Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
Social context modulates the effect of hot temperature on perceived interpersonal warmth:
a study of embodied metaphors
Francesca M.M. Citron1,2* , Adele E. Goldberg2,1
1
Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2
Humanities Council, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Address correspondence to: Francesca Citron
Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”
Freie Universität Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
D-14195 Berlin
Tel.: +49 (0) 17644437682
E-mail: fmm.citron@gmail.com
Word count: 2996
Running head: Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
1
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
Abstract
Physical contact with hot vs. iced coffee has been shown to affect evaluation of PERSONAL
WARMTH of a hypothetical person. HEAT is also metaphorically associated with ANGER. In 3
studies, we investigated whether the manipulation of social context leads to the activation of one
metaphor over another. We expected that PERSONAL WARMTH as HEAT would be more relevant and
therefore activated when a hypothetical person represents an ally, whereas ANGER as HEAT would be
activated when the person represents an adversary. Unexpectedly, we found no evidence that the
metaphor ANGER as HEAT was activated. But results showed that social context did modulate the
activation of PERSONAL WARMTH as HEAT: adversaries were judged as possessing more personal
warmth when participants had experienced heat, whereas no effect emerged in the ally condition.
These studies suggest that context can modulate metaphorical activation, with out-group
(adversary) members being affected more strongly by the physical heat manipulation.
Key words: embodied metaphors, personal warmth, anger, impulsivity, temperature, heat, group
membership
2
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
1. Introduction
Physical experiences have been shown to implicitly affect judgments, through associations
between a physical domain and a more abstract domain (e.g., Williams & Bargh, 2008). According
to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), people think about abstract concepts partially in terms of
more concrete vehicles (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980); e.g., in the metaphor POSITIVE as UP, good
feeling is associated with high spatial position and sad feeling is associated with low spatial location
(e.g., she’s feeling up; He’s down today). While these mappings are primarily evident in language,
they affect our non-linguistic behavior as well. For example, previous research has shown that
people are quicker to judge positively valenced words as positive when they are presented high on
the screen, and negatively valenced words as negative when they are low on the screen (Meier &
Robinson, 2004).
At the same time, multiple target domains are typically associated with the same source
domain across-languages and even within a single language. For example, English speakers talk
about TIME is terms of HORIZONTAL POSITION, whereas Mandarin speakers are more likely to
associate TIME with VERTICAL POSITION (Fuhrman et al., 2011). Furthermore, English-speaking
right-handed people associate RIGHT with GOOD, and LEFT with BAD, in line with their language
use, but left-handed people show the opposite implicit association (Casasanto, 2009). In both
English and German, HEAT can be associated with PERSONAL WARMTH, or with ANGER (Kovecses
1986). Both metaphors have been shown to affect judgments (Williams and Bargh 2008;
Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter and Feltman 2009).
A question that has not been investigated so far is whether social contextual cues can
determine which metaphor is activated by a physical experience and to what extent. This is the aim
of the present paper.
Williams and Bargh (2008) gave participants a neutral description of a hypothetical person
after they had held either a hot or iced cup of coffee. In a subsequent questionnaire, participants
evaluated the person as more kind if they were in the hot condition than if they were in the cold
condition. In the debriefing, people said they were unaware of the association between the
temperature of the drink and the evaluation.
The present experiment aimed to replicate this finding while adding a contextual
manipulation that was intended to make either PERSONAL WARMTH as HEAT or ANGER as HEAT
relevant. In particular, we aimed to determine whether viewing the hypothetical person as part of an
ad hoc in-group might elicit HEAT as PERSONAL WARMTH, while viewing the hypothetical person
as a member of an ad hoc out-group might elicit HEAT as ANGER. Therefore, after contact with a hot
vs. cold beverage and before reading the neutral description of a hypothetical person, participants
were told they were going to play a computer game on the same team or against the hypothetical
person.
In the evaluation questionnaire, participants rated the degree to which the hypothetical
person tended to be impulsive, irritable, etc., and the degree to which the person was agreeable,
sociable, etc. along with filler questions about unrelated personal qualities. We expected
participants assigned to the “ally” condition to implicitly activate the metaphor PERSONAL WARMTH
as HEAT, which would replicate Williams & Bargh (2008). At the same time, we expected
participants in the “adversary” condition to activate the metaphor ANGER as HEAT and therefore
evaluate the hypothetical person as more impulsive or prone to anger if given the hot beverage.
2. Experiment 1
2.1. Material and methods
2.1.1. Participants
Thirty-six native German speakers took part in the experiment in Berlin (M = 32 years,
range = 20-65; 21 women). Participants received 5€ or course credit.
