Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning

By Paul H. Thibodeau, Lera Boroditsky. PLoS ONE, 2011

919 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32120a640e5271ee2a5023458aa267a180c2902b

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The Effects of Metaphorical Framing on Political Persuasion: A Systematic Literature Review (2017, background): “Consider studies conducted by two groups of scholars who examined the effect of two metaphorical frames, namely crime is beast and crime is a virus, on policy preferences (REA: Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013).”
Emotional Implications of Metaphor: Consequences of Metaphor Framing for Mindset about Cancer (2018, background): “For example, people who read about crime as either a virus or a beast offered solutions for dealing with the crime that were consistent with the metaphor they read (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013).”
Metaphorical framing in political discourse through words vs. concepts: a meta-analysis (2019, background): “Experimental studies without a non-metaphorical message condition (e.g., Robins & Mayer, 2000; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011) were excluded.”