Exploring the boundaries of embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor theory

Embodied cognition is an approach to cognition which suggests that our bodies and their actions play a fundamental role in the processing of information including perception, planning, feeling, and even decision making. While research includes some strong theoretical work, there is a tendency in this literature to focus on novel effects and there is limited rigorous and systematic programs of inquiry. The current thesis endeavours to address this weakness of the literature by examining the boundaries and limitations of an established effect. This is achieved in this thesis by a meta-analysis, and two empirical studies designed to replicate and extend research on the embodied fishiness-suspicion conceptual metaphor. The results of the meta-analysis indicated that gustatory metaphor consistent embodied effects typically demonstrate moderate to large effect sizes in the predicted (i.e., metaphor consistent) direction. The findings from a broad range of bias tests suggest that these effects are generally robust to publication bias. The results of the first empirical study replicated the previous finding that incidental exposure to a fishy smell elicited suspicion related behaviour in line with the metaphor “something smells fishy”. Consistent with the original experiments, exposure to a fishy smell undermined cooperation (i.e., Public Goods game; Lee & Schwarz, 2012), and improved performance in cognitive decision making (i.e., Wason Rule Discovery Task; Lee et al., 2015). In addition to the replication predictions, it was predicted that certain traits (i.e., distrust) would interact with the embodied effects (i.e., fishy smell) on the various outcome variables (i.e., Public Goods Game/social trust), unexpectedly it was found was that the embodied effects were sufficient to override the traits that were measured. The final study examined the effect of using visual fishiness cues instead of olfactory ones in the fishiness-suspicion paradigm. I predicted that I would find results consistent with the previous research (i.e., Lee et al., 2015; Lee & Schwarz, 2012), and my first empirical study. However, the results failed to support my hypotheses. The discussion focusses on the implications of these findings, and suggestions for future research.