2.1.2. Material and procedure
3
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
The experimenter met each participant at an entrance to Freie Universität Berlin.
Participants were asked to carry a beverage for the experimenter as they walked to the experimental
room (about 300 meters away). The beverage was hot or iced water, contained in a disposable paper
cup. Once in the room, participants returned the cup without drinking from it and received an
instruction booklet. The first page informed them that they would later play a computer game on the
same team or against a hypothetical person referred to as “S.K.”
The second page contained a neutral description of S.K. (see instructions on Table 1). The
third page contained the evaluation questionnaire, with instructions on how to rate S.K. on 7-point
Likert scales. Five personal warmth-related scales (i.e., caring-selfish, generous-ungenerous,
sociable-unsociable, agreeable-disagreeable, warm-cold*), 5 impulsivity-related scales (i.e.,
agitated-self-controlled, aggressive-unaggressive, impulsive-cautious, irritable-good-natured, hotheaded-cool under pressure*) and 5 filler items (i.e., happy-sad, honest-dishonest, talkative-quiet,
serious-carefree, strong-weak) were included, with the extreme ends representing opposite traits. A
unique header above all scales had the label “very much” on points 1 and 7 and “in between” on
point 4. Two different randomized orders were used, whereby personal warmth, impulsivity and
filler items were alternated, as well as the direction of the single scales. Further, the direction of
each item (e.g., caring-selfish vs. selfish-caring) was reversed in a second version of each of the 2
randomizations. The metaphorical items (flagged with * above) always appeared last within their
category to make sure the metaphorical association would not be explicitly activated during the
questionnaire completion.
Table 1. Instructions.
4
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
Awareness of the experimental manipulations was assessed after the experiment and then
participants were debriefed. Experiment and debriefing lasted approximately 20 minutes.
2.1.3. Design and data analysis
Participants were randomly assigned to the hot vs. cold cup condition as well as to the ally
vs. adversary condition in a between-subjects design. Two-by-two independent-measures ANOVAs
with factors temperature (hot, cold) and group membership (ally, adversary) were conducted on the
personal warmth ratings and impulsivity ratings separately. We kept note of the temperature of the
days in which testing took place. The experimenter was the same person throughout.
2.2. Results
No participant reported being aware of any connection between the beverage temperature
and the evaluation of S.K. A main effect of temperature on the personal warmth ratings was found
5
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
F(36,1) = 4.68, p = .038: participants primed with hot temperature rated S.K. as warmer (see Figure
1 for descriptive statistics). No effect of group membership and no interaction between the two
factors was found Fs(36,1) < 1.98, ns. Pair-wise comparisons revealed a significant temperature
difference within the adversary condition only t(16) = 2.67, p = .017. Neither main effects nor an
interaction were found on the impulsivity ratings Fs(36,1) < 0.45, ns. There was no difference in
average day temperature between hot and cold cup conditions in Experiments 1, 2 or 3 (t(34) =
0.17; t(36) = 0.31; t(40) = 0.71).
------ INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE-------2.3. Discussion
Our hypotheses of an effect of temperature on personal warmth ratings for the ally condition
and an effect of temperature on the impulsivity ratings for the adversary condition were not
supported by the results. Only the PERSONAL WARMTH as HEAT metaphor was activated, as shown
by the main effect of temperature; the effect remains significant only when tested within the
adversary condition, as opposed to our prediction of an effect in the ally condition only. That is, the
heat of the cup made participants more likely to judge a hypothetical adversary as more personally
warm but had no significant effect on a hypothetical ally. These results show only a partial
replication of Williams and Bargh´s (2008) original study and support the idea that additional
factors such as social context can modulate the activation of a conceptual metaphor. In particular,
group membership seems to modulate the temperature effect.
No evidence for activation of the ANGER as HEAT metaphor was apparent. One possible
reason may be that the hot cup was not hot enough. Participants may have perceived the cup as
pleasantly warm rather than hot and this might have prevented hot-anger associations. In order to
assess this possibility, we ran a second experiment in which temperature was manipulated through
the use of a quite hot or cold wet thick paper cloth that participants wiped their hands with. The
second experiment took place in the US, and so English was used instead of German.
3. Experiment 2
3.1. Material and methods
3.1.1. Participants
Thirty-eight native English speakers from Princeton University took part in the experiment
(Mean age = 21 years, range = 18-56; 32 women). Participants were rewarded with either $8 or
course credit.
