权力概念的垂直方位空间隐喻对权力判断的影响

The Influence of Vertical Metaphor of Power on Power Judgment

通过两个反应时实验,探讨权力的垂直方位表征对权力判断的影响。实验1发现,当权力词汇出现的位置(电脑屏幕上方或下方)与权力的空间隐喻一致时(高权力词在低权力词上方),相比于隐喻相反时(高权力词在低权力词下方),被试的反应时更短;实验2重复了这一结果,并进一步发现,隐喻一致促进被试的反应,隐喻相反抑制被试的反应。这表明权力的空间隐喻具有心理现实性,会影响权力信息的认知加工。

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory （CMT） put forward by Lackoff and Johnson, people understand abstract concepts by concrete concepts. Vertical position is such concrete thing for people to elucidate many abstract concepts like time, affection, power and so forth. Many studies addressed the influence of vertical metaphor on time and affection judgment. However, fewer studies focus on the vertical metaphor of power, especially among Chinese participants. In addition, even though many researchers referred a concept of “metaphor congruency effect”, no study investigated this effect directly. Therefore, it is not clear whether such effect comes from the promotion of metaphor congruency or the interference of metaphor incongruence. In present study, reaction time tasks were used in two experiments to investigate the influence of vertical position on people’s judgment of power among Chinese undergraduate students and the mechanism underlying this effect, say metaphor congruency effect. Both experiments were programmed in E-prime. In Experiment 1, pairs of words with one high power word and one low power word appeared on the screen. It was a mixed design. There were two within-group conditions： metaphor congruence condition and metaphor incongruence condition. For metaphor congruence condition, a high power word was presented above a low power word in each trial at the same time. For metaphor incongruence condition, the low power word was presented above the high power word. Participants were grouped into high power group and low power group. They should point out whether the high/low power word was up or down both as quickly and as accurately as possible. Repeated-measure analysis of variance （ANOVA） for mean reaction time showed the existence of metaphor congruency effect. Participants have better performance on reaction time in metaphor congruence condition than in metaphor incongruence condition （p 〈 .001）. The result is same with what Schubert got in his study. In Experiment 2, baseline condition was added in the task. Another thing that changed was that only one word appeared on the computer in each trial. There were 3 vertical positions （up, middle, down） for words to show. It was a within-subject design. The task for participants was to judge whether the word appearing on the screen is a high power word or a low power word. As result, participants responded faster to high power words among the words showing at the up-position （p 〈 .05）. However, there was a significant main effect for position, which distorted the interpretation of interaction effect. Therefore residual means were used to analysis the interaction effect. After removing main effect, the interaction was crossover. It supports the assumption that the metaphor congruent condition improves the performance of participants while the metaphor incongruent condition impedes the performance of participants comparing to control condition （words in the middle of the screen）. The current study supports the hypothesis that the vertical position affects people’s judgment of power in China. Moreover, metaphor congruency effect includes both promotion result from metaphor congruent condition and interference result from metaphor incongruent condition. In conclusion, up-down is one kind of metaphor of power.