際際滷

際際滷Share a Scribd company logo
Extended Metaphors are Very Persuasive
Paul H. Thibodeau (paul.thibodeau@oberlin.edu)
Matias Berretta (matias.berretta@oberlin.edu)
Peace Iyiewuare (peace.iyiewuare@oberlin.edu)
Department of Psychology, Oberlin College
120 W. Lorain Street; Oberlin, OH 44074 USA
Abstract
Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues and in鍖u-
ence how people reason about these domains. For instance,
when crime is a beast, people suggest enforcement-oriented
approaches to crime-reduction (e.g., by augmenting the po-
lice force); when crime is a virus, on the other hand, people
suggest systemic reforms for the affected community. In the
current study, we 鍖nd that extending metaphoric language into
the descriptions of policy interventions bolsters the persuasive
in鍖uence of metaphoric frames for an array of important is-
sues. When crime is a beast, people are even more likely to
endorse attacking the problem with harsh enforcement tac-
tics; when crime is a virus people are even more likely to to
endorse treating the problem through social reform.
Keywords: Metaphor, framing, analogy, persuasion, political
psychology, reasoning
Introduction
An economic system entails the production, distribution,
and consumption of scarce resources. In natural language,
though, economic systems are often described metaphori-
cally, as gardens (e.g., The seeds of economic growth were
planted years ago. Today, they are just starting to bear fruit,
and soon we will reap the rewards), vehicles (e.g., The
economy is off track or broken down), bodies (e.g., The
economy used to be healthy but is now suffering), and ma-
chines (e.g., The economy is broken and needs to be 鍖xed).
Conventional metaphors make up as much as 10-20% of
natural discourse (Steen et al., 2010) and can be especially
persuasive (e.g., Sopory & Dillard, 2002). Metaphors high-
light particular relationships in the domains they describe
and, as a result, can encourage systematic patterns of infer-
ence (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008). For instance, if the econ-
omy is a vehicle and it is broken down, then getting it moving
again might require a 鍖nancial jumpstart. On the other hand,
if the economy is a stunted plant, giving a momentary jolt of
nutrients, sunlight, and water is unlikely to be an effective
long-term solution for the health of the plant. Instead, the
economy might be better served by consistent sunlight, wa-
ter, nutrients and a supportive environment (e.g., investments
in education and job training to provide a strong workforce).
Recent work has found that these implicit structural en-
tailments of metaphors affect how people reason about im-
portant issues (e.g., Hauser & Schwarz, 2014; Landau, Sul-
livan, & Greenberg, 2009; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011,
2013, 2015). For instance, a war metaphor for cancer makes
for an excellent slogan and may facilitate fund-raising efforts
at a societal level, but it also seems to downplay the role of
relatively mundane behavior change in cancer prevention at
an individual level (e.g., smoking less; Hauser & Schwarz,
2014); priming people to think of immigration as a type of
bodily contamination leads people to adopt anti-immigration
attitudes (Landauer & Dumais, 1997); and framing crime as a
virus (rather than a beast) leads people to favor social reforms
as a tool for crime-reduction over harsh enforcement and pun-
ishment (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013, 2015).
Here we ask whether extending metaphoric language into
the description of candidate responses can facilitate (or in-
hibit) the persuasive in鍖uence of a previously instantiated
metaphoric frame. Will people be even more likely to sup-
port a proposal to reduce crime by focusing on the educa-
tional system when such a program is described as a treat-
ment for a crime virus? Can metaphor framing effects be
negated (or even reversed) when an extended metaphor is
used to describe a proposal that would otherwise be incon-
gruent with the metaphor frame, as in The city should treat
a crime [virus] by increasing the police force?
Consistent extended metaphors may facilitate metaphor
framing effects by (a) re-instantiating the initial frame and,
in turn, further highlight the ways in which the congruent re-
sponse maps on to the entailments of the initial frame (Nayak
& Gibbs, 1990) or (b) by providing a lexical cue that links
the frame to a response (Graesser & Bower, 1990). For in-
stance, describing education reform as a treatment for a
crime virus may emphasize the ways in which such a policy
is similar to a treatment program for a disease (e.g., by fo-
cusing on the root cause of the problem). This would suggest
that metaphors play an active role in shaping representations
of complex problems and that this role can be facilitated by
actively situating a response in relation to the conceptual en-
tailments of the frame.
