Spatial Metaphor and Real Estate: North-South Location Biases Housing Preference

Metaphors are used to help people understand abstract concepts in terms of perceptual experiences (e.g., "feeling high" or "feeling down"). A consequence of this strategy is that metaphor can bias perception and decision making. For example, consistent with metaphors for affect and spatial perception (up = good, down = bad), people more readily identify positive things when high in location. North and south are abstract concepts, which are also tied by metaphor to spatial perception (north = up, south = down). Based on this, the authors hypothesized that, by virtue of a shared mapping with up and down, north and south may have affective associations (north = good, south = bad) that bias decisions related to housing in terms of location preference and expectations of where others live. The authors found convergent support for this hypothesis across four studies using correlational (Studies 1 and 2) and experimental (Studies 3 and 4) data.