A prominent class of metaphors depicts that which is sacred (God, a spiritual path) in terms of lightness rather than darkness. Metaphors of this type should have systematic implications for religious cognition according to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and a new extension of this theory termed balanced CMT. Five studies (total N = 761) derived predictions from these models and then tested them. Consistent with balanced CMT, Studies 1-3 found that people who preferred light to dark believed in God to a greater extent and were more religious. Furthermore, priming thoughts related to God shifted perceptual responses in a light-ward direction (Study 4), and models wearing lighter, relative to darker, shirts were inferred to be more religious (Study 5). The findings provide novel evidence for the importance of light-dark metaphors in religious representations while highlighting a new class of processes that covary with, and therefore predict, religious belief.
NSTL
Educational Publishing Foundation-American Psychological Assoc
