Embodiment, Agency, and Attitude Change

Embodiment,Agency,and Attitude ChangeCheryl A.Taylor,Charles G.Lord,and Charles F.Bond,Jr.Texas Christian UniversityAttitude embodiment effects occur when the position or movement of a person’s physical body changes the way the person evaluates an object.The present research investigated whether attitude embodiment effects depend more on biomechanical factors or on inferential cues to causal agency.Experiments 1and 2showed that actual movements of the physical body are not necessary to create attitude embodiment effects when inferential cues imply agency for another person’s physical movements.Experiment 3showed that actual movements of the physical body are not sufficient to create attitude embodiment effects when inferential cues imply nonagency for those movements.In all 3experiments,inferential cues to agency played a more important role in attitude embodiment effects than did actual agency,suggesting that theories of embodiment and attitude embodiment need to consider inferential cues to agency alongside biomechanical mechanisms.Keywords:embodiment,attitudes,agencyIn their landmark text Philosophy in the Flesh:The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought ,Lakoff and Johnson (1999)noted that Western philosophers,from pre-Socratic thinkers through Rene ´Descartes,have regarded thinking as amodal.Ac-cording to this long philosophical tradition,people represent what is “out there”in abstract symbols,and then think by manipulating these abstract symbols.In recent decades,this perspective has lent itself readily to the computer metaphor,in which symbols that represent the world and our experiences are stored as abstract concepts and later retrieved to arrive at conclusions and decisions.The brain is like a computer that sits atop a stalk called the spinal cord.Thinking with abstract concepts is inherently amodal,be-cause it would be the same whether it was done by a computer or by a disembodied brain in a vat.Lakoff and Johnson (1999)contrasted with this traditional view an alternative perspective in which thinking is embodied.People think the way they do because human beings have evolved to have specific physical bodies that move in particular ways through their environment.One piece of evidence for embodied thinking,ac-cording to Lakoff and Johnson,is that English and other languages make extensive use of bodily metaphors to convey abstract con-cepts.We grasp ideas,for instance,and also walk a fine line,break out of a daily routine,try to get around regulations,get boxed in a corner or bogged down ,carry a heavy work load,get weighed down by projects,avoid being pushed around or led by the nose ,see light at the end of the tunnel,move ahead ,cover ground,slide backward,need to catch up ,go with the flow,put the past behindus ,look ahead to the future,go crazy,come out of depression,and fall in love.According to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999)view of the embod-ied mind,physical body position and/or movement can change the way that people think,the conclusions they draw,and the decisions they reach.Considerable modern research,comprehensively re-viewed by Niedenthal,Barsalou,Winkielman,Krauth-Gruber,and Ric (2005),has yielded results that can be interpreted as support for these embodiment effects.Other research (also reviewed by Niedenthal et al.,2005)has yielded results that can be interpreted as support for attitude embodiment effects ,in which physical body position and/or movement can change the way that people evaluate attitude objects.Not all influences on evaluative judgment need involve a person who performs a physical movement.Evaluative judgments and related behaviors can be altered by false feedback about one’s own body states (Taylor,1975;Valins,1966),actions that are only imagined and not actually performed (Anderson,1983),visual illusions that increase versus decrease the distance of one’s body from words on a computer screen (Neumann &Strack,2000),and even movements of a computer avatar (Bailenson &Yee,2005).In these demonstrations,the relationship between perceived causal agency for a body movement and attitude change was not in question,because no participant actually performed an attitude-relevant physical body movement.The present research drew on these previous findings and examined whether attitude embodi-ment effects (and by extension all embodiment effects that involve a person who performs a physical body movement)might depend more on inferential cues to agency than on the biomechanical movements themselves.Previous research on causal agency has successfully separated physical body movements from inferences of agency for those movements,demonstrating that people sometimes infer causal agency for body movements that they did not perform (Wegner,Sparrow,&Winerman,2004)and that people do not always perceive agency for their own body movements (Wegner,Fuller,&Sparrow,2003).By adapting these experimental paradigmsCheryl A.Taylor,Charles G.Lord,and Charles F.Bond,Jr.,Depart-ment of Psychology,Texas Christian University.Charles F.Bond,Jr.is now a freelance consultant in Nashville,TN.We thank Betsy Sparrow for advice on making the smock that was used in Experiments 1and 2and also thank Jessica Fife and Juli Stokes for serving as confederates in Experiment 3.