3.1.2. Material and procedure
The experimenter met each participant at the entrance of the Psychology Department at
Princeton and took them to the experimental room. Participants sat at a table and were given a hot
vs. cold wet paper cloth, with which they were asked to wipe their hands because they were going
to eat finger food later on. The cloth had been previously wet with tap water, gently wrung and laid
on a plate; in the hot condition only, the cloth was microwaved for 2 minutes. After wiping their
hands, participants were given the equivalent instruction booklet as in Experiment 1 (in English).
The rest of the methods were identical to Experiment 1 except that, after the debriefing, participants
were given a snack as promised.
3.2. Results
All participants perceived the cloth as actually hot or cold and none of them reported being
aware of any connection between cloth temperature and S.K. evaluation. A marginally significant
effect of temperature on personal warmth ratings was found F(38,1) = 2.78, p = .105, in the same
direction as in Experiment 1. No effect of group membership and no interaction was found Fs(38,1)
< 0.24, ns. Pair-wise comparisons revealed no temperature difference within any group membership
6
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
condition ts(16) < 1.29, ns. As in Experiment 1, no main effects and no interaction on impulsivity
ratings were found Fs(38,1) < 0.40, ns.
3.3. Discussion
The results partially replicate Experiment 1, although they only show a trend toward an
effect of temperature on personal warmth ratings. A possible explanation for the failure to fully
replicate the personal warmth results might be that, even though the hot cloth was properly hot
rather than warm, the cold cloth might not have been cold enough. In fact, the temperature of
participants’ hands could quickly transfer to the cloth and dampen the influence of the cold. Unlike
in Experiment 1, the effect of heat was not modulated by group membership. As before, no effects
of temperature or group membership on impulsivity ratings were found. We considered the
possibility that our group membership assignment instructions might not be effective enough.
In order to address these issues, we ran a third experiment in which we again used the wet
hot cloth, but this time we cooled the cold cloth with cold water. Further, we modified our
instructions for group membership assignment to make them more effective.
4. Experiment 3
4.1. Material and methods
4.1.1. Participants
Forty-two native German speakers from the Berlin area who did not previously participate
in Experiment 1 performed the experiment (M = 31 years, range = 19-73; 24 women).
4.1.2. Material and procedure
The temperature condition assignment was identical to that of Experiment 2, except the cold
cloth was made wet with cold water kept in the fridge. For the group membership assignment,
slightly different and longer instructions were used (see Table 1). In addition, a second person
description was created, A.J., to be certain results would generalize. Participants were randomly
assigned to one of the two descriptions. To make sure the descriptions were interchangeable, we ran
a control study with 20 additional participants (M = 23 years, range = 20-31; 13 women), in which
no temperature or group membership priming was given. We found no significant difference
between S.K. and A.J in either personal warmth or impulsivity ratings ts(18) < 0.88, ns. Personal
warmth for S.K. had M = 4.12, SD =0.51; for A.J. M = 3.88, SD = 0.70. Impulsivity for S.K. had M
= 2.96, SD =0.57; for A.J. M = 3.08, SD = 0.67. Finally, in the evaluation of the hypothetical
person, the example pair “clean/dirty” was replaced by “slow/fast”, as the former could be
associated with the hand wiping.
4.2. Results
All participants perceived the cloth as actually hot or cold and none of them reported being
aware of any connection between cloth temperature and S.K. evaluation. A significant main effect
of temperature on personal warmth ratings was found F(42,1) = 7.70, p = .009, in the same
direction as in Experiments 1 and 2. No main effect of group membership (“ally” vs. “adversary”)
was found Fs(42,1) = 0.44, ns. Nevertheless, a marginally significant interaction appeared F(42,1)
= 2.82, p = .102 and was further supported by the pair-wise comparisons: as in Experiment 1,
temperature significantly affected personal warmth ratings within the adversary condition t(18) =
3.09, p = .006, but not within the ally condition t(20) = 0.79.
The impulsivity ratings showed no main effects of either temperature or group membership
Fs(42,1) < 1.47, ns, but a trend toward an interaction appeared F(42,1) = 2.73, p = .107, weakly
consistent with a trend toward a temperature effect within the adversary condition t(18) = 1.38, p =
.19 and no difference within the ally condition t(20) = 0.99, ns. That is, when participants were
primed with the hot cloth, the hypothetical adversary was rated as numerically, but not significantly,
more impulsive.