Alternatively, people may be drawn to treating a problem
that is framed as a virus because the virus frame serves as a
lexical prime for other virus-related language. Although such
an account may be less compelling on theoretical grounds, if
one could use an extended metaphor to persuade people to
choose particular policy interventions, even through lexical
priming, this would be an important and interesting result. It
would suggest, for instance, that describing crime as a virus
could promote a variety of policy interventions: both those
that are conceptually congruent with the entailments of the
metaphor and those that are not, simply by extending lan-
guage that is consistent with the metaphor frame into the de-
scription of the response (e.g., Treat the crime [virus] by
increasing street patrols!).
1535
Study 1: Conceptual Congruence
Methods
Participants Data from 99 valid participants were collected
through Mechanical Turk.
Materials and Procedure Stimuli consisted of 10 stories,
including scenarios about cheating, crime, education, ecol-
ogy, housing, income inequality, a medical mistake, partisan
politics, science, and sports. Each story was paired with two
metaphor frames and two candidate responses that were de-
signed to re鍖ect realistic judgments relating to policy inter-
ventions, risk management, or blame attribution (see, e.g.,
Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011).
In Study 1, after reading about a non-metaphorically
framed description of a target issue, participants were asked
to match metaphor frames to candidate responses. For in-
stance, after reading a description of a crime problem, par-
ticipants were told: Two of the citys of鍖cials are debating
how to solve this problem; they tend to talk about the prob-
lem in different ways. One argues that crime is a virus; the
other argues that crime is a beast. If you had to guess, which
of the crime-reducing approaches listed below do you think
is supported by each of the of鍖cials?:
1. Increase street patrols that look for criminals.
2. Reform educational practices and create after school pro-
grams.
For each issue we identi鍖ed candidate responses that
seemed to map onto the conceptual entailments of differ-
ent metaphor frames. For instance, a proposal to reform
a citys educational system seemed more consistent with a
crime virus  in which a city is a body that can be brought
back to health by treating the root cause of the problem 
whereas a proposal to increase a citys police force seemed
more consistent with a crime beast.
Study 1 served as a manipulation check of these intuitions.
The extent to which the sample displays similar patterns of
matching behavior is taken to re鍖ect the degree to which the
mappings between the metaphor frames and response options
are conceptually congruent. Highly consistent matching at a
group level would indicate clear conceptual relationships be-
tween the metaphor frames and response options. Less con-
sistent matching would indicate weaker conceptual relation-
ships between the metaphor frames and response options.
Each participant was asked to match responses to frames
for each of the 10 issues. The order of the issues, frames, and
candidate responses was randomized across participants.
Results
The results of this task revealed that there were clear map-
pings between the responses and issue frames, consistent
with the design of the materials  81.1% consistent overall
(95%CI: [.786, .834]). Analyzed separately (i.e., with 10
separate chi-square tests of independence), we found a sig-
ni鍖cant difference in how the responses were matched to the
frames for each issue, 2[1,N = 99]s > 13, ps < .001, con-
鍖rming that participants matched the response options to the
frames at a rate much higher than chance (50%).
This suggests that our intuitions as researchers about the
conceptual relationship between the metaphoric frames and
responses options were consistent with the population from
which the sample in the experiment will be drawn.
Study 2: Lexical Congruence
In the experiment described in the following section (Study
3), we implemented a 3 frame (metaphor A, metaphor B, no
metaphor) by 3 extended metaphor (consistent, inconsistent,
no extended metaphor) design, thereby creating nine versions
of each stimulus item. In the consistent condition, extended
metaphors were paired with their conceptually congruent re-
sponse (e.g., treat with education reform and attack
with increasing police). In the inconsistent condition, we
paired extended metaphors with their conceptually incongru-
ent response (e.g., treat with increasing police and at-
tack with education reform; see Table 1).
Table 1: Examples of consistent and inconsistent uses of ex-
tended metaphor in the description of response options to an
issue that described a crime problem. Italics added to high-
light the extended metaphoric language.
Consistent
a. Treat the problem by reforming educational practices
and creating after school programs.
b. Attack the problem by increasing street patrols that
look for criminals.
