Measuring Effects of Metaphor in a Dynamic Opinion Landscape.

Paul H Thibodeau,Lera Boroditsky,Lidia Adriana Braunstein

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0133939

Paul H Thibodeau, Lera Boroditsky + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133939

Copy DOI

Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jul 28, 2015
Citations: 64	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of California, San Diego, Oberlin College

Abstract

Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues, making up as much as 10–20% of natural discourse. Recent work has suggested that these conventional and systematic metaphors influence the way people reason about the issues they describe. For instance, previous work has found that people were more likely to want to fight back against a crime beast by increasing the police force but more likely to want to diagnose and treat a crime virus through social reform. Here, we report the results of three norming tasks and two experiments that reveal a shift in the overall landscape of opinion on the topic of crime. Importantly, we find that the metaphors continue to have an influence on people’s reasoning about crime. Our results and analyses highlight the importance of up-to-date opinion norms and carefully controlled materials in metaphor research.

Highlights

Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues, making up as much as 10–20% of natural discourse [1]
Our theory is that the frames will make people more likely to select policies that are congruent with the entailments of the metaphors
We report the best fitting model as well as indices of fit (AIC) for the best fitting model, the maximally parameterized model, and the minimally parameterized model

Summary

Introduction

Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues, making up as much as 10–20% of natural discourse [1]. Most complex social issues are talked about using more than one system of metaphors. In addition to disease metaphors we can talk about crime as a beast or wild animal, as in “Crime attacks and preys on cities.”. Using different metaphors leads people to reason differently about social issues and to follow different paths of inference. When people read a report that described crime as a beast, they were more likely to want to fight back by increasing the police force. When they read that crime was a virus they preferred diagnosing and treating the problem through social reform [5,6]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion