TY - CONF

T1 - A reaction time study testing interactions between gender and the psychological reality of the vertical image schema for hierarchy

AU - Heritage, Frazer

AU - Littlemore, Jeannette

AU - Duffy, Sarah

PY - 2016/7/19

Y1 - 2016/7/19

N2 - According to the embodied metaphor hypothesis, metaphor is thought to deriveunconsciously from experiential gestalts relating to our body’s movements, its orientation inspace, and its interactions with objects (Johnson, 1987). One embodied metaphor suggeststhat POWER IS UP and LACK OF POWER IS DOWN. Reaction time studies have shownthat people judge a group’s social power to be greater when the group is presented at the topof a computer screen than when it is presented in the lower part of the screen (Schubert,2005).In our study, we factored gender into Schubert’s experiment by including matched pairs ofgendered prompts, such as waiter/waitress, maid/manservant, king/queen, and so on. Ourhypothesis was that the relationship between the prompt’s power and its position in thehierarchy would be even stronger when powerful, male prompts appear at the top of thescreen and when less powerful, female prompts appear at the bottom of the screen. Such afinding would provide empirical evidence for a subconscious gender bias in our participants.We were also interested to see whether such a bias is equally strong for male, female andtransgender participants. 60 participants (25 male, 25 female and 10 transgender)participated in a reaction time study to measure the relationship between gender, verticalpositioning and perceptions of hierarchy. In this paper, we report the findings from our studyand discuss their implications

AB - According to the embodied metaphor hypothesis, metaphor is thought to deriveunconsciously from experiential gestalts relating to our body’s movements, its orientation inspace, and its interactions with objects (Johnson, 1987). One embodied metaphor suggeststhat POWER IS UP and LACK OF POWER IS DOWN. Reaction time studies have shownthat people judge a group’s social power to be greater when the group is presented at the topof a computer screen than when it is presented in the lower part of the screen (Schubert,2005).In our study, we factored gender into Schubert’s experiment by including matched pairs ofgendered prompts, such as waiter/waitress, maid/manservant, king/queen, and so on. Ourhypothesis was that the relationship between the prompt’s power and its position in thehierarchy would be even stronger when powerful, male prompts appear at the top of thescreen and when less powerful, female prompts appear at the bottom of the screen. Such afinding would provide empirical evidence for a subconscious gender bias in our participants.We were also interested to see whether such a bias is equally strong for male, female andtransgender participants. 60 participants (25 male, 25 female and 10 transgender)participated in a reaction time study to measure the relationship between gender, verticalpositioning and perceptions of hierarchy. In this paper, we report the findings from our studyand discuss their implications

M3 - Conference paper

T2 - UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2016

Y2 - 19 July 2016 through 22 July 2016

ER -