SENSICAL TRANSLATIONS: THREE CASE STUDIES IN APPLIED COGNITIVE COMMUNICATIONS

Abstract

The FrameWorks Institute applies cultural models and metaphor theory from cognitive anthropology to develop communications devices that reframe public understandings and discourses on social problems. This article traces three case studies, in the areas of child mental health, budgets and taxes, and environmental health, where substantial gaps between scientific and public knowledge were identified, and describes the research process to develop “explanatory metaphors” to close those gaps and cultivate more accurate and expansive patterns of public thinking. Three distinct cognitively attuned communications tasks are described: (1) foregrounding an extant but recessive cognitive model prominent among the public; (2) filling a domain-specific “cognitive lacuna” in public thinking by introducing a modified version of an existing model from a kindred cognitive domain; and (3) building off of or working around an existing dominant cognitive model that is consistent with expert knowledge but incomplete. The article concludes with observations on how the practice of applied communications has challenged and strengthened our theory of culture and cognition. ___________ Western anthropologists have long been keen to explore the boundaries between everyday and specialized knowledge: between cultural knowledge that is broadly distributed among members of a population, and that knowledge that is more exclusively the domain of specialists who, by whatever means, have come to see and think differently about some aspect of the world. When anthropology’s focus was more squarely trained on nonWestern cultures, this line of exploration often delved into the study of shamans and diviners, and on the means, purposes, and functions of esoteric knowledge and ritual 1 Annals of Anthropological Practice. Volume 36, Issue 1. (2012) © American Anthropological Associa2on practice in socioreligious contexts (Boas 1902; Benedict 1922; Levi-Strauss 1963). As the discipline’s lens has turned increasingly on Western society and knowledge, the same impulse has led to explorations on the margins between everyday “common sense” notions of the world and those derived from the specialized pursuit of scientific knowledge (McCloskey 1983; Kempton 1987). At the FrameWorks Institute, a non-profit, interdisciplinary, social science research group, we work in this zone between common sense and scientific knowledge. Since 1999, the FrameWorks Institute has been investigating how Americans think about social issues —from early child development to climate change to criminal justice reform—in order to help scientists, policy experts, and advocates more effectively engage the public in thinking about public policy solutions to these issues. FrameWorks has developed an approach to communications research and practice called Strategic Frame AnalysisTM, which integrates theory and methods from the cognitive and social sciences to describe and explain how communications in general, and media in particular, influence public support for social policies. FrameWorks defines framing as “the way a story is told—its selective use of particular symbols, metaphors, and messengers, for example—and to the way these cues, in turn, trigger the shared and durable cultural models that people use to make sense of their world” (Bales and Gilliam 2004, 15). FrameWorks undertakes this work with support from foundations, groups of scientists and policy experts, and a range of other non-profit organizations. Our goal is to deliver a communications strategy that is grounded in research and has the potential to broaden the public debate. On any given issue, our work is two-fold: descriptive in characterizing both commonsense and scientific understandings of an issue, and