2.1.2. Material and procedure
The experimenter met each participant at an entrance to Freie Universität Berlin. Participants were asked to carry a beverage for the experimenter as they walked to the experimental room (about 300 meters away). The beverage was hot or iced water, contained in a disposable paper cup. Once in the room, participants returned the cup without drinking from itand received an instruction booklet. The first page informed them that they would later play a computer game on the same team or against a hypothetical person referred to as “S.K.”
The second page contained a neutral description of S.K. (see instructions on Table 1).The third page contained the evaluation questionnaire, with instructions on how to rate S.K. on 7-point Likert scales. Fivepersonal warmth-relatedscales (i.e., caring-selfish, generous-ungenerous, sociable-unsociable, agreeable-disagreeable, warm-cold*), 5 impulsivity-related scales (i.e., agitated-self-controlled, aggressive-unaggressive, impulsive-cautious, irritable-good-natured, hot-headed-cool under pressure*) and 5 filler items (i.e., happy-sad, honest-dishonest, talkative-quiet, serious-carefree, strong-weak) were included,with the extreme ends representing opposite traits. A unique header above all scales had the label “very much” on points 1 and 7 and “in between” on point 4. Two different randomized orders were used, whereby personal warmth, impulsivity and filler items were alternated, as well as the direction of the single scales. Further, the direction of each item (e.g., caring-selfish vs. selfish-caring) was reversed in a second version of each of the 2 randomizations.The metaphorical items (flagged with * above) always appeared last within their category to make sure the metaphorical association would not be explicitly activated during the questionnaire completion.
Table 1. Instructions.
Awareness of the experimental manipulations was assessed after the experiment and then participants were debriefed. Experiment and debriefing lasted approximately 20 minutes.
2.1.3. Design and data analysis
Participants were randomly assigned to the hot vs. cold cup condition as well as to the ally vs. adversary condition in a between-subjects design. Two-by-two independent-measures ANOVAs with factors temperature (hot, cold) and group membership (ally, adversary) were conducted on the personal warmth ratings and impulsivity ratings separately. We kept note of the temperature of the days in which testing took place. The experimenter was the same person throughout.
2.2.Results
No participant reported being aware of any connection between the beverage temperature and the evaluation of S.K.A main effect of temperature on the personal warmth ratings was found F(36,1) = 4.68, p = .038: participants primed with hot temperature rated S.K. as warmer (see Figure 1 for descriptive statistics). Noeffect of group membership and no interaction between the two factors was found Fs(36,1) < 1.98, ns. Pair-wise comparisons revealed a significant temperature difference within the adversary condition only t(16) = 2.67, p = .017. Neither main effects nor an interaction were found on the impulsivity ratings Fs(36,1) < 0.45, ns.There was no difference in average day temperature between hot and cold cup conditions in Experiments 1, 2 or 3 (t(34) = 0.17; t(36) = 0.31; t(40) = 0.71).
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2.3. Discussion
Our hypotheses of an effect of temperature on personal warmth ratings for the ally condition and an effectof temperature on the impulsivity ratings for the adversary condition were not supported by the results.Only the personal wARMTHas HEAT metaphorwas activated, as shown by the main effect of temperature; the effect remains significant only when tested within the adversary condition, as opposed to our prediction of an effect in the ally condition only. That is, the heat of the cup made participants more likely to judge a hypothetical adversary as more personally warm but had no significant effect on a hypothetical ally. These results show only a partial replication of Williams and Bargh´s(2008) original study and support the idea thatadditional factors such as social context can modulate the activation of a conceptual metaphor. In particular, group membership seems to modulate the temperature effect.
No evidence for activation of the ANGERas HEATmetaphor was apparent.One possible reasonmay be that the hot cup was not hot enough. Participants may have perceived the cup as pleasantly warm rather than hot and this might have prevented hot-anger associations. In order to assess this possibility, we ran a second experiment in which temperature was manipulated through the use of a quite hot or cold wet thick paper cloth that participants wiped their hands with. The second experiment took place in the US, and so English was used instead of German.
