Whoa, this is heavy: brain equates weight with importance | Hacker News Reader

Whoa, this is heavy: brain equates weight with importance

trueslant.com

47 pointsneuroworld39 comments

The paper is available here [pdf]:

http://www.igroup.org/schubert/papers/jostmann_lakens_schube...

The experiment design has an interesting flaw: the values that the users assigned to the questions were indicated by marking a position on a line, not by writing out a number.

In other words, they might have simply measured where people who don't give a shit about answering questions in a stupid survey make arbitrary line markings on a sheet of paper when having to struggle a bit to hold up a heavy clipboard, versus when easily holding a light one.

I've noticed this with chess pieces. Play on a cheap unweighted plastic set, it feels a lot different than playing on a heavily weighted one.

Poker chips as well...

Agreed, you can easily notice the difference in how someone plays when you're using lightweight plastic chips and properly weighted ceramic chips. It affects how someone plays more than money (usually putting $5 on a game will be enough to get people to play serious, but the proper chips and cards will make people play like it's a $50 game).

"A research team found that they could alter people’s judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard."

A heavier material implies a higher cost, which may be associated with commitment, health, being well-off, status. It's the same psychology driving costly signals in males when approaching females (like owning a expensive car, or building impressive branched horns, or long and colorful feathers.)

So we think heavy things are important, and we use the word heavy (or, more formally, weighty) to mean important. In fact, gravitas means something like importance as well. I wonder which direction the causality flows. The article speculates that it might flow from experience (as an infant) to language...which would suggest that languages other than English should have similar metaphors. Anyone know of any?

I've been getting artwork together for new business cards, and found a company to print them. They sent me some samples of available paper types, and my first thought was that the card stock felt flimsy. And flimsy cards send the wrong message.

I've had really solid biz cards before (you could loid a office lock with them), and they suck because you can only get three of them in your wallet. But although a card is really just an information storage and transfer device, and paper stock really shouldn't matter, I can't bring myself to get wobbly cards. Like or not, how it feels also imparts information.

If you go too overboard on this track, you turn into this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk

Perhaps this explains the American Express Centurion Card (aka "Black Card") which is made from anodized titanium--its weight is immediately noticeable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_Card

It would have been even cooler to have made it out of tungsten.

Specific gravity for titanium: 4.506. For tungsten, 19.3.

Or gold which is even heavier.

In cognitive linguistics this is called conceptual metaphor. If you're interested in it, read "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff and Johnson. My favorite conceptual metaphor experiment (I think by Lera Boroditsky) was based on a question like:

The meeting was scheduled for Wednesday but was moved forward 2 days. What day is it on now?

Because this uses the common "time is motion" conceptual metaphor, if you ask it to people on a moving bus, they are more likely to say "Friday" than are people sitting at a bus stop.

The people who are in motion are more likely to conceptualize themselves moving through time and "moving the meeting forward" means forward in their direction of motion. The people who are not in motion conceptualize time as moving past them, and "moving the meeting forward" means forward towards them, making them more likely to say "Monday".

I wonder what would happen if they asked people who were facing backwards on the bus?

I think they're exactly right on the developmental basis of these effects. Our thoughts are embodied because that's how we develop. Just because we learn new stuff doesn't mean it's not rooted in the old.

That's at least one clear place where the brain-as-computer metaphor breaks down. I have yet to see evidence of a neural "delete" function. The question is how robust the overwrite functions are. And so far the evidence suggests the formation of new "files" rather than tampering with, or overwriting, old ones. Based on the neuroanatomy, these basal responses are likely to arise from posterior and subcortical structures. The frontal cortex is then used to abstract away and resolve conflicts.

This is always a factor in people's comparison of iphone vs. palm pre.

This is a good case for the embodied mind.

[Those] who study the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas, thoughts, concepts and categories are shaped by aspects of the body. These aspects include the perceptual system, the intuitions that underlie the ability to move, activities and interactions with our environment and the naive understanding of the world that is built into the body and the brain. (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition)

http://senseis.xmp.net/?Heavy

The meaning isn't exactly "important", more like "unwieldy". (Although I can't see how unimportant stones could ever be labeled heavy.)

I've noticed that doors on expensive cars are much heavier and "solid" feeling than lower-end models.

Maybe the manufacturers picked up on this.

Being heavy can also give you the illusion of being "solidly built"

This only works if you have naturally broad shoulders. If you don't have broad shoulders and you're heavy, you tend to look like a dough ball.

