Lakoff and Johnson (1980) also introduced the concepts of source domain, target domain and mapping. Take the example of time which is frequently discussed metaphorically with terms taken from a description of space. I say: “The date for submitting this book is fast approaching”. Here the source domain is Space and Time is the target domain. There are a couple of metaphors here. One is TIME is INEVITABLE and the other is FUTURE is IN FRONT. My speech act about the urgency of my date of submission is then generated by mapping a literal specification of the source to a metaphorical target. To get a full reading of this particular communicative act though you would need some pragmatic 21 information about me, my attitude toward deadlines, how importantly I weigh the inevitability metaphor in the grand scheme of things and so on.
That brief introduction to metaphor, its role in language and thinking paves the way for some more psychology which is relevant to consumption theory and research and we’ll look at that in Chapter 4.
Notes
1.The rest of this monologue by Jaques in the play refers to the ‘seven stages of man’ so perhaps Shakespeare was also the world’s first lifespan developmental psychologist.
2.This is the accustomed physical distance people maintain in different behaviours as a function of different degrees of intimacy in different social contexts such as private and public. There are interesting cultural and subcultural differences.
3.It is important when we consider human development to recognise the distinction between growth, whether it is the metaphor of mental growth or the accompanying physiological changes during the lifespan, and changes like learning and adaptation that can best be attributed to environmental influences.
4.For a review see Alba and Williams (2012).
5.Happiness and general well-being would be examples.
6. Affect is a more abstract term than emotion—to borrow from Levi-Strauss, it’s the raw part before it is culturally cooked into an emotion.
7.There are two layers of information overload. One that has been shared by all members of Homo sapiens for millennia is to do with the capacity of the senses vastly exceeding the information processing of the mind and is concerned with how to devise information processing devices that both store (memory) and select (attention) relevant information. The other is an extra cultural layer that is common in (most) twenty-first century societies where multi-tasking is the norm and the ubiquity of the smartphone means you are frequently online. This cultural layer can be much thinner if you are a Trappist monk for example.
8.The ability of computers to play chess and Go and beat the best players in the world well-known now and by the time you read this AI will have exceeded the expectations set for it in 2018.
9.One such reason is the contribution to our thinking made by the late Ian Gordon, a colleague of mine at the University of Exeter for many years. His chapter on Gibson is illuminating and clarified for me his view of how we see and act in a complex multi-sensory world.
10.‘Afford’ here in the sense of “…what they furnish for good or ill” (Gibson, 1971 as cited by Gordon, op. cit., p. 154).
11.This term has a provenance which I can best describe as out of Appadurai (1990) by Ger and Belk (1996). For me it means that where and how we consume (e.g. Starbucks or McDonald’s) has a template with a set of scripts. Sometimes the consumptionscape incorporates particular elements of the host culture. For the interested reader I think there is another provenance going back to ethnography as exemplified by Frake (1964).
12.The proprioceptive sense is a minor channel in most person’s lives and works by integrating information from muscles, organs (including the inner ear for balance) to establish a sense of where you are relative to your environment . It’s highly tuned in sports.
13.Proximal means ‘near’ and distal is ‘further away’. Both are used frequently in the perception literature and my borrowing should not injure the technical meaning.
14.A gig economy is one where contracts are infrequent and jobs are given when demand is there. There is little or no job security. An example would be food delivery by courier which is prevalent in metropolitan Britain.
15.I am not assuming you attend these events but ‘the cocktail party problem’ was one way of describing selective attention many years ago in psychology textbooks. ‘Paying attention’ is something we can usually do quite well.
16.These are available on the web: Search with ‘color picker’.
17.Rosch’s work on natural categories and her contribution to embodied cognition are also internationally recognised. See section on concepts and natural categories in the “Conceptual Toolbox” in Chapter 2 and “Embodied Cognition” is a section of Chapter 4.
18.In psychology parlance ‘the inducer precedes the concurrent as in hearing-colour synaesthesia’.
19.In the words of the authors “synesthesia arises when the pruning of synapses is not completed between some contiguous brain areas” (op. cit., p. 177). Pruning is not a metaphor, although it may have originated as such and is a technical term referring to the process of adjacent brain cells altering their connections or synapses to form circuits. It occurs in children as they learn.
20.Interestingly, at the time of writing in the UK there is a tendency to talk about debates and discussions in the political sphere with deliberately softer language. So we are having a ‘national conversation’ (at the moment) about BREXIT. Here is more evidence that it works, that metaphors frame not only discourse but our thinking about society, us and other things. However his examples now look more dated and culturally specific with the benefit of hindsight.
21.Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics which deals with both the settings in which talk occurs and the non-linguistic knowledge that speakers and listeners possess. Mutual understanding between the parties of a conversation rely heavily on pragmatic knowledge; readers of this book, less so.