Inconsistent
a. Attack the problem by reforming educational practices
and creating after school programs.
b. Treat the problem by increasing street patrols that look
for criminals.
In this section we con鍖rm that the extended metaphors did,
in fact, extend the initial frames consistently and inconsis-
tently by using latent semantic analysis (LSA; Landauer &
Dumais, 1997). LSA is a tool that measures the similarity
of words, phrases, and texts as a function of their contextual
co-occurrence and has been shown to, among other things,
reliably predict response times in for lexically primed target
words in a lexical decision task (Hutchison, Balota, Cortese,
& Watson, 2008).
To conduct this analysis, we identi鍖ed the words that were
used to instantiate the initial metaphor frames for each issue
(e.g., virus plaguing and beast preying) and the words
used to insatiate the extended metaphors in the description of
the responses (e.g., treat and attack). Then we entered
these word pairings into the LSA database, which yielded
four similarity scores per issue (see Table 2). In every case
two were designed (expected) to be consistent (more simi-
lar) and two were designed (expected) to be inconsistent (less
1536
similar).
Table 2: Similarity scores between metaphor frames and ex-
tended metaphors as measured by LSA. For this issue (about
crime), virus-treat and beast-attack were designed
to be consistent whereas virus-attack and beast-treat
were designed to be inconsistent.
Treat Attack
Virus .28 .24
Beast .18 .26
For each issue, we averaged ratings of similarity between
the two consistent and the two inconsistent pairings. For
instance, in this case the average cosine (LSAs metric of
similarity) between the consistent pairings was .27 and the
average cosine between the inconsistent pairings was .21.
A paired t-test revealed that the consistent matches (M =
.261,SD = .139) were more similar than the inconsistent
matches (M = .167,SD = .134),t[9] = 5.018, p < .001, con-
鍖rming the design of the materials.
The average similarity between the consistent matches was
greater than the average similarity between the inconsistent
matches for all of the ten issues except one. The one issue
that yielded anomalous results described a medical clinic that
had made a mistake in 鍖lling prescription medication. One
metaphor framed the clinic as an ecosystem and was extended
with the word interactive; the other framed the clinic as an
assembly line and was extended with the word station. LSA
revealed that the relationship between the consistent pairings
was the same as the relationship between the inconsistent
pairings in this case.
The lack of a difference between the consistent and incon-
sistent extended metaphors for this issue raises a larger is-
sue about metaphor frames that has so far been overlooked:
sometimes a metaphor frame can be extended in multiple
ways. For instance, in the crime context, the word treat
was found to be more similar to the virus than beast frame;
the word attack was found to be more similar to beast than
virus frame. However, viruses can be attacked and beasts
can be treated. For this reason we divided the issues into
two groups: those that were more ambiguous (less distinct
or speci鍖c) with respect to the similarity between the initial
frames and extended metaphors (i.e., cases where the initial
frames were similar to both extended metaphors) and those
that were less ambiguous (more distinct or speci鍖c) with re-
spect to the similarity between the initial frames and extended
metaphors. We will consider this dichotomy in analyzing the
results of the experiment presented below. It may be the case
that the extended metaphors are especially likely to facilitate
(or inhibit) the effect of the initial frame when the similarity
between the frame and extended metaphoric language is less
ambiguous (more speci鍖c).
The difference in similarity between the initial frames and
metaphor extensions was signi鍖cantly higher for the 鍖ve
items that were identi鍖ed as less ambiguous (more distinct
and speci鍖c; M = .143,SD = .037) than for the 鍖ve items that
were identi鍖ed as more ambiguous (M = .046,SD = .027),
t[8] = 4.733, p = .001.
Together, the two norming studies validate the experimen-
tal design. For each issue, there were systematic concep-
tual and lexical relationships between the metaphor frames
and candidate responses. A group of nave participants in
Study 1 con鍖rmed that the two response options for each
issue mapped on to the conceptual entailments of different
metaphor frames. Study 2 used LSA to con鍖rm that the con-
sistent extended metaphors were more similar to the initial
frames than the inconsistent extended metaphors. In the fol-
lowing experiment, we will test whether people are sensitive
to these relationships when metaphor frames are embedded in
the description of a target issue and when extended metaphors
are used to describe the response options.
