Investigation of the Influence of Social Rank and Spatial Arrangement Using the Psychophysical Experiments

According to social rank, high rank people are located “Up” and low rank people are located “Low”. “Up” and “Low” are concept of spatial arrangement. However, they are used as metaphors to represent the social rank.This study describes psychophysical experiments to confirm whether there is a link between the “Up and Low” of the spatial arrangement and “High and Low” of the social rank. In the experiments, two randomly words from three words that have social ranks were shown to subjects vertically on the display. We taught the subjects a target word at the beginning of the experiments. We asked the subjects to check whether the target word appears. If the target word appeared, subjects pressed the button as soon as possible. We obtained reaction times of the button press by psychophysical experiments. We assumed a linear model that contains three elements: “Time which differs between the target word”, “Time which differs between the spatial arrangement of the words to be presented”, “Time which differs between the social rank”.The results show that the reaction time in case that social rank coincides with spatial arrangement is significantly shorter than the reaction time in case that social rank does not coincide with spatial arrangement