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Illustration: Rami Niemi

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Can a person be bright? Cold? Soft? Sweet? When the psychologists Solomon Asch and Harriet Nerlove posed these questions to a group of 3- and 4-year-olds in 1960, the response, on the whole, was skeptical. “Poor people are cold because they have no clothes,” one child said. By second or third grade, though, children could understand the psychological meanings of these so-called double-function terms and how they relate to the physical world [1].

“Embodied cognition” is a subset of psychological research that explores the way physical sensations can evoke abstract concepts. Take warmth, for example. In one study from 2008, a research assistant asked subjects to hold her cup of coffee (either hot or iced) and then had them fill out a personality-impression questionnaire. Subjects who had held a hot cup judged others to be more caring and generous than did those who had held a cold one [2].

Researchers have also found that weight seems to correspond with perceived significance, giving new credence to the expression a loaded question. Evaluating information on a heavy clipboard has been shown to increase estimates of monetary value [3]. Heavy clipboards also add heft to the résumés of job candidates, according to another study, which further found that subjects who completed a sandpaper-covered puzzle rated subsequent social interactions as more difficult than did those who worked on a nonabrasive version [4]. And bad taste may offend more than the palate: study subjects who drank a bitter herbal tonic made harsher moral judgments about fictional scenarios than those who drank berry punch [5].

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Notes:

[1] Asch and Nerlove, “The Development of Double Function Terms in Children” (Perspectives in Psychological Theory, 1960)

[2] Williams and Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth” (Science, Oct. 2008)

[3] Jostmann et al., “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” (Psychological Science, Sept. 2009)

[4] Ackerman et al., “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions” (Science, June 2010)

[5] Eskine et al., “The Bitter Truth About Morality: Virtue, Not Vice, Makes a Bland Beverage Taste Nice” (PLOS One, July 2012)

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Sarah Yager is an associate editor at The Atlantic.