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Charles G.Lord,Department of Psychology 298920,Texas Christian University,Fort Worth,TX 76129.E-mail:c.lord@Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ©2009American Psychological Association 2009,Vol.97,No.6,946–9620022-3514/09/$12.00DOI:10.1037/a0017421946designed to distinguish actual from perceived agency for physical body movements,the present research tested the hypotheses that actual body movements are neither necessary nor sufficient to produce attitude embodiment effects.Embodiment EffectsEmpirical evidence for embodiment effects includes research on positions of the face and body,body movements,and movements of approach or avoidance.Positions of the Face and BodyPeople often arrange their faces or bodies in positions that interact with their thoughts and feelings.In one relevant study, participants were filmed while trying to guess the emotions pic-tured on the faces of various actors(Wallbott,1991).Two weeks later,they were able to guess which emotions had been portrayed from watching only the recording of their own faces.They must, therefore,have been imitating the pictured emotions.In a related study(Neumann&Strack,2000),participants were not aware that they spontaneously imitated a speaker’s tone of voice(e.g.,happy, sad)when asked only to repeat the speaker’s words,or that their own tone of voice influenced their moods.People are also more accurate at guessing another person’s emotions if they are allowed to alter their own facial expressions while viewing the speaker (Niedenthal,Brauer,Halberstadt,&Innes-Ker,2001).Experi-menters in two related studies(Duclos et al.,1989)arranged participants’bodies in poses that normally coincide with fear, anger,disgust,and sadness,but without mentioning any emotions. Participants rated their current moods as being congruent with these arranged positions,without realizing that they had been influenced.Stepper and Strack(1993)used the excuse of studying effects of ergonomic working positions on task performance to place partic-ipants in normal,upright,and slumped seating positions.Partici-pants who had moved from slumped to upright postures just before being given bogus success feedback also reported greater pride in their achievements.Similarly,Riskind and Gotay(1982),claiming to be studying the relationship between muscle response and galvanic skin response,arranged participants in slumped or upright positions and gave them bogus success feedback.Participants who had been in an upright posture when learning of their success subsequently displayed greater persistence on an unsolvable task than did participants who had been slumped,even though the experimenters never used terms like“upright”or“slumped”in describing the task.Participants in another study were asked to play a game of rock, paper,scissors,in which they sometimes had to close their hands into a fist to make a“rock”(Schubert,2004).They were quicker to identify words related to the concept of power when they had formed a fist than when they had arranged their hands in either of the other two configurations.All these studies suggest that holding the body in a specific position or posture can change the emotions that people experience,the accuracy of their interpersonal judg-ments,the concepts that come to mind,and behaviors such as persistence at a task.Body MovementsMovements of the physical body can interfere with or facilitate mental processes.Shepard and Metzler(1971)showed participants drawings of two three-dimensional objects,with one object rotated some number of degrees from the first.Participants’task was to decide whether the two objects were the same or different,which presumably required mental rotation.Verification times for differ-ent degrees of rotation indicated that people mentally rotate objects at a fixed rate of approximately60degrees per second.Wexler, Kosslyn,and Berthoz(1998)replicated the study but also had participants rotate their hands either clockwise or counterclock-wise,out of sight under the table.They found that rotating one’s hands in a direction opposite to the required mental rotation slows the speed of mental rotation.Reed and Farah(1995)performed a similar study,but with photos of a model holding a pose of unusual arm and leg positions, taken from two different angles that differed by some number of degrees of rotation.While making these judgments,participants had to move either their arms or their legs.They made fewer errors on changes in arm positions when they moved their own arms, regardless of instructions to attend to the model’s arm positions, whether they were experienced in dance or martial arts,and with and without cognitive load.Other body movements that can affect thought processes include shakes or nods of the head.Fo¨rster and Strack(1996)induced participants to nod or to shake their heads while listening to positive and negative words.Participants later recognized positive words better if they had been nodding than