You’re so sweet! How the sexy notion of Embodied Cognition is changing neuroscience…
Wednesday, November 1, 2023. According to the Western Church calendar, Christians celebrate All Saints’ Day on November 1 every year.
Do you have a sweet tooth? Research from 2011 suggests that it may explain something about your personality. According to research from North Dakota, humans who prefer sweets literally have a sweeter personality.
It seems that helpful humans who tend to volunteer a lot for worthy causes, also seem to prefer sweet foods. In addition, these sweethearts rank nosebleed high for on the personality trait of agreeableness.
Professor Michael D. Robinson, study co-author, said:
“Our results suggest there is a real link between sweet tastes and pro-social behavior.
Such findings reveal that metaphors can lead to unique and provocative predictions about people’s behaviors and personality traits.”
How the study was conducted
For the research, humans tasted sweet or non-sweet foods and were asked about their views on food and personality.
Dr. Brian Meier, the study’s first author, said:
“Taste is something we experience every day.
Our research examined whether metaphors that link taste preferences with pro-social experiences (e.g., “she’s a sweetheart”) can be used to shed light on actual personality traits and behavior.”
The results revealed that people intuitively believe that those who like sweet food also have sweet personalities.
Dr. Meier explained:
“It is striking that helpful and friendly people are considered ‘sweet’ because taste would seem to have little in common with personality or behavior.
Yet, recent psychological theories of embodied metaphor led us to hypothesize that seemingly innocuous metaphors can be used to derive novel insights about personality and behavior.
Importantly, our taste studies controlled for positive mood so the effects we found are not due to the happy or rewarding feeling one may have after eating a sweet food.”
The results may not be the same in different cultures, Dr Meier said:
“Although we suggest our results are likely to be found in other cultures, that may not always be the case across all cultures.”
Five studies zeroed in on this notion…
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 pro-social personalities, prosocial intentions, and prosocial behaviors.
Studies 4 and 5 used experimental designs and showed that momentarily savoring a sweet food (vs. a non-sweet 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.
What does it mean for thoughts to be “embodied”?
Although embodiment can mean many things, they’re recruiting this term as it is used in a landmark paper by Lawrence Barsalou (1999), and in the more than 4,000 papers that have cited it to date.
According to Barsalou’s theory of Embodied Cognition, thinking involves constructing “simulations” of bodily experiences.
Embodied Cognition?
I’m deep into the woods here, and my nose is on fire.
I guess the problem I have with the study is that the punchline of the research is rather insipid. Sweets for my sweet? Gimme a break.
Here’s a Better Question…What is Embodied Cognition Anyway?
Embodied Cognition is the hypothesis that the brain, while important, is not the only, singular resource we have available to us to generate behavior.
Instead, our behavior emerges from the real-time interaction between our nervous system in our body with particular capabilities, and an environment that offers opportunities for behavior and information about those opportunities.
That seems stupefyingly vague to me and I’m sniffing for bullsh*t.
Embodied Cognition reframes the brain’s day job…
The reason this is a pretty wild idea is that it completely reframes the job description for a human brain; instead of having to represent knowledge about the world, and recruiting that knowledge to simply output commands, the human brain is now posited to be but part of a broader system that critically involves perception and behavior.
The actual solution an organism comes up with for a given task includes all these elements, not just solely relying on the brain. Geez? Are you fu*king serious?
For example, Miles, Lind & Macrae (2010) tried to show that thinking about the future made you sway forwards and thinking about the past made you sway backwards; they suggest this sway is caused by the underlying metaphor of 'past is behind us' and 'the future is ahead of us' but, boy did that study suffer under scrutiny (more here).
As I said earlier, Embodied Cognition posits that the brain, while important, is not the only resource we have available to us to generate behavior.
Instead, the sexy notion of Embodied Cognition claims that the form of our behavior emerges from the real-time interaction between a nervous system in a body with particular capabilities, and an environment that offers opportunities for behavior and information about those opportunities.
The reason this is quite a radical claim is that it changes the job description for the brain; instead of having to represent knowledge about the world and using that knowledge to simply output commands, the brain is now a part of a broader system that critically involves perception and action as well.
Sorry.. I’m not on board just yet…
If there’s anything here, it’ll probably be awhile before we sniff it out.
But as we’re learning more, it seems to me we’re looking at frightening vulnerabilities and suggestibilities. Is Embodied Cognition a potential “back door” into human behavior?
Is Embodied Cognition how the US military hacked brains with Pictures of Puppies?
I appreciate the groping for wisdom beyond standard brain function, but musings about Embodied Cognition might best find a home in more somatically based models of couples therapy such as PACT and Brent Atkinson’s Pragmatic Experience Model (PEX).
I guess what I’m mildly peeved about is the click-bait trivialization of a complicated new idea in neuroscience.
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Barsalou, Lawrence W. & Katja Wiemer-Hastings. 2005. Situating abstract concepts. In D. Pecher and R. Zwaan (eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thought, 129–163. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511499968.007Search in Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W., W. Kyle Simmons, Aron K. Barbey & Christine D. Wilson. 2003. Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(2). 84–91.10.1016/S1364-6613(02)00029-3Search in Google Scholar
Meier, B. P., Moeller, S. K., Riemer-Peltz, M., & Robinson, M. D. (2012). Sweet taste preferences and experiences predict prosocial inferences, personalities, and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(1), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025253
Miles, L. K., Nind, L. K., & Macrae, C. N. (2010). Moving Through Time. Psychological Science, 21(2), 222-223. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609359333
