Metaphors are heating up

Metaphors matter more than you think they do. They subtly shape how we think about important, complex, big issues like healthcare, war, love and crime. Two articles that came my way not so long ago keep bringing to mind just how important they are, even if it's easy to forget out about it in the day-to-day grind.

The first is an article that reports on an experiment by my favourite metaphor researcher, Lera Boroditsky, and her colleague Paul Thobodeau. You can read the full article - Is crime a virus or a beast? on Discover Magazine but I'll try to give the gist of it briefly.

Crime is neither a virus or a beast, but the overall concept of crime as a whole is suitably abstract that we naturally use metaphors to get to grips with it. The experimenters found that by playing subtly with the initial framing of an article about crime they could affect how students thought about it, and, more significantly, what students thought was the best approach to deal with it. The researchers used instances of two different metaphors: Crime Is A Beast; and Crime Is A Virus.

For Crime Is A Beast, the framing referenced crime as a “wild beast preying on the city” “lurking in neighbourhoods”

For Crime Is A Virus, the framing referenced crime as a “virus infecting the city” “plaguing” neighbourhoods.

The headline for me is that students who were given the Beast framing for crime were more likely to recommend enforcement and punishment as solutions, while others given the Virus framing were comparatively more likely to recommend social reforms. The effect is somewhat subtle but significant. When asked why the recommended what they did most students tended to point to the stats - the metaphors subconsciously affect our thinking.

I am particularly reminded of the significance of metaphors whenever I hear newscasters talking about the war on terror - with attendant war practices - or the war on cancer.

The second article continues with the war on terror theme reporting on a new initiative by the US government. The initiative is a call for proposals for a metaphor program by the Office of Incisive Analysis. Essentially it's a call for researchers to develop methods for the automatic identification and analysis of metaphor by software.

A metaphor can be harder to defeat than an army. You can beat people down, but you can't easily change the way they think. I've no doubt, for example, that the metaphors people use to talk about the US and its policies have some major variations in pro vs anti US (or UK) nations. I'm not sure that software is necessarily required above smart people doing careful analysis but if they make some headway I'd be interested in the results. It might make an interesting app...

Perhaps the major point though is that metaphor seems significant enough to launch a research program worthy of National Intelligence.

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Thibodeau & Boroditsky. 2011. Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782

The smart people in the FrameNet and NTL groups at ICSI Berkeley have been working on software analysis for some time