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© The Author(s) 2018
Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_4
4. How We Process Information: A Look at Embodied Cognition and Priming
Brian M. Young1
(1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Brian M. Young
Email: [email protected]
Embodied Cognition
Like most long and powerful rivers, there are several sources of embodied cognition and maybe no one is quite sure which one can claim to be the fount of this body of knowledge. One possible source would be Johnson (1987) and in a review of this book Alexander (1989) claimed that it was a very significant and promising development in Anglo-American philosophy (op. cit., p. 130). He was certainly impressed with its philosophical credentials. Another source emerged from a critique that Lakoff (1990) made of objectivity in science in general. Briefly the assumption of objectivity is that the world is out there to be measured and evaluated and is independent of our own thinking. But Lakoff thought that thinking was influenced by our biology as well as our physical experiences in our environment (Lakoff, op. cit., p. 267) so that thinking about the world is inextricably linked to our actions on the world. Both books concluded that our thinking is embodied, and such embodiment is a natural part of the condition of being human.
For consumer researchers, interest in embodied cognition emerged from a symposium organised by the Association for Consumer Research in 1997 entitled Embodied Cognition: Towards a More Realistic and Productive Model of Mental Representation (Babbes & Malter, 1997) where three papers were presented and discussed. The interesting part for me can be found in the summary of the session where embodied cognition was ‘sold’ to the attendees on three criteria: That it was well-grounded in the cognitive literature; that there was an active research discipline; and that it was very relevant to consumer research. The emphasis was that here was a development in psychology that was going somewhere and it’s theoretically sound so you better get on board and find a consumer research niche. That is what happened.
Before we leave the origins of embodied cognition and look at the relevant consumer research literature from the last 20 years, my own contribution to this section would be to pose the question: Why has it taken so long to consider the relationship between thought and action this way? I think this is partly because scholarship and research has long been the province of universities. I have worked in universities all my life and appreciate the freedom to pursue different lines of enquiry into subjects and areas that interest me. However there is a tendency, an occupational hazard in a sense, to be less than worldly and prefer books and abstract ideas to the ordinary everyday world of getting things done. 1 Mathematics is a good example of a discipline which is often seen as pure and intellectually the summit of human mental achievement and the fact that it works and can explain and predict so much about the world serves to elevate rationality and pure reason as examples of what humanity can achieve. So there is a case that reason, theories that are formal, abstract and universal and an ignorance of the practical mundane and ordinary problems of life contribute to the elevation of pure thought to a sacred 2 status. This is what distinguishes us from the animals after all. 3
This critique of abstract thought emerges in a different form in a paper by Sullins (2000) who looked at a loosely defined group called Transhumanists . They believed that the future of humanity lay in immortality where we are freed from the body and can exist as transcendent thought ‘sans everything’. 4 Their argument has a certain logic where the mind with its memories and functions becomes an immense store of 1s and 0s and the body becomes unnecessary as in the future reflexive thinking and awareness can be programmed. Looking at these as imaginative fiction but asking ourselves here in the second decade of the twenty-first century whether it could come to pass, it seems that replacement of all organs below the central nervous system is now a distinct possibility in the future and replacing parts of the brain is in the bounds of possibility. Quantum computing will enable storage beyond our wildest dreams and the body could become a complex set of prosthetic devices that will simulate our actions well beyond the limited tools of the biological organs of Homo sapiens . But will the world experienced by these sons and daughters of Frankenstein be the same experience as ours? No, and that is why we are stuck with imaginative fiction and not truthful facts.
The Evidence for Embodied Cognition
Many of the results reported in the literature on embodied cognition, especially in the consumer psychology tradition, used a classic ‘treatment and control’ paradigm . At least two groups of participants are used and one group is given the treatment while the other group (the control) is given something similar to do but the procedure lacks a critical feature that is under examination in the experiment. A typical example would be Hung and Labroo (2011). They were interested in seeing if there is a link between body and mind reflected in metaphors such as ‘the student had firmly resolved to finish the essay before midnight’ 5 where the power of the will is given a muscular description as firm muscles. The authors make a good case that language and the body are metaphorically related in this way. Several experiments were reported and results seemed to be conclusive. The muscle firming used was simply to grasp a pen tightly (the control group held the pen normally). Those experimental groups where muscle firming was used performed differently on various tasks from the control groups where muscle firming was not used. In particular the ‘muscle firmers’ would give more money to charity and were able to keep their hand in freezing water longer. The participants were not aware of what the r
esearchers were trying to demonstrate and the authors concluded that in the light of these and other experiments they did, the body can influence willpower and help self-regulation (op. cit., p. 1046).
There were many more papers that emerged at that time on embodied cognition and this was one of the first to be in one of the top journals for consumer researchers. The first point to make is that results here are based on group differences and there are no grounds for claiming that everyone will always function this way i.e. that some tricks with your body can provide a magic way to help you solve your problems of yielding to temptation, although there might be some advantage in adopting the maxim that the authors suggest where muscles can affect resolve (op. cit., p. 1058). But we can say with certainty that metaphorical links between body and mind have been established. Holding a pen firmly will provide a sensory input to the mind and the mental links and associations that are established are important.
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