李恒:Karma or Immortality: Can Religion Influence Space‐Time Mappings?

文章作者:  发布时间: 2018-11-14  浏览次数: 10

论文题目:Karma or Immortality: Can Religion Influence SpaceTime Mappings?

论文作者:李恒

作者单位:语言科学与艺术学院

发表刊物:COGNITIVE SCIENCE

刊物类别:SSCI

摘 要:

People implicitly associate the “past” and “future” with “front” and “back” in their minds according to their cultural attitudes toward time. As the temporal focus hypothesis (TFH) proposes, futureoriented people tend to think about time according to the futureinfront mapping, whereas pastoriented people tend to think about time according to the pastinfront mapping (de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache, & Casasanto, 2014). Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that culture exerts an important influence on people's implicit spatializations of time, we focus specifically on religion, a prominent layer of culture, as potential additional influence on spacetime mappings. In Experiment 1 and 2, we observed a difference between the two religious groups, with Buddhists being more pastfocused and more frequently conceptualizing the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them, and Taoists more futurefocused and exhibiting the opposite spacetime mapping. In Experiment 3, we administered a religion prime, in which Buddhists were randomly assigned to visualize the picture of the Buddhas of the Past (Buddha Dipamkara) or the Future (Buddha Maitreya). Results showed that the pictorial icon of Dipamkara increased participants' tendency to conceptualize the past as in front of them. In contrast, the pictorial icon of Maitreya caused a dramatic increase in the rate of futureinfront responses. In Experiment 4, the causal effect of religion on implicit spacetime mappings was replicated in atheists. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence for the hypothesized causal role of religion for temporal focus in determining spacetime mappings.