ArticleBehavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)2026
Black-White Color Metaphors of Justice: Two Experiments on Justice as a Legal Value.
Article in Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Color metaphors may shape how people mentally represent abstract legal values such as justice and thereby influence legal socialization and law-related cognition. We tested whether black/white color terms are metaphorically linked to justice conceived specifically as a legal value, and whether these linkages vary with task demands. In two preregistered experiments that controlled for affective valence, word frequency, and semantic relatedness, Experiment 1 employed a Stroop-style lexical-judgment task with law-relevant terms and found faster responses to justice-related (legal) words than to injustice-related words and higher accuracy for white-colored stimuli, but no reliable color × meaning interaction-suggesting the absence of an automatic color-justice congruency effect during early, automatic processing. Experiment 2 used a translation-matching paradigm in which participants selected black or white translations for unfamiliar foreign words; here, participants systematically matched justice-related (legal) items with white and injustice-related items with black at rates above chance, revealing explicit color-justice associations. Together, the results point to a robust mental linkage of white with justice as a legal value, while black-injustice mappings emerge primarily under explicit selection demands. These findings suggest that black/white color metaphors organize law-related moral cognition but are flexibly activated depending on cognitive task and processing level.
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