3. Experiment 2
3.1. Material and methods
3.1.1. Participants
Thirty-eight native English speakers from Princeton University took part in the experiment (Mean age = 21 years, range = 18-56; 32 women). Participants were rewarded with either $8 or course credit.
3.1.2. Material and procedure
The experimenter met each participant at the entrance of the Psychology Department at Princeton and took them to the experimental room. Participants sat at a table and were given a hot vs. cold wet paper cloth, with which they were asked to wipe their hands because they were going to eat finger food later on. The cloth had been previously wet with tap water, gently wrung and laid on a plate; in the hot condition only, the cloth wasmicrowaved for 2 minutes. After wiping their hands, participants were given the equivalent instruction booklet as in Experiment 1 (in English). The rest of the methods were identical to Experiment 1 except that, after the debriefing, participants were given a snack as promised.
3.2. Results
All participants perceived the cloth as actually hot or cold and none of them reported being aware of any connection between cloth temperature and S.K. evaluation. A marginally significant effect of temperature on personal warmth ratings was found F(38,1) = 2.78, p = .105, in the same direction as in Experiment 1. No effect of group membership and no interaction wasfound Fs(38,1) < 0.24, ns. Pair-wise comparisons revealed no temperature difference within any group membership conditionts(16) <1.29, ns. As in Experiment 1, no main effects and no interaction on impulsivity ratings were found Fs(38,1) < 0.40, ns.
3.3. Discussion
The results partially replicate Experiment 1, although they only show a trend toward an effect of temperature on personal warmth ratings. A possible explanation for the failure to fully replicate the personal warmth results might be that, even though the hot cloth was properly hot rather than warm, the cold cloth might not have been cold enough. In fact, the temperature of participants’ hands could quickly transfer to the cloth and dampen the influence of the cold. Unlike in Experiment 1, the effect of heat was not modulated by group membership. As before, no effects of temperature or group membership on impulsivity ratings were found. We considered the possibility that our group membership assignment instructions might not be effective enough.
In order to address these issues, we ran a third experiment in which we again used the wet hot cloth, but this time we cooled the cold cloth with cold water. Further, we modified our instructionsfor group membership assignment to make themmore effective.
4. Experiment 3
4.1. Material and methods
4.1.1. Participants
Forty-two native German speakers from the Berlin area who did not previously participate in Experiment 1performed the experiment (M = 31 years, range = 19-73; 24 women).
4.1.2. Material and procedure
The temperature condition assignment was identical to that of Experiment 2, except the cold cloth was made wet withcold water kept in the fridge. For the group membership assignment, slightly different andlonger instructions were used (see Table 1). In addition, a second person description wascreated, A.J., to be certain results would generalize.Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two descriptions.To make sure the descriptions were interchangeable, we ran a control study with 20 additional participants (M = 23 years, range = 20-31; 13 women), in which no temperature or group membership priming was given. We found no significant difference between S.K. and A.J in either personal warmth or impulsivity ratings ts(18) < 0.88, ns. Personal warmth for S.K. had M = 4.12, SD =0.51; for A.J. M = 3.88, SD = 0.70. Impulsivity for S.K. had M = 2.96, SD =0.57; for A.J. M = 3.08, SD = 0.67. Finally, in the evaluation of the hypothetical person, the example pair “clean/dirty” was replaced by “slow/fast”, as the former could be associated with the hand wiping.
4.2. Results
All participants perceived the cloth as actually hot or cold andnone of them reported being aware of any connection between cloth temperature and S.K. evaluation. A significantmain effect of temperature onpersonal warmth ratings was found F(42,1) = 7.70, p = .009, in the same direction as in Experiments 1 and 2. No main effect of group membership (“ally” vs. “adversary”) was found Fs(42,1) = 0.44, ns. Nevertheless, a marginally significant interaction appeared F(42,1) = 2.82, p = .102 and was further supported by the pair-wise comparisons: as in Experiment 1, temperature significantly affected personal warmth ratings within the adversary condition t(18) = 3.09, p = .006, but not within the ally condition t(20) = 0.79.
