Color Blindness - Gender Metaphor Mechanism And Its Impact On Consumption Behavior

Metaphor is a very common language phenomenon in the present multicultural world, such as emotional space metaphor "you seem to be very low’、"I am so high" etc., and all of this makes the words and languages existed in a more flexible way from expressing the abstract concepts through the concrete body perception metaphor.In the metaphorical phenomenon’s understanding, the traditional semantics thinks that metaphor is merely a semantic issues, it is meanings’ replace or change. After that, the progressive pragmatics proposed that the understanding of metaphor should be focused on the logic and context, but this view is still limited the understanding of metaphor in terms of language using. With the advent of modern cognitive theory, it also provides a new way to analyze the phenomenon of metaphor from cognitive mechanisms. Therefore, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) proposed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) from the second-generation cognitive science-embodied cognition’s research trends. According to the theory of conceptual metaphor theory point of view, the metaphor is not just a rhetorical device, it is more emphasis on the abstract concepts’ development systems from human experience of sensory perception and concrete concepts’ forming, which means, the subject’ representation and processing of abstract concepts can be achieved from one’s personal experience.It has become a main content that analysis and discussion the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor from the cognitive mechanisms’ perspective in the current psychological research. So, on the basis of previous studies, we first combed the conceptual metaphor theory’s development and it’s concrete research content in psychological circles from embodied cognition perspective, and focused on introducing the metaphor phenomenon in a variety of cultures and its existing research results, especially for the content of light and dark metaphor, we made a comprehensive summary of terms and proposed gender-related leads embodied metaphor on the basis of these results, which is to be proved that there is a metaphors linking between bright areas’ perception and gender areas’ cognition, and there is a certain psychological reality in the metaphor. Comprehensive studies on gender metaphors from home and abroad, found that the existing researches are more focuses on gender and spatial metaphor, such as "male-left, female-right ", or gender stereotype color metaphors, such as "male-blue, female-pink". Thus, this study started from the consumer’s preferences, discussed color shades-gender metaphor and characterize effects related to consistency,and its application in consumer behavior from three experiments.The study is completed by three experiments:In experiment 1, we used a simple classification experimental paradigm to control the independent variables from the name’s color(black-white) and names(male-female), to explore the "male-black, female-white" metaphor mechanism in gender cognitive process; In experiment 2, we using the same simple classification paradigm, and control the independent variable in colors’ brightness(lime-light green-green-dark green) and names (male-female), and try to explore the existence of dark male-bright woman metaphor mechanism, test and verify the cognitive metaphor consistency between brightness category and gender category; In experiment 3, there is an experimental application of testing with a context background, which is completed by different color goods and the gender of story’s protagonist to explore the application of brightness-gender metaphor mechanism, this particular gender-based preferences in consumer behavior.Through the specific experiments, analysis and discussion, we draw the following conclusions:(1) There is a psychological reality’s linking between the black-white and the concept of gender metaphor, the perception of black and white will affect the subjects’ judgment of gender;(2) There is a consistent mental representation between brightness and gender, the specific performance is that brightness and female have the same mental representation concept, darkness and male have the same concept of mental representation.(3) The consumer goods’ brightness and darkness can effectively drive the subjects of gender-specific preferences, brightness-gender metaphor processing model of consumer behavior affect the main role of the female preference for brightly colored consumer goods, while men prefer dark consumer goods.