An Empirical Investigation of Psychological Metaphor

Abstract

The abundance of metaphors in psychological research, psychological theory, and our everyday language to describe psychological phenomena has been widely cited and rarely questioned. Furthermore, empirical research on this topic is surprisingly lacking. In this article, metaphors in psychology, as well as the effects of experience and problem domain on the use of such metaphors, are empirically investigated. Subjects with formal graduate training in experimental psychology were compared to those with little or no formal training. All subjects were asked to explain the phenomena described in summaries of results from four hypothetical experiments. Two of the experiments involved topics in cognitive psychology (i.e., memory) and two involved topics in social cognition (i.e., person perception). Analyses of the explanation protocols indicated that experienced subjects used more psychological metaphors than inexperienced subjects did, although both groups used everyday metaphors to the same extent and rarely used novel metaphors. The experienced subjects also used metaphors covering a wider range of psychological phenomena than did the inexperienced subjects. In addition, the cognitive summaries elicited more metaphors than did the social-cognition summaries. In general, these findings suggest that metaphorical explanations are more prevalent among individuals experienced in the domain and in situations in which a literal explanation is unavailable or insufficient.