Study 3: Framing Experiment
Methods
Participants Data from 988 valid participants were col-
lected through Mechanical Turk.
Materials and Design Nine versions of each of 10 stim-
ulus items were created by crossing the three framing condi-
tions (metaphor A, metaphor B, none) with the three extended
metaphor conditions (consistent, inconsistent, no extended
metaphor). Participants were presented with one version of
each of the 10 issues. Their task was to answer a follow-up
question for each issue, for which there were two candidate
responses. The follow-up question was designed to reveal
whether people were sensitive to implicit conceptual entail-
ments of the metaphor frames. In some cases, the follow-
up question asked the participant to choose between policy
responses (e.g., as in the case of crime); in other cases the
follow-up question asked participants to attribute blame for
an outcome or to speculate on some other aspect of the target
domain (e.g., for the issue that described a mistake at a med-
ical clinic, participants were asked whether the nurse who
administered the medicine or the computer system that re-
layed messages between the nurse and pharmacist was more
responsible for the mistake).
In the consistent and inconsistent conditions, metaphoric
language was used to describe both of the response options,
thereby affording careful control over the experimental ma-
nipulation (see Table 1). Each participant was exposed to one
of the nine versions of each stimulus item. The order and
version of the stimuli was randomized across participants.
Congruence To analyze data from the conditions that in-
cluded a metaphoric frame, we coded responses as congru-
ent or incongruent with the associated frame. For instance,
in the context of the crime example, Increase street patrols
was coded as congruent with the beast frame and incongru-
ent with the virus frame, regardless of the presence/absence
of extended metaphoric language.
1537
This approach captures the joint effects of the pairs
of metaphor frames and is consistent with prior work on
metaphor framing (e.g., Robins & Mayer, 2000; Thibodeau
& Boroditsky, 2011, 2013, 2015). One advantage of such
a coding scheme is that it provides a clear metric for inter-
preting the degree to which metaphors in鍖uence judgments.
Metaphor frames that do not systematically in鍖uence the way
people think about an issue will yield a congruence score
close to .5; metaphor frames that in鍖uence people to choose
the response option that is consistent with the frames entail-
ments will yield a congruence score above .5; and metaphors
that in鍖uence people to choose the response option that is
inconsistent with the frames entailments will yield a congru-
ence score less than .5.
For instance, the results of the current experiment found
that people were more likely to think that a city should fo-
cus on education reform in response to a crime virus (59.0%;
no extended metaphor condition) than beast (51.9%; no ex-
tended metaphor condition). Since the shift is consistent
with the predicted effects of the metaphor, the congruence
score for this item is greater than .5 (.590 + (1  .519) =
1.071;1.071/2 = .536). In other words, 53.6% of responses
to this item were congruent with the metaphor frame (i.e.,
7.2% more participants chose the response option that was
congruent with the virus metaphor when crime was framed
as a virus compared to when crime was framed as a beast).
Note that if everyone, in both framing conditions, thought
that the city should increase the police force in response to
the crime problem, the congruence score for the item would
be .5: all of the responses in the beast condition would be
coded as congruent with the frame but none of the responses
in the virus condition would be coded as congruent with the
frame (1 + 0 = 1;1/2 = .5). In this way, transforming par-
ticipants judgments into a congruence score allows for clear
comparison across issues with different metaphor frames and
response options.
Coding responses as congruent or incongruent with the
metaphor frame requires that we collapse over the two
metaphor frames for a given issue. As a result, congruence
cannot be computed when the issue is presented without an
initial metaphor (i.e. for the no metaphor frame trials).
Results
We found that participants chose the congruent response op-
tion 54.9%, 51.3% and 50.1% of the time in the consistent,
no extended metaphor, and inconsistent extended metaphor
conditions, respectively. A mixed ANOVA on the mean con-
gruence ratings for the 10 issues with extended metaphor con-
dition treated as a factor and issue as a repeated measure re-
vealed a statistically signi鍖cant difference in the degree to
which participants chose the congruent response by extended
metaphor condition, F[2,18] = 4.011, p = .036.
Due to the relatively small number of items, no pair-wise
differences between extended metaphor conditions were sig-
ni鍖cant in post-hoc testing. However, the pattern of results
suggested that extending consistent language into the de-
scription of the response options made people more likely
to choose the congruent response whereas extending incon-
sistent language into the description of the response options
made people less likely to choose the congruent response. We
present additional analyses that help to distinguish between
the conditions below.
