"Is it a problem for liberal parties that they are on the left of the political spectrum, but most voters are right-handed?"

Does handedness steer our shopping behavior? Questions, questions, questions. We need the right answer. Or the left.

Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Right- and Left-Handers

Daniel Casasanto

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people who interact with their physical environments in systematically different ways should form correspondingly different mental representations. In a test of this hypothesis, 5 experiments investigated links between handedness and the mental representation of abstract concepts with positive or negative valence (e.g., honesty, sadness, intelligence). Mappings from spatial location to emotional valence differed between rightand left-handed participants. Right-handers tended to associate rightward space with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but left-handers showed the opposite pattern, associating rightward space with negative ideas and leftward with positive ideas. These contrasting mental metaphors for valence cannot be attributed to linguistic experience, because idioms in English associate good with right but not with left. Rather, right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they could act more fluently with their dominant hands. These results support the body-specificity hypothesis and provide evidence for the perceptuomotor basis of even the most abstract ideas.

General Discussion

Five experiments demonstrated associations between horizontal
space and the mental representation of abstract concepts with positive and negative emotional valence. These associations differed between right- and left-handers. Right-handers were more likely than left-handers to associate right with positive ideas and left with negative ideas. Left-handers were more likely than right-handers to associate left with positive ideas and right with negative ideas. Right- and left-handers tended to link good things like intelligence, attractiveness, honesty, and happiness with opposite sides of left– right space, each group associating them more strongly with their dominant side. By contrast, both left- and right-handers showed the same preference to associate good things with up and bad things with down. This pattern of results was predicted on the basis of the body-specificity hypothesis and demonstrates that people with different bodies (in this case, right- and left-handers) form correspondingly different mental representations, even in highly abstract conceptual domains.

Consequences of Body-Specific Representations of Good and Bad

Do body-specific mental metaphors influence judgments outside of the laboratory? When choosing between two brands of cereal on the supermarket shelf, are we biased to buy the one on our dominant side? Does the placement of candidates’ names on the left or right side of a ballot influence how likely they are to get elected? Is it a problem for liberal parties that they are on the left of the political spectrum, but most voters are right-handed? It may seem implausible that the incidental association of products or people with locations in physical space could influence our judgments about them, but as Wilson and Nisbett (1978) demonstrated, our intuitions about the factors that shape our judgments can be misleading. Some judgments may be impervious to the influence of irrelevant spatial factors. Optimistically, many of our decisions, from what to buy to whom we should vote for, are anchored in firm opinions developed after extensive research or prior experience. Yet, other routine decisions are at least partly impulsive, underinformed, or rooted in gut feelings rather than facts (e.g., Ambady & Rule, 2007; Oppenheimer, 2008). How much of the variance in these judgments might be accounted for by the implicit influence of mental metaphors? Even subtle influences of spatial location could have measurable real-world consequences. Because right-handed participants outnumbered left-handers in Experiments 1–5, a significantly greater number of participants showed a Good Is Right bias (53%) than a Good Is Left bias (47%), overall, collapsing across right- and left-handers ( prep⫽ 0.97). This 3% difference might seem negligible, but political elections are routinely won and lost by much slimmer margins. Even for presidential elections, votes have been shown to depend substantially on subtle, irrelevant factors like the order in which candidates’ names were listed on the ballot (Krosnick, Miller, & Tichy, 2004). The Fribbles, shopping, and job tasks are similar to tasks we perform in our daily lives: purchasing items found on the left or right side of a catalog or computer screen; ordering dishes from the left or right page of a restaurant menu; selecting candidates—for the Parent–Teacher Association or for political office—from the left or right side of a roster. Because right-handers outnumber left-handers in the general population, right-handers’ mental metaphors should have a greater overall effect on the collective judgments made by knitting circles, neighborhoods, or nations. If we want to win approval, garner customers, or accumulate votes, the right side may be the right place to be.


Aside from the possible real-world implications of links between handedness and left–right preference, the discovery of bodyspecific mental metaphors for valence has several theoretical implications. Because patterns in language are tightly coupled with patterns of body–world interactions, previous studies have been unable to determine the extent to which mental metaphors from space to valence arise in the individual learner due to correlations in bodily experience or to correlations in linguistic experience. But framing experimental hypotheses in terms of body-specificity allowed the possible influences of language and culture to be distinguished from the influences of perceptuomotor experience. Linguistic and cultural experience cannot predict or explain the body-specific Good Is Left metaphor in left-handers or the difference between right- and left-handers’ judgments. Thus, these data provide unequivocal evidence for an embodied origin of at least some abstract concepts. Like research on linguistic relativity and cultural relativity, research on what I will call by analogy bodily relativity can elucidate ways in which particular patterns of experience can give rise to corresponding habits of thinking, perceiving, and acting.


Not content with this? German scientists in Bielefeld (where??) conducted tests to see if handedness impacts shopping behavior.

ABSTRACT CONCEPTS OF RIGHT-­‐ AND LEFT-­‐HANDERS – IS OUR ENTIRE THINKING BUILT ON THE EXPERIENCES OF OUR BODY?

To obtain a more robust estimate of the statistical reliability, we performed a replication of one of Casasanto’s central experiments for perceptual judgment, the ‘shopping tour’. This experiment concentrated on the impact of handedness on decision making processes. The participants were confronted with several product categories and had to decide for one of two products on the basis of short descriptions, which were placed in columns on the right and left of these categories. Our replication, which involved more left-­‐handers and a more equal distribution of left vs. right handers than in the original experiment, not reveal any significant effect of handedness. This made us suspect that the body specificity effect only occurs in ‘active placement’ tasks, and not in perceptive judgment tasks. In order to test this new hypothesis we also performed an ‘active placement’ version of the shopping tour. The participants were asked to imagine that they are the manager of a supermarket, who had the task to choose the side at in which the two objects of the same category had to be placed. In contrast with the replication experiment with the perceptual judgment task, this version showed a strong effect of left versus right handedness.

We therefore propose our ‘Manipulation Specificity Hypothesis’ which states that the impact of handedness is only relevant in active placement tasks and not in perception situations. Thus, body specificity is only a determining factor when people have to use their hands actively, so that the better accessibility of objects serves as a positive criterion. This Manipulation Specificity Hypothesis is weaker than the Body Specificity Hypothesis, but is strongly supported both by the combination of Casasanto’s (2009) experiments and our two replication attempts.

 The last paragraph is a relief.