A Theory of Social Embodiment

A Theory of Social Embodiment
Although the phenomena just reviewed all involve embodiment, no unified
account of them exists. Furthermore, embodiment is often viewed as
peripheral to these phenomena, namely as an appendage that accompanies
more central representations of social entities and events. This next section
presents a theory in which embodiment resides at the heart of social
representations, contributing directly to their meaning. The subsequent
section shows how this account explains social embodiment phenomena.
According to most theories, knowledge consists of amodal symbols that
redescribe modality-specific states. On interacting with a person in a social
event, an amodal redescription of the perceptions, actions, and introspec-
tions in the event becomes established in memory to support social
processing. Nearly all accounts of social cognition represent knowledge this
way, using feature lists, propositions, productions, schemata, statistical
vectors, and so forth to redescribe perceptual, motor, and introspective
states. Many examples of such theories can be found in the edited volumes
of Wyer and Srull (1984a,b,c). According to these views, amodal
redescriptions of social experience constitute social knowledge.
A few notable exceptions have stressed the importance of embodied
representations in social cognition. Early accounts of attitudes proposed
that motor movements are central components of attitudes (for a review, see
Fleming, 1967). Darwin (1872/1904) used attitude to mean the collection of
motor behaviors, especially posture, that conveys an organism’s affective
response toward an object. Subsequent accounts similarly stressed the
importance of motor behavior in attitudes (e.g., Sherrington, 1906;
Washburn, 1926). More recently, Zajonc and Markus (1984) have argued
that motor behavior and affect represent themselves in higher cognition
rather than amodal symbols standing in for them. Similarly, Damasio (1994,
1999) argued that somatic markers are central to higher cognition and that
without them, rationality is compromised. All of these views are closely
related to the theory we propose