The DOI matches its Crossref record; 16 of the 16 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Weight as an Embodiment of Importance
Abstract
Four studies show that the abstract concept of importance is grounded in bodily experiences of weight. Participants provided judgments of importance while they held either a heavy or a light clipboard. Holding a heavy clipboard increased judgments of monetary value (Study 1) and made participants consider fair decision-making procedures to be more important (Study 2). It also caused more elaborate thinking, as indicated by higher consistency between related judgments (Study 3) and by greater polarization of agreement ratings for strong versus weak arguments (Study 4). In line with an embodied perspective on cognition, these findings suggest that, much as weight makes people invest more physical effort in dealing with concrete objects, it also makes people invest more cognitive effort in dealing with abstract issues.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Bornstein, M. H., & Gibson, J. J. (1980) · The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · doi:10.2307/429816 · Cited by 22,935
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003) · University of Chicago Press eBooks · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226470993.001.0001 · Cited by 20,632
Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957) · Cited by 9,433
(1999) · Cited by 6,104
Barsalou, L. W. (2008) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639 · Cited by 5,936 · cited 4×
“These findings are consistent with an embodied perspective on cognition (Barsalou, 2008), which holds that representations of abstract concepts are grounded in sensorimotor processes.”
BackgroundMethodResultInfluentialExperiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth
Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1162548 · Cited by 1,429
Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing
Zhong, C.-B., & Liljenquist, K. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1130726 · Cited by 1,169
CLARK, H. H. (1973) · Cognitive Development and Acquisition of Language · doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-505850-6.50008-6 · Cited by 1,089
The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought
Boroditsky, L., & Ramscar, M. (2002) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00434 · Cited by 882
Embodied Perception and the Economy of Action
Proffitt, D. R. (2006) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00008.x · Cited by 696 · cited 1×
“In line with this notion, research has found that people who carry heavy backpacks judge distances to be greater and hills to be steeper than those who do not carry this weight (Proffitt, 2006).”
Result
Cited by
Many Labs 3: Evaluating participant pool quality across the academic semester via replication
Ebersole, C. R., Atherton, O. E., Belanger, A. L., Skulborstad, H. M., Allen, J. M., Banks, J. B., Baranski, E., Bernstein, M. J., Bonfiglio, D. B. V., Boucher, L., et al. (2016) · Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2015.10.012 · Cited by 468
Addressing the theory crisis in psychology
Oberauer, K., & Lewandowsky, S. (2019) · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review · doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01645-2 · Cited by 462
Mapping the brain's metaphor circuitry: metaphorical thought in everyday reason
Lakoff, G. (2014) · Frontiers in Human Neuroscience · doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00958 · Cited by 335
Comparing meta-analyses and preregistered multiple-laboratory replication projects
Kvarven, A., Strømland, E., & Johannesson, M. (2019) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0787-z · Cited by 271
van Aert, R. C. M., Wicherts, J. M., & van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2016) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/1745691616650874 · Cited by 219
Metadata
- Authors
- Jostmann, N. B., Lakens, D., & Schubert, T. W.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2009-09
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1169-1174
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W2104686673
- Cited by
- 401
- References
- 16
- FWCI
- 10.60
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Weight as an Embodiment of Importance. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02426.x
- The paper
- Jostmann, N. B., Lakens, D., & Schubert, T. W. (2009). Weight as an Embodiment of Importance. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02426.x
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
