Tom Bartlett reports on a relatively new area of inquiry:
Research on embodied cognition – the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition) – is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching results. For instance, there’s the 2009 study that seems to show that people holding heavy clipboards are more likely to disagree with weak arguments than people holding light clipboards. Or the study, also published in 2009, that found that people gripping a warm cup of coffee judged others as having a “warm” personality.
Another study indicated that that people who like sweet foods are more likely to volunteer – or as Bartlett puts it, “They were metaphorically sweet people who loved actual sweets”:
That finding hits on one of the underlying ideas of embodied cognition – that is, that the metaphors we toss around are grounded in more concrete, physiological truths. Warm things make you physically and psychologically warmer. Cold things make you feel more alienated. Sweet things make you sweeter, and liking sweet things means you behave more sweetly.
Now there are plenty of people, including some psychologists, who are skeptical about some of those results. I wrote about the critics of John Bargh’s research – he did the coffee-mug experiment – in an article last year. And a study that purported to show that people were more generous after riding an “up” escalator was shot down by Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a dry-witted crusader against suspicious statistics. (The Dutch researcher who did the escalator study, Lawrence Sanna, later resigned.) But that doesn’t mean embodied cognition as a whole is wrong, of course.
The Dish 