shaking their heads at the time and recognized negative words better if they had been shaking than nodding their heads.In a follow-up study(Fo¨rster& Strack,1996),participants performed more poorly on a finger dexterity task if their head movements(nodding vs.shaking) matched than mismatched the valence of words they were trying to remember.Movements of Approach or AvoidanceSeveral studies have shown that judgments are facilitated when the movements required to make the judgment correspond with rather than contradict the seemingly abstract concepts that are involved.In one such study,participants had to judge whether a sentence made sense(Glenberg&Kaschak,2002).Some of the sentences conveyed direction,in either a concrete sense(e.g.,“close the drawer,”“open the drawer”)or an abstract sense.(e.g.,“you delivered the pizza to him,”“he radioed the message to you”).Participants answered by taking their fingers off the middle of three buttons and pressing either the button farther away or the button closer to them.As predicted,they were faster to answer by moving their hands in the concrete or abstract direction implied by the sentence than in the opposite direction(Lang,Bradley,& Cuthbert,1990).In another study,participants had to press a key that made words on a computer screen come closer,or release the key,which made the words recede.They pressed faster for positive words and released faster for negative words.Similarly,Solarz(1960)printed positive and negative words(e.g.,sweet,kind,cruel,worthless)on cards that could be mounted on a slide.On each trial,participants were to push the card away from them or pull it closer to them as947EMBODIMENT,AGENCY,AND ATTITUDE CHANGEfast as possible.They were faster to push negative words away and to pull positive words toward them.They also took fewer trials to learn to push than pull negative words and fewer trials to learn to pull than push positive words.Finally,Fo¨rster and Strack(1997,1998)told participants that they were studying the motor actions of handicapped people. Under this guise,they asked participants either to push down on the top of a table(using the same muscles one would use to push something away)or pull up on the bottom of the table(using the same muscles one would use to pull something closer).While they were pushing or pulling on the table with one hand,participants were told to list in three columns the names of celebrities they liked,other celebrities they disliked,and celebrities they neither liked nor disliked.Participants listed significantly more names of liked than disliked celebrities when they were pulling closer and did the reverse when they were pushing away.The physical action of pulling closer seemed to make positive exemplars more acces-sible,whereas the physical action of pushing away seemed to make negative exemplars more accessible.Attitude Embodiment EffectsThe studies that were reviewed in the previous section may be interpreted as demonstrations of embodiment effects caused by positions of the face and body,body movements,and physical movements of approach or avoidance(Gibbs,2006).These studies did not,however,address specifically the idea that physical body positions and movements might affect the psychology of evalua-tion.Do people also evaluate attitude objects differently depending on movements of the physical body?Considerable evidence sug-gests that they do.In one study of facial positions,Strack,Martin,and Stepper (1988)asked participants to hold a pen in their mouth,either with just the lips(which requires holding facial muscles in something like a frown)or just the teeth(which requires holding facial muscles in something like a smile).While holding these facial positions,all participants rated the funniness of several cartoons. As predicted,participants rated the cartoons as funnier when they held a facial position similar to a smile than when they held a facial position similar to a frown,even though they could not guess the experimental hypothesis.In a well-known study of head movements,Wells and Petty (1980)had participants move their heads up and down(nodding) or side to side(shaking)while listening to music and a persuasive message,supposedly to test newly developed headphones for sound and comfort.On a subsequent attitude questionnaire,par-ticipants who had been nodding their heads up and down during the message agreed with it more than did participants who had been shaking their heads from side to side.In a follow-up study, Brin˜ol and Petty(2003)showed that the effect occurs because head nods are normally associated with supporting rather than doubting one’s own thoughts about a persuasive message,and not support-ing rather than doubting the message itself.In another study of head movements,participants were induced to nod or shake their heads while listening to music on headphones(Tom,Pettersen, Lau,Burton,&Cook,1991).Before they started,the experimenter placed a blue or burgundy ballpoint pen on the table in front of ter,participants were asked which color pen they wanted as a gift.Seventy-five percent of participants who nodded their heads chose the pen they had been looking at while nodding, whereas75%of