I'm sure a lot of this is more down to human's perceptions, broad shoulders are essentially equivalent to strength. You weren't afraid of the beanpole in school, you was afraid of the cubic jock.

A large proportion of female founders and CEO's typically have broader shoulders, and the same is usually true for male CEO's. The same is true with congressmen/women. This has been recognised for a long time, I mean look at the portraits of Henry VIII and virtually any other king, and even queens.

I am a woman with extremely broad shoulders (and an abnormally high amount of muscle mass, not to mention man-sized extremities). I've sometimes wondered if part of the reason I am the way I am, attitudinally, is due to the kind of hormone configuration that would build my body this way.

But, in any event -- you have to be careful if you're saying "women CEOs have broader shoulders" and then compare it to fictional depictions of people from the pre-photographic past (e.g. portraits). For the longest time, portraits were in many ways symbolic and metaphorical. Features would be highlighted, added, or exaggerated to make a statement. Not to mention the staging of the whole thing.

Think about that famous painting of the scarily-dressed, hook-nosed man and the pregnant woman. It is a painting depicting a wedding, and yet the woman is comically pregnant. I've read quite a bit about this painting, tho its name escapes me -- and everything seems to argue that not only is her pregnancy purely symbolic (fruitful), but so is much of the rest of the setting. It is notable also because there is a convex mirror behind them, showing their backs and the room. The bit of art criticism I was reading, about mirrors, made the case that even the mirror was symbolic of the past.

> Think about that famous painting of the scarily-dressed, hook-nosed man and the pregnant woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait ?

My point was that certain traits are highlighted and exaggerated for a reason, broad shoulders in men and women were seen as commanding. This meant that their attire exaggerated this in their courts, IIRC it was common for visiting Kings or Queens to wear less dramatic attire when the purpose was alliance seeking and wore more dramatic attire when the purpose was to be threatening.

Modern CEO's and Presidents don't display this type of showmanship in their attire, however take a look at Presidential portraits and portraits of the First Ladies, they still strike the artificial poses displaying broad shoulders.

It would take you an exceptionally long time to find a successful political figure in a posture that doesn't make them look commanding. They're actually trained to hold certain postures and frequently have personal gym instructors to help improve posture, this got leaked about President Sarkozy in France as he was mildly overweight, causing him to change to more comfortable postures in long meetings and speeches, etc.

People take posture to be quite trivial, but the amount of time spent on it by our societies elite really shows how important it is. I can't remember where I read it, but it can supposedly boost approval ratings by ~10% for presidents.

A lot of extra thought that goes into high-end cars. I remember reading an article about how the sound of the door shutting is carefully tweaked to make it feel substantial and expensive.

Edit: Found this: http://soundinthemachine.org/2009/01/21/the-swaying-car-door...

Few things sound like they actually do. The sounds made by technology are more a story about what it should sound like than what it actually does.

Because drivers don’t get the sensation of a “real” car in a hybrid electric car, speakers are now being placed in the cab to play synthetic engine noise for the driver. And, because it’s synthetic, the noise piped into a Prius can be made to sound like a Lamborghini.

Yesterday's BMW article had in interesting section on how they made a special dual mass flywheel to dampen vibration at lower RPMs so the sound would be more agreeable and people would not downshift as early.

A lot of effort and expense to work around a misprogrammed driver.

God, I wish you can turn off the synthetic engine noise. Part of what's exhausting about driving is the constant droning noise.

I've wondered about why we think dense objects are valuable and whether this is a large contributor to gold's historical use as money.

Probably more - this rock is never going to kill that mamoth.

Heavy things cost more to ship, therefore as the relative weight of any given piece of equipment goes up, so does the price. And we all know that pricier things are better, right?

Unless you are talking about equipment for activities that actively value lightness (camping, rock climbing, hang-gliding).

laptoping

there's that word again, "heavy". why are things so heavy in the future? is there a problem with the earths gravitational pull?

Cool, now how do I make a heavy website?

CSS image resizing.

Or Flash.

metallic textures?

Careful application of typography and white space.

The nuances of our collective psyches never cease to amaze me. Now to off to do some "heavy" thinking.

That was a heavy article.

But it's not true for all of us...

For someone, it could perfectly be the other way round:

"Hey, it's perfect, and it's light too! Wow! Now go to h*ll all of you too earth-bound children, while we will continue to fly high in the sky...".

;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com