The Sweet Kisses of Embodied Cognition

I wandered into a session on embodied cognition at last week’s Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, and I walked away thinking what I heard can’t possibly be true.

I mean, it just can’t be. Can it?

Research on embodied cognition—the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition)—is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching results. For instance, there’s the 2009 study that seems to show that people holding heavy clipboards are more likely to disagree with weak arguments than people holding light clipboards. Or the study, also published in 2009, that found that people gripping a warm cup of coffee judged others as having a “warm” personality.

In the session I saw, the presentation, by Michael D. Robinson, a professor of psychology at North Dakota State University, was on his research suggesting a strong connection between acting sweet and eating sweets. Between cupcakes and kindness.

Some of his research got attention when it was first published, in 2011, but I was struck again by what it would mean if it turned out to be true.

In one experiment, the researchers gave 58 undergraduates either a Hershey’s Kiss or an Altoids Tangerine Sour. Posttreat, those who had eaten a Kiss rated themselves as feeling more agreeable than those who had sucked an Altoid.

That’s not terribly shocking. Maybe chocolate puts people in a slightly better mood. Fine.

What’s harder to wrap my head around is an experiment that linked a fondness for sweet foods with a willingness to help others. First, the 108 participants (undergrads again) filled out a survey in which they rated how much they liked salty, sour, and sweet foods.

They were then asked whether they would be willing to help dispose of sandbags. The question isn’t as random as it sounds: There had been a flood in the area, and millions of sandbags needed to be removed. The way the question was framed, the participants might reasonably have believed that they were committing to help out with the cleanup.

Here’s what Robinson found: People who liked sweet foods were more likely to volunteer to remove sandbags. They were metaphorically sweet people who loved actual sweets.

And the finding hits on one of the underlying ideas of embodied cognition—that is, that the metaphors we toss around are grounded in more concrete, physiological truths. Warm things make you physically and psychologically warmer. Cold things make you feel more alienated. Sweet things make you sweeter, and liking sweet things means you behave more sweetly.

Now there are plenty of people, including some psychologists, who are skeptical about some of those results. I wrote about the critics of John Bargh’s research—he did the coffee-mug experiment—in an article last year. And a study that purported to show that people were more generous after riding an “up” escalator was shot down by Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a dry-witted crusader against suspicious statistics. (The researcher who did the escalator study, Lawrence Sanna, later resigned.)(**Sanna’s not Dutch. I was thinking of Dirk Smeesters, who is Dutch, and who also resigned, and is mentioned in that same linked story. Sorry about that.)

But that doesn’t mean embodied cognition as a whole is wrong, of course.

I asked Michael Robinson, the sweetness researcher, via email if he also finds the results difficult to fathom. He wrote back that he has six other experiments, which he didn’t mention in the presentation I saw, that all show that more-agreeable people like sweet foods.

“The theoretical model that we work with predicts that these sorts of effects should be robust, and we have come to see results that are very supportive of conceptual metaphor effects,” he wrote. “So we are not surprised with these sorts of results.”

I admit it still surprises me. But perhaps as studies like this one are replicated in other labs, the research will seem less strange. In the meantime, why not enjoy a Kiss?