Interesting article - would seem to support much of George Lakoff's work in metaphor and cognition, especially his work in politics. In these experiments, they are looking specifically at the response to issues involving crime - the whole article is open access and posted at the link below (also can be downloaded as a PDF).Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning
Paul H. Thibodeau, Lera Boroditsky: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America
Abstract
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.
Here are the first few paragraphs of the introduction.
Introduction
Both crime, and the criminal justice system designed to deal with crime, impose tremendous costs on society. Over 11 million serious crimes are reported in the United States each year [1], and the US has the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country [2]. Despite being home to only 5% of the world's population, the United States holds 25% of the world's prisoners, with nearly 1% of the US population living behind bars [3]. Addressing the crime problem is an issue of central importance in social policy. How do people conceptualize crime, and how do they reason about solving the crime problem?
Public discourse about crime is saturated with metaphor. Increases in the prevalence of crime are described as crime waves, surges or sprees. A spreading crime problem is a crime epidemic, plaguing a city or infecting a community. Crimes themselves are attacks in which criminals prey on unsuspecting victims. And criminal investigations are hunts where criminals are tracked and caught. Such metaphorical language pervades not only discourse about crime, but nearly all talk about the abstract and complex [4]–[5]. Are such metaphors just fancy ways of talking, or do they have real consequences for how people reason about complex social problems like crime?
Previous work has demonstrated that using different metaphors can lead people to reason differently about notions like time, emotion, or electricity [6]–[11]. For example, people's reasoning about electricity flow differed systematically depending on the metaphoric frame used to describe electricity (flowing water vs. teeming crowds) [6]. Such findings on metaphorical framing are grounded in a larger body of work that has established the importance of linguistic framing in reasoning [12], and the importance of narrative structure in instantiating meaning [13]. However, questions about the pervasiveness of the role of metaphor in thinking remain. Critics argue that very little work has empirically demonstrated that metaphors in language influence how people think about and solve real-world problems [14].
In this paper we investigate the role of metaphor in reasoning about a domain of societal importance: social policy on crime. Beyond establishing whether metaphors play a role in how people reason about crime, our studies are designed to further illuminate the mechanisms through which metaphors can shape understanding and reasoning. If metaphors in language invite conceptual analogies, then different metaphors should bring to mind different knowledge structures and suggest different analogical inferences. In this paper we ask if metaphors indeed play such a role in reasoning about social policy. That is, do we reason about complex social issues in the same way that we talk about them: through a patchwork of metaphors?
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