The Dimensions Of Metaphorical Representation Of Moral Personality

Compared to traditional moral cognitive model, the moral personality can be able to solve the problem of knowing and behavior better, so the research of moral personality is a new theme of moral psychology. Because the concept of moral personality is more abstract, we often use metaphors to understand it better. Thus, the metaphorical perspective of moral personality becomes a research direction. Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003, p.154) pointed out:"Our experiences will differ from culture to culture and may depend on our understanding one kind of experience in terms of another, that is, our experiences may be metaphorical in nature." Then, on the human experience and metaphor, similarity and difference exist at the same time. Therefore, the metaphorical representation of moral personality is multi-dimensional, and it can be restricted by cultural factors. However, this is only the view of cognitive linguistics, so it needs the support of empirical researches. As Valenzuela (2009) argued that people had seen how empirical studies can suggest refinements in the theory, point at non-linguistic realizations of metaphor, or suggest restrictions or additions to proposed metaphors.Johnson (1993) has suggested that morality is represented within metaphoric dimensions, which may directly influence moral decision-making and cognitive processing. Hill and Lapsley’s (2009) studies have shown that moral personality is represented metaphorically in the vertical dimension, but not in brightness (black vs. white) dimension. However, Hill and Lapsley’s (2009) results and the results of previous studies (Meier, Sellbom,&Wygant,2007; Sherman&Clore,2009) are not consistent. With respect to the vertical dimension, Meier et al.(2007) indicates that metaphorical representation of morality is only suitable for the moral words, while Hill and Lapsley’s (2009) research indicates that metaphorical representation of morality only applies to immoral personality words. For the lightness dimension, previous research has shown that violations committed by individuals wearing white may be viewed as less egregious than those by individuals wearing black; in line with this suggestion, Sherman and Clore (2009) found that white and black are moral purity and moral pollution conceptual symbols; but in Hill and Lapsley’s (2009) research, the results show that moral personality is not represented metaphorically in the lightness dimension. These divergent results are worth testing. Because the cultural differences have effect on moral personality in metaphor, then, how the metaphorical representation of moral personality would be like in the context of Chinese culture?In order to inspect whether the metaphoric representation of the moral personality is multi-dimensional, and to find culturally specific factors of metaphoric representation of moral personality, the current research would attempt to replicate and extend Hill and Lapsley’s (2009) research and we would like to know whether people will represent the moral personality along the three metaphorical dimensions:verticality, color, and size. Our studies include three experiments using moral personality adjectives as stimulus materials, college students as subjects, reaction time of correct judgments as dependent variable. The results show that:(1) In the context of Chinese culture, the moral personality is represented along some relevant metaphor dimensions (e.g., verticality).(2) The suitable representational dimension of moral personality may be limited, whether moral personality is represented metaphorically along the color and size dimensions needs more empirical test.(3) Judging the immoral personality word correctly is slower than judging the moral personality word correctly. That is, there is an adaptive attentional bias towards immoral traits.