Up-right Placement for Honored Individuals: A Replication and a Wrinkle

People mentally represent abstract concepts in terms of concrete physical metaphors. For example, research by Lin and Oyserman (2021) supported the hypothesis that people—especially those who strongly embrace honor values—metaphorically represent honor as an up–right position in space. In one of their studies, they found that photographs of Donald Trump posted online on politically conservative news websites were more likely to include him in the upper-right sectors of the picture (and less likely to include him in the lower-left sectors) than were photographs on politically liberal news websites. We conceptually replicated that study with online photos of Joe Biden (a more liberal politician), predicting that in this case we would find an up-right bias for liberal news websites. Instead, conservative web sites were also more likely to present Biden in the “upright” position (and less likely to present him in the lower-left) than were liberal ones. Political conservatism is positively correlated with endorsement of honor values. Thus, although these findings are seemingly inconsistent with the hypothesis that the abstract concept of honor is metaphorically represented as an up–right position in space, the effect honor values have on the association between leaders and an upright position in space may supersede any effects that the positive or negative evaluations of any specific leader might have.