participants who had been shaking their heads chose the other pen.In a study of body position and movement,Cacioppo,Priester, and Berntson(1993)had participants rate Chinese ideographs. While doing these ratings,the experimenter directed participants to pull up on the bottom of the table(pulling toward)while some of the ideographs were shown and push down on the top of the table (pushing away)while other ideographs were shown.Participants reported liking whichever ideographs they viewed while pulling up more than ones they viewed while pushing down,even though ratings of task enjoyment,difficulty,and effort did not differ. Interestingly,these effects did not replicate when participants in a follow-up study pressed up or down with their legs rather than their arms.The researchers speculated that leg movements would not affect attitudes toward a previously neutral stimulus because people do not usually grasp objects and pull them closer versus push them away with their legs and feet,but only with their arms and hands.The researchers also noted that the subjective experi-ence of pushing something away or pulling it closer with ones hands and arms might play an important role in producing attitude embodiment effects(Cacioppo et al.,1993).Chen and Bargh(1999)had participants classify words pre-sented on a screen as good or bad.Some participants were told to push a lever away from them for negative words and pull it toward them for positive words.Others were told to push the lever away from them for positive words and pull it toward them for negative words.Participants moved the lever faster when the required motion was congruent rather than incongruent with the word’s valence.In related studies,Kawakami,Phills,Steele,and Dovidio (2007)had participants either push a joystick away from them or pull the joystick toward them while viewing photographs of Afri-can American and European American men.On several different measures,participants displayed more positive subsequent atti-tudes toward African Americans after pulling the joystick toward them than after pushing the joystick away.In a follow-up study (Study4),participants who had pulled the joystick toward them later sat closer and in a more open body orientation toward an African American confederate than did participants who had pushed the joystick away.All these studies suggest that attitude embodiment effects are at least as prevalent as other embodiment effects that do not involve evaluative judgments.Facial positions,head movements,muscle movements,and physical acts of pulling toward or pushing away reliably affect the attitudes that participants report,and even their nonverbal koff and Johnson’s(1999)reasoning about the intimate connection between physical body position or move-ment and seemingly abstract concepts has received considerable empirical support(Gibbs,2006;Niedenthal et al.,2005).These demonstrations of attitude embodiment effects,however,raise interesting questions about the underlying necessary and sufficient conditions for such effects to occur,questions originally raised by Cacioppo et al.(1993),who noted that“it remains for future researchers to determine whether subjects’subjective experiences during the task(e.g.,feelings of approach–withdrawal)are neces-sary for motor processes to have attitudinal effects”(p.16). Consider a simple thought experiment.Imagine that someone else were to grab your arm and use it to push a photograph of an African American man away from you.Would you come to like948TAYLOR,LORD,AND BONDAfrican Americans less?That possibility seems unlikely,no matter how many times the pushing away motion was repeated.Having someone else push your arm away is not the same as using your own arm to push something away.It seems unlikely that the sheer biomechanical movement of your arm in pulling something toward you or pushing it away would have any effect on your attitudes if the physical body movement was not“yours.”The subjective experience of having someone else use your arm to push some-thing away would presumably not be the same as the subjective experience of doing it yourself.Or would it?Research on per-ceived agency for actions suggests that the answer is not as obvious as one might suppose.Perceived AgencyIn all the reviewed studies of attitude embodiment effects, participants were clearly the authors of the attitude-relevant ac-tions.By contrast,participants in other studies have been led to infer causal agency even for other people’s actions.Wegner et al. (2004)suggested that people do not have infallible knowledge of whether they or someone else performed an action.Perceived agency is an inference rather than a matter of fact.To infer that they are causal agents for a body movement,people use inferential cues such as the orientation of the physical body in relation to the environment,sensory(proprioceptive and kinesthetic)feedback, direct bodily feed forward,visual feedback,effects on others, consequences for goals,and action-relevant thoughts that occur prior to the action.People tend to infer they are the originators and owners of physical actions when the cues that usually accompany their own