Did the speci鍖city of the extended metaphor matter? In
order to test whether the quality of the relationship between
the initial frame and the extended metaphor affected this pat-
tern of behavior, we added an additional factor into this anal-
ysis: whether LSA scored the relationships between the ini-
tial frames and extended metaphors as more ambiguous (i.e.,
both frames were similar to both extended metaphors) or less
ambiguous (i.e., the frames were much more similar to the
matching consistent extended metaphor and less similar to
the inconsistent extended metaphor).
The result was a statistically signi鍖cant interaction be-
tween this factor and the extended metaphor condition,
F[2,16] = 3.872, p = .043. As shown in Figure 1, differences
in congruence between the no extended metaphor, consis-
tent extended metaphor, and inconsistent extended metaphor
conditions were greater for items that were less ambiguous,
F[2,8] = 7.137, p = .017, than for items that were more am-
biguous, F[2,8] = .134, p = .877.
Baseline Consistent Inconsistent
0.4
0.5
0.6
Less ambiguous (more specific)
More ambiguous (less distinct)
Congruence
Extended Metaphor
None 
 Consistent
 Inconsistent
Figure 1: Proportion of congruent responses by extended
metaphor condition for items with a less ambiguous rela-
tionship between the initial frame and extended metaphor
(more speci鍖c to the consistent extended metaphor) and for
items with a more ambiguous relationship between the initial
frame and extended metaphor (indicating that the extended
metaphor may be somewhat appropriate in the context of both
frames).
This analysis suggests that the degree to which extended
metaphors facilitate the persuasive in鍖uence of a frame de-
pends, in part, on the speci鍖city of the extended metaphor.
For instance, although the word treat 鍖ts a virus frame bet-
ter than it 鍖ts a beast frame (and the word attack 鍖ts a beast
frame better than a virus frame), treat can also be used
in reference to a beast (similarly, the word attack can be
used in reference to a virus). For this issue, people chose
1538
the congruent option more in the consistent than inconsis-
tent extended metaphor conditions (55% compared to 51%);
however, this difference is relatively small when compared
to items in which the initial frames were speci鍖cally more
related to the consistent, and not the inconsistent, extended
metaphor. For instance, another issue described a research
scientist as either climbing a mountain (extended with gains
ground) or solving a puzzle (extended with looks for con-
nections). For this issue, 72% of responses were congru-
ent in the consistent condition compared to 50% in the in-
consistent condition). Not only was the relationship between
a given frame and the matched extended metaphor relevant
to participants judgments, but the relationship between the
frame and the alternative extended metaphor mattered as well.
How strongly did the metaphors affect judgments? So
far, we have shown that people were more likely to choose
the conceptually congruent response when it was described
using consistent extended metaphoric language and that the
speci鍖city of the relationships between the initial frames and
extended metaphors moderated this effect. However, we have
not tested whether people chose the conceptually congruent
response more often than one would expect by chance in any
of the three conditions.
Here, we use mixed-effect logistic regression to test this
important question and to make further comparisons between
the conditions. On this approach, analyses are conducted at
the level of the individual trial, rather than by averaging data
over items or participants (i.e., by 鍖tting a single model to
participants binary judgment for each issue; Bates, Maech-
ler, Bolker, & Walker, 2013; Jaeger, 2008). This allows us
to take advantage of the statistical power afforded by the rel-
atively large sample and increases the reliability of the re-
sults (by reducing the probability of a Type 1 or Type 2 er-
ror; Jaeger, 2008). In the model, we included random effects
for participant and issue to simultaneously account for error
variance associated with these factors (i.e., participant and
issue were treated as repeated measures; cf. Clark, 1973).
An additional advantage of this approach is that it allows us
to compare across all three levels of the framing manipula-
tion (metaphor frame A, metaphor frame B, and no frame) as
well as all three levels of the extended metaphor manipulation
(consistent, inconsistent, and no extended metaphor).
