Department of Psychology, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2012 Jan;102(1):163-74. doi: 10.1037/a0025253. Epub 2011 Aug 29.
It is striking that prosocial people are considered "sweet" (e.g., "she's a sweetie") because they are unlikely to differentially taste this way. These metaphors aid communication, but theories of conceptual metaphor and embodiment led us to hypothesize that they can be used to derive novel insights about personality processes. Five studies converged on this idea. Study 1 revealed that people believed strangers who liked sweet foods (e.g., candy) were also higher in agreeableness. Studies 2 and 3 showed that individual differences in the preference for sweet foods predicted prosocial personalities, prosocial intentions, and prosocial behaviors. Studies 4 and 5 used experimental designs and showed that momentarily savoring a sweet food (vs. a nonsweet food or no food) increased participants' self-reports of agreeableness and helping behavior. The results reveal that an embodied metaphor approach provides a complementary but unique perspective to traditional trait views of personality.
引人注目的是，亲社会的人被认为是“甜的”（例如，“她是个甜心”），因为他们不太可能有这种不同的味道。这些隐喻有助于交流，但概念隐喻和体现理论使我们假设它们可以用来得出关于人格过程的新见解。五项研究都集中在这个想法上。研究 1 表明，人们认为喜欢甜食（例如糖果）的陌生人在宜人性方面也更高。研究 2 和 3 表明，对甜食的偏好的个体差异预测了亲社会人格、亲社会意图和亲社会行为。研究 4 和 5 使用实验设计表明，暂时品尝甜食（与非甜食或无食物相比）会增加参与者对宜人性和帮助行为的自我报告。研究结果表明，一种体现隐喻的方法为传统的人格特质观点提供了一种补充但独特的视角。
