# Black–White Color Metaphors of Justice: Two Experiments on Justice as a Legal Value

## TL;DR

The study explores how black and white color metaphors influence people's understanding of justice as a legal value through two experiments.

## Contribution

The research reveals explicit color–justice associations in legal cognition, showing that white is linked to justice and black to injustice under specific task demands.

## Key findings

- Participants responded faster and more accurately to white-colored justice-related words in a lexical-judgment task.
- In a translation-matching task, justice-related items were matched with white and injustice-related items with black above chance.
- Color–justice associations depend on cognitive task and processing level, with white linked to justice and black to injustice under explicit selection.

## 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.