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Published on: September 5, 2019
Institutional position words influence the power grasp of East Asians
Can Wang1, Zhijun Zhang2, Yejin Chen2
1The Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, The People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Power perceptions reflect citizens' attitudes toward social hierarchies and power inequality, whereas power metaphors reflect the cognitive process of a personal sense of power. This study examines the influence of power representations on grasp aperture in East Asian participants. In experiment 1 (n = 34), we investigated whether powerful institutional position words trigger larger grasp apertures compared to less powerful words, indicating a correlation between power and spatial dimensions. Our results demonstrate that powerful words indeed led to larger grasp apertures, suggesting a direct association between power and size representation. In experiment 2 (n = 20), the results indicate that this effect persisted even when institutional positions were not described by size-related language. These findings suggest the existence of power representations within a generalized magnitude system, influenced by relative rather than absolute size. This research sheds light on how abstract concepts, such as power, are integrated into cognitive processes related to spatial perception.
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