It seems that it may, even for atheists and agnostics.
"Three studies investigate the extent to which this metaphor not only shapes how people talk about politics, but how people think about politics. Participants who are oriented to their right report more conservative political attitudes, while those who are oriented toward their left report more liberal attitudes. This supports the notion that spatial metaphor is a key ingredient underlying abstract thinking even for important belief systems."
Talks about differences between liberals and conservatives, in J. Haidt's new book, "The Righteous Mind."
"you’re more likely to think warmly of someone else if you’re holding something warm in your hand like a mug of coffee or tea. The experimenters, Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale, gave cups of either hot or iced coffee to people and asked them to rate someone’s personality based on a packet of information. The ones who held the hot cup rated that individual significantly higher for “warmth” than did the subjects holding the iced coffee. "
More on the research on experimenter effect in a priming study. The controversy begins.
Finds that some Bargh, et al., experiments on behavioral priming difficult to replicate when measurement is automated, but the effect is returned when the expectations of the EXPERIMENTERS are manipulated. How many other behavioral priming experiments are really measures of experimenter bias?