Thinking about weighty matters: Weight while thinking matters. | Psychology Today

Thinking about weighty matters: Weight while thinking matters. Psychology Today


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Ulterior Motives
How goals, both seen and unseen, drive behavior
by Art Markman, PhD

Excerpts:

One common metaphor relates weight and heaviness to importance. For example, when you do a little light reading, the book is not that important. When we talk about people who think deep thoughts, we consider them to have intellectual heft.

These metaphors might signal something important about the relationship between mind and body, but the might just be a convenient way that language uses to express the abstract concept of the importance of thoughts.

A paper by Nils Jostmann, Daniel Lakens, and Thomas Schubert in the September, 2009 issue of Psychological Science put this idea to the test in a series of clever studies.

These findings suggest that experiencing weight and heaviness is enough to trigger the concept of importance. This idea of importance then affects people's judgments of value and leads people to seek consistency in their thoughts.
Heavy.

Read full article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/200910/thinking-about-weighty-matters-weight-while-thinking-matters

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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.