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

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.