Grounding social relations

The present dissertation deals with how social relationships are processed and understood, mostly through examining the role of physical warmth. An intuitive example of the role of temperature in social relationships are descriptions like ‘being a cold fish’. Such metaphors have been shown to have to be taken literal; for example, warm conditions induce prosociality (Williams & Bargh, 2008). Here we go beyond such findings on metaphor. Central to theories on metaphor is that the effect of the experience on the abstract concept is unidirectional. An often researched relationship is that between time and space. One could think of an example that stresses the space->time relationship: finishing one’s dissertation sometimes appears to be far away. The reverse is more difficult to conceptualize; in fact, research has shown an asymmetry between the two concepts: concepts of space affect how one thinks about time, but not vice versa (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008). We proposed that this asymmetry is less relevant for social relations; physical and social distance between self and other should affect perceptions of temperature in a similar way that physical temperature affects the way people perceive and think in social contexts. Theories describing social relations and development (e.g. attachment theory; Bowlby, 1969) stressed that people possess innate building blocks to engage in social interactions. At a very early stage in life, people need to know who is warm and trustworthy versus cold and hostile. In other words, babies first rely on perceptual input as opposed to more abstract, semantic representations. Physical warmth thus becomes an important proxy for social relations. To support this reasoning, we first showed that physically warm (as compared to cold) conditions induce greater psychological closeness with the experimenter, a greater perceptual focus on relations, and a greater usage of verbs. We then detailed how physically or socially inducing closeness or distance induces perceptions of higher or lower ambient temperature. Subsequently, we discussed the role of culture in relation to the body. From anthropology comes the suggestion that people develop techniques of the body (Mauss, 1979), acquired throughout life. Without truly paying attention to a concept (like honor) or posture (upright or slouched) one can form an association; upright postures might become associated with the idea that familism, male potency, and female purity are paramount. Cultures that oppose honor values actually might inhibit such concepts in such postures. Finally, our closing chapter addressed an existing dataset from cultural psychology with the knowledge acquired in this dissertation. In two previous articles, Kashima and Kashima (1998, 2003) addressed the effect of language and temperature on cultural values. They argued that temperature moderates the relationship between language and temperature. Based on the knowledge acquired in Chapter 2, we suggested that rather than moderating, temperature is an important factor as it affects the way people use language, which subsequently affects the way people construe cultural syndromes. The dissertation grounds social relations, and in its entirety supports that ‘body, psyche, and culture make each other up’