Space-valence mapping of social concepts: Do we arrange ethnic stereotypes from left to right?
Mon-B21-Talk III-01
Presented by: Katharina Kühne
The body-specificity hypothesis states that in right-handers, positive concepts are associated with the right side and negative concepts with the left side of the body. Our study postulated that negative out-group ethnic stereotypes would be associated with the left side, and positive in-group stereotypes would be associated with the right side. The experiment consisted of two parts. First, we measured the spatial mapping of ethnic stereotypes by using a sensibility judgment task, in which participants decided whether a sentence was sensible or not by pressing either a left or a right key. The sentences included German vs. Arabic proper names. Second, we measured implicit ethnic stereotypes in the same participants using the Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT), in which Arabic vs. German proper names were presented in combination with positive vs. negative adjectives. Right-handed German native speakers (N = 92) participated in an online study. As predicted, in the GNAT, participants reacted faster to German names combined with positive adjectives and to Arabic names combined with negative adjectives, thus demonstrating valenced in- and out-group ethnic stereotypes. However, we failed to find any reliable effects in the sentence-verification task, i.e., there was no evidence of spatial mapping of ethnic stereotypes. There was no correlation between the results of the two tasks at the individual level. Further Bayesian and exploratory analyses in the left-handed subsample (N = 9) corroborated the evidence in favor of null results. Our study suggests that ethnic stereotypes are not automatically mapped in a body-specific manner.
Keywords: body-specificity hypothesis, embodied cognition, ethnic stereotypes, implicit associations, GNAT, out-group stereotypes, space-valence associations