Weight as an Embodiment of Importance

@article{Jostmann2009WeightAA,
  title={Weight as an Embodiment of Importance},
  author={Nils B Jostmann and Daniel Lakens and Thomas W. Schubert},
  journal={Psychological Science},
  year={2009},
  volume={20},
  pages={1169 - 1174}
}
Four studies show that the abstract concept of importance is grounded in bodily experiences of weight. Participants provided judgments of importance while they held either a heavy or a light clipboard. Holding a heavy clipboard increased judgments of monetary value (Study 1) and made participants consider fair decision-making procedures to be more important (Study 2). It also caused more elaborate thinking, as indicated by higher consistency between related judgments (Study 3) and by greater… 
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358 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
25
Background Citations
84
Methods Citations
10
Results Citations
18

358 Citations

The Role of Conscious Attention in How Weight Serves as an Embodiment of Importance
TLDR
The current research proposes that conscious attention of a bodily state can moderate its influence on social judgment, and three studies tested this possibility in the case of the demonstrated effect of weight sensations on judgments of an abstract idea’s importance.
Weighty Matters
Previous work showed that concrete experiences of weight influence people’s judgments of how important certain issues are. In line with an embodied simulation account but contrary to a…
Elaborative Thinking Increases the Impact of Physical Weight on Importance Judgments
Previous research showed that a book seems more important when its physical heft is increased through concealed weights. Do such embodied metaphor effects reflect shallow reasoning in the absence of…
Embodiment meets metamemory: weight as a cue for metacognitive judgments.
TLDR
Greater weight was associated with higher JOLs, although weight did not affect actual memory performance, and the relationship between weight andJOLs disappeared when participants were primed to think of cases where lightweight is a positive attribute and heavyweight is a negative attribute.
Adding weight to judgments: The role of stimulus focality on weight-related embodied cognition
Research employing metaphors to explore embodied cognition has shown bidirectional relationships between cognitions and sensory-motor stimuli, such as importance and weight (e.g., “weighty tome”).…
Situated Embodiment: When Physical Weight Does and Does Not Inform Judgments of Importance
Bodily sensations impact metaphorically related judgments. Are such effects obligatory or do they follow the logic of knowledge accessibility? If the latter, the impact of sensory information should…
No Effect of Weight on Judgments of Importance in the Moral Domain and Evidence of Publication Bias from a Meta-Analysis
TLDR
The present research tests the effect of carrying a heavy (or light) clipboard on the perceived importance of helping and on the judged severity of moral transgressions and suggests that the concept of importance may not be as universally grounded in sensations of weight as previously assumed.
Disembodiment: abstract construal attenuates the influence of contextual bodily state in judgment.
TLDR
Results suggest that high-level thought allows for consistency by buffering against the effects of transitory situational factors, and suggests that level of mental construal may moderate the role of temporary physical state in judgment.
Is a difficult task literally heavy?
Abstract The conceptualization of abstract concepts is very often metaphorical, meaning that we think and talk about abstract concepts in terms of other, usually more concrete experiences. Recent…
Replicability of Social-Cognitive Priming: The Case of Weight as an Embodiment of Importance
Several influential research programs in social cognition have suggested that even subtle changes in such perceptual events can have a powerful influence on socially meaningful judgments and…
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