GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Emma Firestone
(Emma is a Ph.D. candidate in Cambridge’s Faculty of English. She is soon to defend her doctoral dissertation, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Improbable in Shakespeare’)

Is The Catcher in the Rye an important novel? There may be more and less weighty reasons to believe it is. How do more and less considered reasons relate to one another?

Chandler, Jesse, David Reinhard, and Norbert Schwarz, ‘To Judge a Book by its Weight You Need to Know its Content: Knowledge Moderates the Use of Embodied Cues’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2012)

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At every conscious moment, our bodily and perceptual experiences are influencing what we think and feel – or more precisely, which thoughts and feelings present themselves to us most naturally and effortlessly. This is not news, or shouldn’t be. Obviously different social and sensory environments invite, and incite, different tempos and behaviors and even habits of mind. Most of us find it perfectly plausible that being warm and comfortable might increase our incidence of companionable thoughts, maybe even measurably so. Most of us would not dispute the good sense of studying in the company of focused and serious others.

Nevertheless, in recent years, researchers in social psychology and related fields have been demonstrating the depth and ubiquity of these effects with such consistency and, sometimes, inherent drama that the whole theoretical area implicated – i.e. perceptual and situational influences on cognitive functions, especially ‘higher’ ones, like attribution and judgment – has not only acquired new prestige as a research topic, but actually moved to a central position in cognition research. Within ‘embodied’ or ‘grounded’ cognitive studies, one particular phenomenon has grabbed the interests of more humanities-oriented audience: the phenomenon whereby common metaphors consistently predict behavioral effects. First described decades ago by George Lakoff and collaborators, ‘primary’ or ‘conceptual’ metaphors convey abstractions in .

Since about 2006, research has shown that when we engage some physical or perceptual representation linked metaphorically to a conceptual domain – warmth, height, cleanliness, distance, etc. – there might be striking behavioral and cognitive consequences. Studies have shown, for instance, that making upward motions with the hands provides subjects with readier access to positive anecdotes, and downward motions, to negative ones. Handling warm objects increases ones ‘warm’ interpersonal behavior and tendency to think others worthy of trust. And thoughts of guilt-inducing events made participants eager to wipe their hands with antiseptic towels.

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A recent study by Chandler, Reinhard and Schwarz (2012) considers factors that create variation in a metaphor’s capacity to influence individual judgment. They look at one variable in particular: the perceiving individual’s knowledge of the object to be judged. These researchers handed participants a book, then asked them to evaluate the intellectual impact of that book. Some of these participants handled a book that contained a concealed weight. At issue was whether any relationship might be identified between the perceivers’ knowledge of the book and the influence of on their perceptions of the book’s importance and if so, what that relationship might be.

You might predict that the more the perceiver knows about the book, the less his or her evaluation should be affected by perceptions of physical weight. On the other hand, some studies actually point to the opposite prediction. These suggest that people only draw on metaphorically-derived information when they consider themselves capable of judging. Bodily sensations (e.g. of weight) may only bring applicable, metaphorically linked concepts (e.g. of importance) to mind when some knowledge (e.g. about the target’s importance) is already present and available. In conditions of zero, low, or insufficient knowledge, perceptual or situational cues simply cannot find a foothold in the perceiver’s cognitive process of assessment.

Chandler et al. tested these diverging predictions deliberately. Three separate studies manipulated or measured participants’ knowledge of a book, whose importance and impact they were then asked to judge. To summarize briefly, their findings did not support the assumption that the less the perceiver knew about the book, the more influential the embodied metaphors would be. To the contrary, the book’s physical weight only influenced judgments of its importance when participants knew something about the book’s content and reception. When participants completely lacked knowledge of the book, its physical weight had no effect on their judgments; but so long as they knew something – even if that information was limited to back-cover summaries and blurbs – then they happily drew on embodied-situational inputs to inform their views.

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The researchers went further, testing whether participants’ actual (objective) knowledge of the book’s content and reputation, as well as their subjective knowledge (how much they thought they knew), moderated the impact of the concealed weight on their judgment of the book’s worth. They predicted that people who knew the book (The Catcher in the Rye, as it happens) in detail, being capable of building strong and coherent representations of it without any contextual clues, would not be significantly affected by the book’s relative heft. This prediction, too, turned out to be incorrect. The book’s weight did not influence participants whose knowledge of the book was low (as revealed by a short quiz). But it did influence those whose knowledge was moderate and high, including those who scored the highest marks on the quiz.

These findings highlight the fact that actual, pre-existing knowledge of an object does not protect against the influence of incidental sensory or ‘merely’ metaphorical information on judgments of that object. In fact, it increases the perceiver’s susceptibility to information of this sort. The authors note that they did not test participants whose knowledge of the books in question might rate as ‘very high’ or ‘expert’, and that their results might well change when higher levels of expertise are involved. Citing research into , though, they speculate that experts might be as likely to search for supporting perceptual evidence as novices.

There’s something very suggestive about this idea that instinct is enhanced by expertise, not just in sports or music (for example) but in cultural interactions of a kind that are implicit at least in a lot of literary critical activity. That will be the subject of another post – coming soon.