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Authors: Nick Kolenda
Tags: Psychology, Self-Help, Human Behavior, marketing, Influence, consumer behavior, advertising, persuasion
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attitudes, and many other cognitive mechanisms.
Over time, we come to associate specific behavioral actions with particular states of mind. These associations eventually become so strong that our mere body movements and positioning can trigger the corresponding cognitive mechanism (Niedenthal et al., 2005). For example, the act of making a fist has become so heavily associated with hostility that men who were subtly influenced to make a fist (under the disguise of a “rock, paper, scissors” type of task) rated themselves as more assertive in a seemingly unrelated questionnaire (Schubert & Koole, 2009).
Now that you have a better “grasp” of embodied cognition, the original three bulleted findings might make more sense:
If a résumé feels heavier—even if it’s only due to a heavy clipboard—people falsely associate the heaviness with value. Not only is there a nonsensical belief that more information is packed into the résumé, but there’s also the common metaphor that important things tend to “carry more weight.”
Why does writing down negative thoughts about yourself lower your self-esteem only when you write them with your dominant hand? When you write down negative thoughts with your nondominant hand, the effect disappears because you’re less confident in your writing ability. The lack of confidence that you feel from writing is misattributed to a lack of confidence in the accuracy of those negative thoughts.
When we push our arm upward against a table, that movement resembles bending our arm inward, an action that we perform when we bring something toward us. Because we perform that action when we find something appealing, people who were asked to push their arm upward ate significantly more cookies compared to people who were asked to push their arm downward, an action that we perform when we push something away from us.
As you’ll discover in this chapter, embodied cognition is a fascinating phenomenon with tremendous potential.
For those of you who are still biting a pen with your teeth, you can take it out now. Why on earth did I ask you to do that? When you hold a pen in your mouth by biting it with your teeth, this facial positioning causes you to exude the same expressions that you exude when you smile (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). You’re now in a better mood than you were at the beginning of the chapter. The next section will explain why that’s the case.
WHY IS EMBODIED COGNITION SO POWERFUL?
Still skeptical about embodied cognition? There are a few psychological principles that can explain why it occurs.
Facial Feedback Hypothesis. Remember how I asked you to read the opening description while biting a pen with your teeth? A group of researchers asked people to view a series of cartoons while holding a pen in their mouth. They asked some people to bite the pen with their teeth, and they asked other people to simply hold the pen with their lips. The researchers found that people who were biting the pen with their teeth (a position that caused them to smile) found the cartoons more amusing compared to people who were holding the pen with their lips (a position that didn’t cause them to smile) (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988).
To explain that phenomenon—which has become known as the facial feedback hypothesis —Robert Zajonc proposed a vascular theory of emotion , a theory suggesting that our body language can trigger biological mechanisms that, in turn, influence our emotional state and interpretation of information. When he and his colleagues (1989) asked German students to repeat certain vowel sounds ( i, e, o, a, u, ah, ü ), they found that students exhibited lower forehead temperature when they repeated e and ah vowel sounds (sounds that caused them to exude smiling expressions). Those smiling expressions cooled the students’ arterial blood, which produced a more pleasant mood by lowering their brain temperature. Conversely, repeating u and ü sounds forced
Over time, we come to associate specific behavioral actions with particular states of mind. These associations eventually become so strong that our mere body movements and positioning can trigger the corresponding cognitive mechanism (Niedenthal et al., 2005). For example, the act of making a fist has become so heavily associated with hostility that men who were subtly influenced to make a fist (under the disguise of a “rock, paper, scissors” type of task) rated themselves as more assertive in a seemingly unrelated questionnaire (Schubert & Koole, 2009).
Now that you have a better “grasp” of embodied cognition, the original three bulleted findings might make more sense:
If a résumé feels heavier—even if it’s only due to a heavy clipboard—people falsely associate the heaviness with value. Not only is there a nonsensical belief that more information is packed into the résumé, but there’s also the common metaphor that important things tend to “carry more weight.”
Why does writing down negative thoughts about yourself lower your self-esteem only when you write them with your dominant hand? When you write down negative thoughts with your nondominant hand, the effect disappears because you’re less confident in your writing ability. The lack of confidence that you feel from writing is misattributed to a lack of confidence in the accuracy of those negative thoughts.
When we push our arm upward against a table, that movement resembles bending our arm inward, an action that we perform when we bring something toward us. Because we perform that action when we find something appealing, people who were asked to push their arm upward ate significantly more cookies compared to people who were asked to push their arm downward, an action that we perform when we push something away from us.
As you’ll discover in this chapter, embodied cognition is a fascinating phenomenon with tremendous potential.
For those of you who are still biting a pen with your teeth, you can take it out now. Why on earth did I ask you to do that? When you hold a pen in your mouth by biting it with your teeth, this facial positioning causes you to exude the same expressions that you exude when you smile (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). You’re now in a better mood than you were at the beginning of the chapter. The next section will explain why that’s the case.
WHY IS EMBODIED COGNITION SO POWERFUL?
Still skeptical about embodied cognition? There are a few psychological principles that can explain why it occurs.
Facial Feedback Hypothesis. Remember how I asked you to read the opening description while biting a pen with your teeth? A group of researchers asked people to view a series of cartoons while holding a pen in their mouth. They asked some people to bite the pen with their teeth, and they asked other people to simply hold the pen with their lips. The researchers found that people who were biting the pen with their teeth (a position that caused them to smile) found the cartoons more amusing compared to people who were holding the pen with their lips (a position that didn’t cause them to smile) (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988).
To explain that phenomenon—which has become known as the facial feedback hypothesis —Robert Zajonc proposed a vascular theory of emotion , a theory suggesting that our body language can trigger biological mechanisms that, in turn, influence our emotional state and interpretation of information. When he and his colleagues (1989) asked German students to repeat certain vowel sounds ( i, e, o, a, u, ah, ü ), they found that students exhibited lower forehead temperature when they repeated e and ah vowel sounds (sounds that caused them to exude smiling expressions). Those smiling expressions cooled the students’ arterial blood, which produced a more pleasant mood by lowering their brain temperature. Conversely, repeating u and ü sounds forced
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