The role of nature and nurture in conceptual metaphors: The case of gustatory priming

It is unclear whether embodied-cognition effects are caused by the activation of cultural-linguistic metaphors, or whether these metaphors stem from preverbal mechanisms that directly affect both language and behavior. Therefore, we conducted a study wherein 62 Israeli participants ate sweet or spicy snacks and performed a social judgment task. Preverbal mechanisms assign positive hedonic value to sweetness and negative value to spiciness. However, in Israeli culture, "sweetness" is used as a metaphor for inauthenticity, whereas "spiciness"stands for intellectual competence. In accordance with the predictions of a culturally-mediated variant of conceptual-metaphor theory, the results showed that priming participants with spicy (vs. sweet) tastes increased judgments of intellectual competence, decreased judgments of inauthenticity, and increased overall evaluation of a social target.