We 鍖rst con鍖rmed the results presented above by test-
ing for an interaction between the framing and extended
metaphor manipulations. We compared two models1: one
that included predictors for interactions between these fac-
tors and one that did not. We found that including pre-
dictors for the interactions signi鍖cantly improved the 鍖t
of the model, 2[4] = 11.378, p = .023. Post-hoc testing
(Bonferroni-corrected 留 = .017) revealed that participants
were more likely to choose the congruent response in the con-
1The deviance between the models (i.e., difference in likelihood
ratios) is reported as an index of model 鍖t: model deviance approxi-
mates a chi-square distribution with the number of added parameters
as its degrees of freedom (Menard, 2002).
sistent extended metaphor condition than in the inconsistent
metaphor condition, 2[1] = 10.410, p = .001, or the no ex-
tended metaphor condition, 2[1] = 7.608, p = .006. There
was no difference between the inconsistent and no extended
metaphor conditions, 2[1] = .646, p = .422.
We then tested whether people were signi鍖cantly more
likely than one would expect by chance to choose the
congruent response option for each of the three extended
metaphor conditions. We found that the metaphor frames af-
fected participants judgments when the candidate responses
were described with consistent extended metaphors, 2[2] =
25.812, p < .001, and when the candidate responses were
described with no extended metaphors, 2[2] = 13.203, p =
.001. However, the metaphor frames did not affect par-
ticipants judgments when the candidate responses were
described with inconsistent extended metaphors, 2[2] =
3.963, p = .138.
In sum, these analyses con鍖rmed the omnibus difference in
participants likelihood of choosing a congruent response by
extended metaphor condition, and additionally revealed that
people were signi鍖cantly more likely to choose the congruent
response when extended metaphors were used consistently to
describe the candidate responses, relative to the inconsistent
or no extended metaphor conditions. It also revealed that
people were more likely to choose the congruent response
than one would expect by chance in the consistent and no
extended metaphor conditions but not in the inconsistent ex-
tended metaphor condition.
In other words, these analyses revealed evidence of a sim-
ple metaphor framing effect when the candidate responses
were described without extended metaphors, which was am-
pli鍖ed (facilitated) when the candidate responses were de-
scribed with consistent extended metaphors. This effect was
not negated when the candidate responses were described
with inconsistent extended metaphors, as responses in this
condition were no different from what one might expect by
chance (i.e., this condition did not show a metaphor framing
effect).
General Discussion
The results of this study indicate that metaphor framing is es-
pecially persuasive when consistent metaphoric language is
extended to descriptions of candidate responses. Although
people are more likely to endorse approaches to crime-
reduction that emphasize social reform when crime is framed
as a virus, they are even more likely to do so when the re-
form is described as a treatment (i.e., in the context of a
re-instantiation of the initial metaphor frame).
We found differences of about 10 (54.9% congruent) and
3 (51.3% congruent) percentage points in the consistent and
no extended metaphor conditions that were attributable to the
metaphor frame. Of note, we also found that the speci鍖city
of the extended metaphor mattered. Extended metaphors that
were speci鍖cally related to the matching frame, and distinct
from the non-matching frame, were most likely to facilitate
1539
persuasion (58.9%; a shift of about 18 percentage points). For
instance, the facilitative effect of the extended metaphor was
less pronounced in the context of crime because viruses and
beasts can both be treated and attacked.
For comparison, in prior work, we have found shifts on the
order of 15 percentage points in a free response task and 8
percentage points in a forced choice task, when response op-
tions were described without extended metaphors (Thibodeau
& Boroditsky, 2011, 2013). One notable difference between
the present work and prior studies is the use of multiple tar-
get domains and pairs of metaphor frames. Thus, we are in
a position to make a more general claim about how metaphor
frames in鍖uence reasoning, as well as to explore some of the
boundary conditions of metaphor framing effects in future
work (Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014).
As noted in the introduction, there are at least two rea-
sons that extended metaphors may facilitate persuasion: ei-
ther because they re-instantiate the conceptual structure of
the initial frame or because they provide a more associative
(lexical) link to the initial frame. The present work sug-
gests that the conceptual entailments and lexical associations
of metaphors are mutually bene鍖cial sources of information
(see, e.g., Patterson, 2014), as people were most likely to
be in鍖uenced by the metaphor frame when the conceptually
related response option was described with a matching ex-
tended metaphor.
