THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYfor example, we invoke the metaphor of height – we talk about someone
being on the bottom rung of the ladder, or a person being “high up” in
the office hierarchy. For time, we invoke the metaphor of movement
through space. You can test this out yourself by considering which day
of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for
Wednesday but has been moved forward two days. If you think it’s now
changed to Friday, so the argument goes, then you’re someone who
thinks of themselves as moving through time, while if you think the
meeting is now on Monday, then you’re more passive, and you think
about time passing you by. A study by David Hauser and colleagues in
2009 even suggested that angrier people are more likely to think the
meeting has moved to Friday, reflecting the fact that they have a more
assertive, forward-moving attitude.
This idea that our thoughts are not only grounded in but also affected
by physical metaphors is known as embodied cognition. Other examples
include the finding that people in a warm room are more likely to say
they feel socially close to an experimenter than research participants
in a cool room, and that people tend to assume a serious book will be
heavier than a flippant one. These kinds of examples have led some
linguists – most famously George Lakoff – to go so far as to suggest that
the language of thought that underlies our use of words is fully rooted
in the physical. According to this extreme account, we can only under-
stand abstract concepts like importance and time by referring to physical
concepts like weight and distance. Most experts believe this is taking
the role of metaphor in our mental lives too far. Pinker, for one, points
out that while metaphors clearly play an important role in language and
thought, they are ultimately based on a separate conceptual foundation.
He says this is revealed graphically by our ability to “see through” meta-
phors (as in US comedian Steven Wright’s question: “If all the world’s a
stage, where is the audience sitting?”) and, in the case of the “time-as-
space” metaphor, by the existence of brain-damaged patients who no
longer understand prepositions for space (as in “she’s at her desk”), but
do still understand prepositions for time (as in “he daydreamed through
the meeting”).
A helping hand
We’ve focused on words so far, but watch any person speak for a few
minutes and you’ll doubtless see them waving their hands about as if
conducting an invisible orchestra. In fact, some experts believe that