The impulsivity ratings showed no main effects of either temperature or group membership Fs(42,1) < 1.47, ns, but a trend toward an interaction appeared F(42,1) = 2.73, p = .107, weakly consistent with a trend toward a temperature effect within the adversary condition t(18) = 1.38, p = .19 and no difference within the ally conditiont(20) = 0.99, ns. That is, when participants were primed with the hot cloth, the hypothetical adversary was rated as numerically, but not significantly, more impulsive.
5. General discussion
This study builds on previous work showing that the physical experience of heat, a concrete conceptual domain, leads to the implicit activation of personal warmth, a more abstract, affective domain (Williams & Bargh, 2008). Given that heat is associated with bothPERSONAL WARMTH andANGER, the present studiesaimed to determine whether, by manipulating the social context, we could see differential activation of the two metaphors. Groupmembership (ally or adversary) was used to manipulate the social context.
Overall, our experiments showed reliable activation of the PERSONAL WARMTHas HEATmetaphor, as revealed by significant effects of temperature on personal warmth ratings in Experiments 1 and 3 and a marginal effect in Experiment 2.There was noclear evidence for the activation of ANGERas HEAT. Social context was found to modulate the metaphorical activation, althoughnot as we had predicted. In particular, participants in the adversary conditiononly evaluated a hypothetical person as warmer when primed with heat than cold; participants in the ally condition showed no difference.
This finding may be explained by the fact that evaluations of out-group members are usually more extreme than those of in-group members, and an adversary would naturally be viewed as an out-group member. Linville and Jones (1980)showed that affectively relevant information led to greater polarization in the evaluation of out-group members compared to in-group members, no matter whether the information was positive or negative. The idea that people have more complex mental schemas of their own group and therefore tend to make more moderate judgments of in-group members; knowledge about out-groups is often based on fewer dimensions, leading to less weighted and more extreme evaluations(Linville & Jones, 1980).Even though participants in the present study were given little information about either group members, thetendency tojudge out-group members more strongly on the basis of meager evidence may generalize to other circumstances, such as these experiments.
An alternative interpretation has to do with category-driven processes that require a degree of perceived fit between a member’s characteristics and the characteristics associated with a category. If the member does not fit the category, people will look for additional information to evaluate them (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). In our studies, the neutral description of S.K./A.J. might not have fit with implicit expectations regarding an adversary and therefore people relied on the additional temperature cue in order to evaluate them.The same descriptions might have been perceived as more compatible with a hypothetical ally.
While the present results provide evidence in support of the idea that metaphorical mappings can be influenced by contextual cues such as group membership, we did not find clear evidence that a different metaphorical mapping could be activated by a different context. Only Experiment 3 showed a trend toward an interaction between temperature and group membership on impulsivity ratings. A possible reason for the lack of a significant activation of ANGER mightrelate to the specifics of the metaphorical mapping: the metaphor ANGER is HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER(Kovecses 1986) as in the expressions she´s boiling mador hot-headed, entails not only hot temperature but also pressure, which was not primed in our experiment. Also, previous studies that evoked the ANGER as HEAT metaphor primed participants with lexical entries associated with the anger concept(Wilkowski et al., 2009); our elicitation of anger through temperature and group membership experiences may not have been strong enough.An alternative interpretation is that attributing anger and impulsivity to a stranger may not be perceived as socially desirable.Therefore, our participants might have decided to suppress their responses, especially in an explicit evaluation questionnaire. Nonetheless, the present experiments suggest that additional investigations into contextual effects on the activation of conceptual metaphors may provide needed nuance to theories of embodied cognition.