Institutional position words influence the power grasp of East Asians.

Abstract

Power perceptions reflect citizens' attitudes toward social hierarchies and power inequality, whereas power metaphors reflect the cognitive process of a personal sense of power. This study examines the influence of power representations on grasp aperture in East Asian participants. In experiment 1 (n = 34), we investigated whether powerful institutional position words trigger larger grasp apertures compared to less powerful words, indicating a correlation between power and spatial dimensions. Our results demonstrate that powerful words indeed led to larger grasp apertures, suggesting a direct association between power and size representation. In experiment 2 (n = 20), the results indicate that this effect persisted even when institutional positions were not described by size-related language. These findings suggest the existence of power representations within a generalized magnitude system, influenced by relative rather than absolute size. This research sheds light on how abstract concepts, such as power, are integrated into cognitive processes related to spatial perception.