Weight as an embodiment of importance
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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
Published on: February 2, 2017
Nils B Jostmann1, Daniël Lakens, Thomas W Schubert
1University of Amsterdam, 1081 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. n.b.jostmann@uva.nl
Abstract:
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 polarization of agreement ratings for strong versus weak arguments (Study 4). In line with an embodied perspective on cognition, these findings suggest that, much as weight makes people invest more physical effort in dealing with concrete objects, it also makes people invest more cognitive effort in dealing with abstract issues.
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