actions are present—for instance,when they think about moving their arms and hands just before it happens,and then they see their arms and hands move.One way to show that people use such cues to infer agency is to demonstrate that when the cues are misleading,people inaccu-rately assume causal agency for arm and hand movements that they did not make—that were,in fact,made by someone else. Participants in a study of prior action-relevant thoughts stood with their hands at their sides,facing a mirror(Wegner et al.,2004).A second participant served as a“hand helper.”The hand helper stood out of sight,just behind the first participant,and held her arms forward,creating a visual illusion.To the first participant, looking in the mirror,the hand helper’s hands and arms appeared to be her own.Both participants were wearing headphones.Over these headphones,the experimenter instructed the hand helper to make several gestures,such as spreading the fingers of the left hand.The experimental manipulation was that some participants (in the preview condition)could hear the instructions through their own headphones and thus knew in advance what gesture the hand helper was about to make,whereas other participants(in the no-preview condition)could not hear the instructions and did not know what gestures were going to be made.On the key dependent measures,preview condition participants, who could hear the instructions in advance,were more likely than those in the no-preview condition to perceive themselves as having control over the gestures.They reported significantly greater than zero agency for the gestures even though they were actually standing with their hands at their sides.In addition,in a follow-up study,preview participants displayed significant physiological re-sponses when the hand helpers snapped a rubber band on their wrists,as though the band had been snapped on the participant’s own wrist.By these and other ingenious procedures,Wegner et al. (2004)were able to show that people use preknowledge of a body movement as one inferential cue to separate their own actions from those of other people.When this cue is combined with a visual illusion,people can infer causal agency even for movements that are actually performed by someone else and not by themselves.The Present ExperimentsWegner et al.(2003,2004)developed innovative ways to sep-arate actual agency from perceived agency for arm and hand movements.The present experiments borrowed these techniques to assess whether attitude embodiment effects occur when inferential cues imply causal agency for arm and hand movements and not when inferential cues imply nonagency.In other words,inferential cues moderate attitude embodiment effects.The actual,biome-chanical body movements are neither necessary(Experiments1 and2)nor sufficient(Experiment3).Experiment1:Attitude Embodiment Effects for AnotherPerson’s MovementsAs a first test of a new procedure that had previously been used for other purposes,Experiment1had two primary goals.The first goal was to determine whether it would be possible to replicate Wegner et al.’s(2003)manipulation of vicarious agency for an-other person’s hand and arm movements,even with several po-tentially crucial changes.Those changes included the use of eval-uative rather than nonevaluative arm and hand movements,the movements being made while possibly distracting images were shown,the use of a memory cover story,and the addition of a third (observer)participant who saw everything the perceiver saw,but without the mirror image that was intended to create a visual illusion of perceived agency.The items used to measure agency included four questions taken verbatim from Wegner et al.’s pro-cedure,plus additional questions designed to address other possi-bly relevant aspects of the agency construct,such as responsibility and authorship(Wegner&Sparrow,2004).The prediction was that the new procedure would successfully create the same type of vicarious agency for another person’s physical movements as had been reported by Wegner et al.The second goal of the experiment was to determine whether it might be possible to produce attitude embodiment effects with a new procedure that differed from previous attitude embodiment studies in several important ways.Those differences included using evaluative gestures such as thumbs up and thumbs down rather than more explicit physical movements like pushing away versus pulling toward,the body movements being produced on command with little or no room for improvisation,and the target movements being interspersed with other movements made in the direction of other attitude objects.Type of gesture(gestures of approval vs.gestures of disapproval)was the manipulation.Re-ported attitudes served as the dependent measure.Role(participant vs.observer)was the predicted moderator variable.The central prediction called for a type of GestureϫRole interaction,in which perceivers would report more positive attitudes after seeing ges-tures of approval than disapproval made by someone else toward an attitude object,but observers who saw the same gestures made949EMBODIMENT,AGENCY,AND ATTITUDE CHANGEby someone else would