Will it really happen? Disambiguating of the hypothetical and real “Next Wednesday's meeting” question in Mandarin speakers

To vaccinate or not: The relationship between conscientiousness and individual attitudes toward vaccination in real‐life contexts

“…However, it is unclear whether self‐report measurement is reflective of people's actual behavior (Holden, 2008 ; Li & Cao, 2022b ). Some evidence in moral and cognitive psychology suggests that there might be some striking dissociation between hypothetical judgement and real‐life behavior (Li, 2020 ). For instance, Bostyn, Sevenhant and Roets ( 2018 ) found that despite psychopathy meaningfully being associated with consequentialist reasoning in traditional trolley‐style dilemmas, there was no relationship between anti‐social personality and participants' behavior on the real‐life version of the dilemma.…”

Spice up the moment: The influence of spicy taste on people's metaphorical perspectives on time

“…Drawing upon two well-established streams of research-one regarding the spatial and emotional influence on temporal representation (e.g., Hauser et al, 2009) and one concerning the gustatory influence on emotional status (e.g., Ji et al, 2013), the current research explored the potential relationship between taste and time by delving into the specific influence of spicy taste on people's metaphorical perspective on time. Concretely, Study 1 and Study 2 probed whether spicy taste enjoyment and consumption would be more likely to evoke the ego-moving perspective when disambiguating the "Next Wednesday's meeting" question (Li, 2020) and it was revealed that people who enjoyed spicy taste more (vs. those who enjoyed it less) and participants who ingested spicy chips (vs. those who ingested salty chips) displayed a preference for the ego-moving perspective. Because spicy taste is associated with anger and approach motivation (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009;Chen et al, 2023;Harmon-Jones & Schutter, 2022) that predicted the egomoving perspective (Hauser et al, 2009), we hypothesized that the taste-time link discovered might be related to spicy-aroused anger and approach motivation.…”

“…What day is the meeting now that it has been moved? ) (Li, 2020). ” Previous study using the literally translated paradigm that retains the adverb “forward” found that Mandarin monolinguals unanimously preferred the time-moving perspective and answered “Wednesday” (Lai & Boroditsky, 2013), an indication of the lack of ambiguity of the experimental question as Chinese speakers may habitually identify “ 前 ( forward )” with temporal events being moved closer to where they are, evident in conventional phrases such as “ 提前 ( carry front: bring to an earlier time)” (Li & Cao, 2020).…”

“…Then in lieu of Brand A chips, Brand B chips (again so they were told) were presented in similar quantities. Participants were encouraged to relish the taste and texture of the chips for around 90 s before moving on to the second task, which was the same target time question used in Study 1 (Li, 2020). In the instruction, the subjective nature of the question was stressed and an intuitive answer demanded.…”

“…To test this hypothesis, three studies were conducted. In Study 1, we explored whether spicy liking was related to the ego-moving perspective by comparing people's enjoyment of spicy taste with the perspectives adopted when deciphering the ambiguous “Next Wednesday's meeting” statement (Li, 2020; McGlone & Harding, 1998). To ascertain the robustness of the observational findings, Study 2 examined the causal relationship between spicy taste and the ego-moving perspective by contrasting the immediate effect of spicy ingestion with that of salty intake on the perspectives taken regarding the resolution of the same temporal ambiguity.…”