Upright And Honorable: People Use Space To Understand Honor, Affecting Choice And Perception

Honor is abstract. We predict that people make sense of honor metaphorically as an up-right position in space and that endorsing honor values makes this metaphor more accessible. Supporting our prediction, people in China (Study 1) and the United States (Studies 1-4) associate honor with up and right and dishonor with down and left, controlling for the association of positive with up-right (Studies 3, 4). We document downstream consequences for choice and perception of this metaphoric representation. Regarding choice, Americans who endorse honor values and voted for then-candidate Trump prefer photographs in which President Trump is positioned in the up-right quadrant (Study 5). Images from conservative news websites position the President's face in the up-right quadrant more than nonconservative ones (Study 6). Regarding perception, Americans who rate President Trump as honorable are more likely to perceive him as facing up and to the right in news website images (Study 7).