Although it is valuable to think about how these distinct
sources of information contribute, separately and in combi-
nation, to long-term and on-line representations, it may not
be possible to dissociate them completely. Further, at a pro-
cess level, both of these sources of information can be can be
modeled as a spreading activation in an associative network
(Flusberg, Thibodeau, Sternberg, & Glick, 2010; Rogers &
McClelland, 2008; John, 1992).
References
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2013).
lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using eigen and s4. R
package version, 1(4).
Clark, H. H. (1973). The language-as-鍖xed-effect fallacy:
A critique of language statistics in psychological research.
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12(4),
335359.
Flusberg, S. J., Thibodeau, P. H., Sternberg, D. A., & Glick,
J. J. (2010). A connectionist approach to embodied con-
ceptual metaphor. Frontiers in Psychology, 1(197), 1-11.
Graesser, A. C., & Bower, G. H. (1990). Inferences and text
comprehension. (Vol. XIX; G. H. B. Arthur C. Graesser,
Ed.). Academic Press.
Hauser, D. J., & Schwarz, N. (2014). The war on pre-
vention bellicose cancer metaphors hurt (some) prevention
intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
0146167214557006.
Hutchison, K. A., Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., & Watson,
J. M. (2008). Predicting semantic priming at the item level.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(7),
10361066.
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from
anovas (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed
models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 434
446.
John, M. F. S. (1992). The story gestalt: A model
of knowledge-intensive processes in text comprehension.
Cognitive Science, 16(2), 271306.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by.
University of Chicago press.
Landau, M. J., Sullivan, D., & Greenberg, J. (2009). Evidence
that self-relevant motives and metaphoric framing interact
to in鍖uence political and social attitudes. Psychological
Science, 20(11), 14211427.
Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to
platos problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of ac-
quisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psy-
chological review, 104(2), 211.
Menard, S. (2002). Applied logistic regression analysis
(Vol. 106). Sage.
Nayak, N. P., & Gibbs, R. W. (1990). Conceptual knowledge
in the interpretation of idioms. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 119(3), 315.
Patterson, K. J. (2014). The analysis of metaphor: To what
extent can the theory of lexical priming help our under-
standing of metaphor usage and comprehension? Journal
of psycholinguistic research, 122.
Robins, S., & Mayer, R. E. (2000). The metaphor framing
effect: Metaphorical reasoning about text-based dilemmas.
Discourse Processes, 30(1), 5786.
Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2008). Pr卒ecis of seman-
tic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(06), 689714.
Sopory, P., & Dillard, J. P. (2002). The persuasive effects of
metaphor: A meta-analysis. Human Communication Re-
search, 28(3), 382419.
Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A., Kren-
nmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic
metaphor identi鍖cation: From mip to mipvu (Vol. 14). John
Benjamins Publishing.
Steen, G. J., Reijnierse, W. G., & Burgers, C. (2014). When
do natural language metaphors in鍖uence reasoning? a
follow-up study to thibodeau and boroditsky (2013). PloS
one, 9(12), e113536.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we
think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS One,
6(2), e16782.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). Natural language
metaphors covertly in鍖uence reasoning. PloS one, 8(1),
e52961.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2015). Measuring effects
of metaphor in a dynamic opinion landscape. PloS one,
10(7), e0133939.
1540

More Related Content

Similar to paper0271 (20)

PDF
Systems 550 ppt_art
Preston Gales, M. Ed, PMP, CSPO
PPTX
Testing the Levels of Message Effects and the Hierarchy Model of Responses wi...
Qingjiang (Q. J.) Yao
DOCX
Select油one of the body systems from the University of Phoenix Mate.docx
bagotjesusa
DOCX
1. Elaborate on the coca-cocaine commodity油value chain and the ill.docx
SONU61709
DOCX
163息 Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021R. P. Dealey, M. R.
KiyokoSlagleis
DOCX
163息 Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021R. P. Dealey, M. R.
AnastaciaShadelb
PDF
A_Partial_Least_Squares_Latent_Variable_Modeling_A.pdf
LuqmanHakim478
PDF
A Content Analysis Of Arguing Behaviors A Case Study Of Romania As Compared ...