not,because observers would not have the same visual illusion and inferential cues to agency as would perceivers.MethodOverviewFigure1shows the arrangement of the experimental room.A perceiver participant,wearing a black smock,stood looking at a mirror on the wall.The experimenter sat to one side,projecting slide images on the wall next to the mirror.The hand helper participant stood directly behind the perceiver,with hands thrust through arm holes in the perceiver’s smock.The hand helper made hand and arm gestures as directed by the experimenter.An ob-server participant stood to the other side of the perceiver,watching both the gestures and the images.ParticipantsA total of99undergraduate students(84women and15men) participated for course credit,in33three-person,same-sex ses-sions.Gender had no effect on the results to be reported. ProcedureThe cover story was that the research involved memory for information presented in multiple modalities.The three partici-pants in each session were told that they would be presented with simultaneous auditory,visual,and physical action stimuli and would later be tested to see how well they remembered these stimuli.They then drew cards labeled“perceiver,”“hand helper,”and“observer.”From this point on,the experimental procedure closely resembled that of Wegner et al.(2004),with additions necessary to test the present hypotheses.Role instructions.The experimenter asked the perceiver to don white gloves and a black smock.The smock had a hard cardboard backing,which extended up the perceiver’s back and three feet above the perceiver’s shoulders.The perceiver was then told to stand with hands at his or her side,and not to move his or her hands throughout the procedure.The perceiver faced a6-ft-high mirror mounted on the wall10feet away and could thus see his or her reflection in the mirror.The experimenter then instructed the hand helper to don white gloves,stand behind the perceiver,and to insert his or her hands through slits cut in the smock,so that,from the perceiver’s perspective in the mirror,the hand helper’s arms and hands stuck out from the perceiver’s body in the same place that his or her own arms and hands would normally appear.The hand helper’s head was behind the cardboard backing,so the hand helper could not see the wall on which the mirror was mounted.The procedure of Wegner et al.(2004)did not include an observer,because they were interested primarily in perceived agency.The present proce-dure included an observer as a control for explanations of attitude change that might be based on merely seeing evaluative gestures paired repeatedly with specific images.The observer was told to stand off to the side,where he or she could see the perceiver,the hand helper’s arms and hands protruding from the smock,the images,and the wall on which the mirror was mounted,but could not see the visual illusion of a mirror image with hands that looked like his or her own.Gestures and images.The experimenter then explained to all three participants that on each of several trials a visual image would be projected onto the wall just to the right of the mirror. Simultaneous with the presentation of each slide image,the ex-perimenter would direct the hand helper to make a specific gesture with his or her arms and hands.The experimenter would,for instance,show a slide of buildings and announce aloud“Spread the fingers of your left hand.”The hand helper would make the appropriate gesture and hold it for5s.Then the next slide would be shown and the experimenter would call for a different gesture. All three participants could hear the experimenter’s directions.The participant and observer could see both the images and the ges-tures.The hand helper made the gestures,but could see neither the images nor the gestures.The gestures that accompanied the specific slide images were intended to manipulate attitudes.In a predetermined random order (the same for all sessions),the experimenter projected15slide images.The images were three photographs of buildings,three of snakes,three of cars on highways,three of sunsets,and three of gay men(embracing,kissing,and getting married).The images of gay men were always3rd,10th,and13th.In the gestures of disapproval condition(nϭ16sessions),the experimenter directed the hand helper to make three negative hand gestures(make and shake a fist with right hand,make a chopping motion with left hand,and turn both thumbs down)when the three gay men images were shown.In the gestures of approval condition(nϭ17ses-sions),the experimenter directed the hand helper to make three positive hand gestures(make OK sign with right hand,wave hello with left hand,turn both thumbs up)when the three gay men images were shown.Gestures for the other12images were mixed, including some positive(e.g.,make peace sign with right hand), some negative(e.g.,push away with both hands palms out),and some neutral(e.g.,spread fingers of right hand),and were identicalyout of experimental room for perceivers(P),hand helpers(H),observers(O),experimenter(E),mirror,and projected images(Ex-periments1and2).Pro.ϭprojector.The mirror and images are at the frontof the room.950TAYLOR,LORD,AND BOND。