Up And Down:Perceptual Simulation Of The Social Categorization Of The Rich And The Poor

Traditional propositional system theory compares human cognitive activities to the operating systems similar to computers,the representation of abstract concepts is equal to the processing of abstract symbols,essentially,it has nothing to do with the body carried by cognition.However,embodied cognition holds that the representation of abstract concepts is not a simple symbolic process,but comes from specific perceptual experience,the most representative is the theory of perceptual system proposed by Barsalou in 1999,the theory holds that the understanding and representation of abstract concepts also involves the perceptual simulation of embodied perceptual experience.Recent research has found that social categorization processes also activate perceptual simulations of embodied experience.This paper explores whether there is a perception simulation of the vertical position of the social categorization of the rich and the poor.It assumes that the representation of the concept of rich is related to "up",and the representation of the concept of poor is related to "down".We verify the above hypothesis through four studies.In study 1,the high-income occupational names and low-income occupational names were selected as the target stimulus,and "up" and "down" keys were used to operate the perceptual simulation of the vertical position of the space.The results showed that for higher-income occupations,pressing the “up” key was faster than pressing the “down” key,on the contrary,for lower-income occupations,pressing the“down” key was faster than pressing the “up” key.Previous studies have found that the processing of the concept of social power also activates the perceptual simulation of vertical spatial position,In order to exclude the influence of the concept of social power on the experimental results,study 2 selected the high-income occupational names without social power and the low-income occupational names as the target stimulus,the results showed that for higher-income occupations,pressing the “up”key was faster than pressing the “down” key,and for lower-income occupations,pressing the “down” key was faster than pressing the “up” key,again verifying the conclusion of study 1.study 3 manipulated the perceptual simulation of vertical position of space by presenting the high-income and low income occupational names at the top and bottom of the screen.The results showed that when the high-incomeoccupational name was presented at the top of the screen,the response of the subjects was faster,and when the low-income occupational name was presented at the bottom of the screen,the response of the subjects was faster.The high-income and the low-income occupational names besides rich and poor also contains other meanings such as power,study 4 further selected the names marked only with the meaning of rich and poor as the target stimulus,the results showed that the response of the subjects were faster when the rich names displayed at the top of the screen,and the response were faster when the poor names were displayed at the bottom.The above results show that the process of social categorization of the rich and the poor activates the perceptual simulation of vertical position.