Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning.

Paul H Thibodeau,Lera Boroditsky,Attila Szolnoki

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0052961

Abstract

Metaphors pervade discussions of social issues like climate change, the economy, and crime. We ask how natural language metaphors shape the way people reason about such social issues. In previous work, we showed that describing crime metaphorically as a beast or a virus, led people to generate different solutions to a city’s crime problem. In the current series of studies, instead of asking people to generate a solution on their own, we provided them with a selection of possible solutions and asked them to choose the best ones. We found that metaphors influenced people’s reasoning even when they had a set of options available to compare and select among. These findings suggest that metaphors can influence not just what solution comes to mind first, but also which solution people think is best, even when given the opportunity to explicitly compare alternatives. Further, we tested whether participants were aware of the metaphor. We found that very few participants thought the metaphor played an important part in their decision. Further, participants who had no explicit memory of the metaphor were just as much affected by the metaphor as participants who were able to remember the metaphorical frame. These findings suggest that metaphors can act covertly in reasoning. Finally, we examined the role of political affiliation on reasoning about crime. The results confirm our previous findings that Republicans are more likely to generate enforcement and punishment solutions for dealing with crime, and are less swayed by metaphor than are Democrats or Independents.

Highlights

Modern societies are faced with intractable social problems like crime, poverty, and climate change
If the two metaphors lend themselves to different ways of conceptualizing a crime problem, and, if explicitly comparing the two metaphors helps bring these differences to mind, we should expect people to associate enforcement-oriented programs with the beast metaphor and reform-oriented programs with the virus metaphor
To test the significance of this trend, we numerically coded the degree to which participants selected enforcement- or reform-oriented programs to match with the metaphorical frames

Summary

Introduction

Modern societies are faced with intractable social problems like crime, poverty, and climate change. How can average citizens get conceptual entree into social problems and make sense of complex policy issues?. Whether we’re discussing hunting down drug lords, propping up dictators, or trying to jump-start the economy, we are borrowing terms from everyday domains of knowledge (hunting, physical support, cars) to talk about complex social and political issues. By simplifying the problem space, and allowing reuse of knowledge from everyday experience, metaphors can allow more people to participate meaningfully in policy discussion. Political Affiliation Consistent with previous work [7], we found systematic differences in the response patterns of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. In Experiments 2–4, Republicans were more likely to choose an enforcement-oriented response (55%) than Independents (33%) or Democrats (32%), x2 [1,934] = 24.90, p,.001. Pooling data across the experiments (each of which uses the same crime report and similar dependent measures; and each of which yielded similar results: with 55–60% of responses congruent with the frame) affords the most stable and representative data for the purpose of this analysis

Methods

Results

Conclusion