黑白隐喻对大学生诚信的影响

The Influence of Black-White Metaphor on College Students’ Integrity

诚信是立身处世之本。本研究分别采用内隐IAT范式、启动范式及现场实验考察中文语境下黑白隐喻对诚信的影响。结果发现:黑白与诚信存在显著的内隐语义联结,表现为一致条件下的反应时显著低于不一致时的反应时。且这种隐喻联结稳定存在于具体的黑白情境中,即白色背景显著提高诚信选择,黑色背景下不诚信选择亦显著提高。而在真实明暗体验中,与明环境相比,暗环境更容易导致被试不诚信行为。本研究显示在中国文化群体中存在“白-诚信”、“黑-不诚信”的隐喻联结;在明暗环境中,中国被试表现出“暗”促进不诚信行为的现象。

Conceptual metaphor theory(CMT)holds that the formation of abstract concepts needs to base on embodied movement or perceptual experience.The CMT points to the mapping between the source domain and the target domain.Source domains are usually concrete cognitive domains,whereas target domains are usually abstract cognitive domains.Those mappings are mostly based on direct human experiences or indirect experiences passed down by our ancestors.Thus,metaphors are in nature our past concrete experience domains that we are familiar with,used to understand the new abstract experience domains that we are unfamiliar with.Metaphor is cultural and thus,needs to be understood with specific cultural backgrounds.In other word,people's embodied experience of the metaphor concepts is largely influenced by cultural experiences.In different cultures,metaphors may carrydifferent meanings.Integrity,as one of the most representative characteristics of the morality domain,its connection with CMT has not enjoyed much investigation and needs to be further discussed.Metaphor has its cultural aspect,and the colors,black and white,also endures high complexity during their interpretation under both the Western and the Eastern cultural backgrounds.There is commonness as well as differences.The color black endures negative meanings,such as mystery,darkness,sullenness,and sorrow,in both the Eastern and the Western cultures;white,instead,has different meanings such as purity,cleanliness,death and uselessness.In Chinese culture,“白"which is the characterfor“white”has other meanings;“白丁”refers to uneducated people or the commoners;"白食"refers to free food.Furthermore,in Peking Opera,colors of the facial makeup are used mainly to represent personality and morality.For example,black mask represents integrity,plain-speaking and recklessness and the most iconic characters for which are Bao Zheng,Li Kui,and Zhang Fei,whereas white represents deceitfulness and paranoia,and is also the color for the crafty and sycophant courtier and snobs,with Cao Cao and Yan Song as the most representative characters.To sum up,the black-and-white color metaphor has commonness andalsodifferences underdifferent linguisticbackgrounds.The abstract concept of integrity(moral)has close connection with black and white in different cultures,which means the perception of black and white are the boundary of integrity.In order to detect the character of embodied metaphor between black/white and integrity among the Chinese cultural group,three experiments were designed to test the implicit association between black/white and integrity,as well as the metaphorical priming effects of explicit and real experienced lightness(vs.darkness).In the results,black/white was not only exclusively associated with integrity,but also significantly affected participants'selection preference,showing more choices with integrity in white background,while more choices with dishonesty in black background.However,our participants only showed"darkness-dishonesty"metaphorical connection in real lightness and darkness situations,meaning that the brightness of the environment did not affect the integrity behavior,whereas the dark environment would increase the dishonesty behavior.Overall,our experiments showed that for the Chinese cultural group,integrity was"white",and dishonesty is"black"in cognitive conditions,while in real environment,only"darkness-dishonesty"metaphor was significant.The influence of culture on the development of embodied metaphors was discussed.