7
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
5. General discussion
This study builds on previous work showing that the physical experience of heat, a concrete
conceptual domain, leads to the implicit activation of personal warmth, a more abstract, affective
domain (Williams & Bargh, 2008). Given that heat is associated with both PERSONAL WARMTH and
ANGER, the present studies aimed to determine whether, by manipulating the social context, we
could see differential activation of the two metaphors. Group membership (ally or adversary) was
used to manipulate the social context.
Overall, our experiments showed reliable activation of the PERSONAL WARMTH as HEAT
metaphor, as revealed by significant effects of temperature on personal warmth ratings in
Experiments 1 and 3 and a marginal effect in Experiment 2. There was no clear evidence for the
activation of ANGER as HEAT. Social context was found to modulate the metaphorical activation,
although not as we had predicted. In particular, participants in the adversary condition only
evaluated a hypothetical person as warmer when primed with heat than cold; participants in the ally
condition showed no difference.
This finding may be explained by the fact that evaluations of out-group members are usually
more extreme than those of in-group members, and an adversary would naturally be viewed as an
out-group member. Linville and Jones (1980) showed that affectively relevant information led to
greater polarization in the evaluation of out-group members compared to in-group members, no
matter whether the information was positive or negative. The idea that people have more complex
mental schemas of their own group and therefore tend to make more moderate judgments of ingroup members; knowledge about out-groups is often based on fewer dimensions, leading to less
weighted and more extreme evaluations (Linville & Jones, 1980). Even though participants in the
present study were given little information about either group members, the tendency to judge outgroup members more strongly on the basis of meager evidence may generalize to other
circumstances, such as these experiments.
An alternative interpretation has to do with category-driven processes that require a degree
of perceived fit between a member’s characteristics and the characteristics associated with a
category. If the member does not fit the category, people will look for additional information to
evaluate them (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). In our studies, the neutral description of S.K./A.J. might not
have fit with implicit expectations regarding an adversary and therefore people relied on the
additional temperature cue in order to evaluate them. The same descriptions might have been
perceived as more compatible with a hypothetical ally.
While the present results provide evidence in support of the idea that metaphorical mappings
can be influenced by contextual cues such as group membership, we did not find clear evidence that
a different metaphorical mapping could be activated by a different context. Only Experiment 3
showed a trend toward an interaction between temperature and group membership on impulsivity
ratings. A possible reason for the lack of a significant activation of ANGER might relate to the
specifics of the metaphorical mapping: the metaphor ANGER is HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER
(Kovecses 1986) as in the expressions she´s boiling mad or hot-headed, entails not only hot
temperature but also pressure, which was not primed in our experiment. Also, previous studies that
evoked the ANGER as HEAT metaphor primed participants with lexical entries associated with the
anger concept (Wilkowski et al., 2009); our elicitation of anger through temperature and group
membership experiences may not have been strong enough. An alternative interpretation is that
attributing anger and impulsivity to a stranger may not be perceived as socially desirable.
Therefore, our participants might have decided to suppress their responses, especially in an explicit
evaluation questionnaire.
Nonetheless, the present experiments suggest that additional
investigations into contextual effects on the activation of conceptual metaphors may provide needed
nuance to theories of embodied cognition.
8
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
6. Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Michael Kucharski and Luna Beck for their help in data collection and
material preparation, respectively. FMMC also thanks Leyla De Amicis for her help during
brainstorming. The authors are funded by an Einstein Visiting Fellowship awarded to AEG, in
conjunction with the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”.
9
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
7. References
Casasanto, D. (2009). Embodiment of abstract concepts: Good and bad in right- and left-handers.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 351-367. doi: 10.1037/a0015854
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Fuhrman, O., McCormick, K., Chen, E., Jiang, H. D., Shu, D. F., Mao, S. M., & Boroditsky, L.
(2011). How linguistic and cultural forces shape conceptions of time: English and Mandarin
time in 3D. Cognitive Science, 35, 1305-1328. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01193.x
Kovecses, Z. (1986) Metaphors of anger, pride, and love: A lexical approach to the structure of
concepts. John Benjamins.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Linville, P. W., & Jones, E. E. (1980). Polarized appraisals of out-group members. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 689-703.
Meier, B. P., & Robinson, M. D. (2004). Why the sunny side is up. Associations between affect and
vertical position. Psychological Science, 15, 243-247.
Wilkowski, B. M., Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., Carter, M. S., & Feltman, R. (2009). "Hotheaded" is more than an expression: The embodied representation of anger in terms of heat.
Emotion, 9, 464-477. doi: 10.1037/a0015764
Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal
warmth. Science, 322, 606-607.
10
Social context and temperature affect interpersonal warmth
11