Daniel Wachtel
PDF
case study
Sunny Shah
PDF
Trait Theory
Renny OlaLa
PDF
Trait Theory
Renny OlaLa
PPT
Merton's theory
Muhammad Saud PhD
PDF
E XPLORING T HE S ELF -E NHANCED M ECHANISM OF I NTERACTIVE A DVERTISING...
ijma
DOCX
06279 Topic PSY 325 Statistics for the Behavioral & Social Scienc.docx
oswald1horne84988
PDF
Addressing Gender Inequality In Science The Multifaceted Challenge Of Assess...
Nathan Mathis
PDF
Essay Of Population Growth. Tennessee College of Applied Technology Hartsville
Beth Payne
PDF
Workforce Diversity Essay.pdf
Ellen Blackburn
PDF
Cross Cultural Analysis Minkov by Danika Tynes
Danika Tynes, Ph.D.
PDF
Critical Analysis Of Research Articles
College Paper Ghost Writer Hannibal
PDF
Essay On The Help.pdf
Linda Roy
Systems 550 ppt_art
Preston Gales, M. Ed, PMP, CSPO
Testing the Levels of Message Effects and the Hierarchy Model of Responses wi...
Qingjiang (Q. J.) Yao
Select油one of the body systems from the University of Phoenix Mate.docx
bagotjesusa
1. Elaborate on the coca-cocaine commodity油value chain and the ill.docx
SONU61709
163息 Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021R. P. Dealey, M. R.
KiyokoSlagleis
163息 Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021R. P. Dealey, M. R.
AnastaciaShadelb
A_Partial_Least_Squares_Latent_Variable_Modeling_A.pdf
LuqmanHakim478
A Content Analysis Of Arguing Behaviors A Case Study Of Romania As Compared ...
Daniel Wachtel
case study
Sunny Shah
Trait Theory
Renny OlaLa
Trait Theory
Renny OlaLa
Merton's theory
Muhammad Saud PhD
E XPLORING T HE S ELF -E NHANCED M ECHANISM OF I NTERACTIVE A DVERTISING...
ijma
06279 Topic PSY 325 Statistics for the Behavioral & Social Scienc.docx
oswald1horne84988
Addressing Gender Inequality In Science The Multifaceted Challenge Of Assess...
Nathan Mathis
Essay Of Population Growth. Tennessee College of Applied Technology Hartsville
Beth Payne
Workforce Diversity Essay.pdf
Ellen Blackburn
Cross Cultural Analysis Minkov by Danika Tynes
Danika Tynes, Ph.D.
Critical Analysis Of Research Articles
College Paper Ghost Writer Hannibal
Essay On The Help.pdf
Linda Roy

paper0271

  • 1. Extended Metaphors are Very Persuasive Paul H. Thibodeau (paul.thibodeau@oberlin.edu) Matias Berretta (matias.berretta@oberlin.edu) Peace Iyiewuare (peace.iyiewuare@oberlin.edu) Department of Psychology, Oberlin College 120 W. Lorain Street; Oberlin, OH 44074 USA Abstract Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues and in鍖u- ence how people reason about these domains. For instance, when crime is a beast, people suggest enforcement-oriented approaches to crime-reduction (e.g., by augmenting the po- lice force); when crime is a virus, on the other hand, people suggest systemic reforms for the affected community. In the current study, we 鍖nd that extending metaphoric language into the descriptions of policy interventions bolsters the persuasive in鍖uence of metaphoric frames for an array of important is- sues. When crime is a beast, people are even more likely to endorse attacking the problem with harsh enforcement tac- tics; when crime is a virus people are even more likely to to endorse treating the problem through social reform. Keywords: Metaphor, framing, analogy, persuasion, political psychology, reasoning Introduction An economic system entails the production, distribution, and consumption of scarce resources. In natural language, though, economic systems are often described metaphori- cally, as gardens (e.g., The seeds of economic growth were planted years ago. Today, they are just starting to bear fruit, and soon we will reap the rewards), vehicles (e.g., The economy is off track or broken down), bodies (e.g., The economy used to be healthy but is now suffering), and ma- chines (e.g., The economy is broken and needs to be 鍖xed). Conventional metaphors make up as much as 10-20% of natural discourse (Steen et al., 2010) and can be especially persuasive (e.g., Sopory & Dillard, 2002). Metaphors high- light particular relationships in the domains they describe and, as a result, can encourage systematic patterns of infer- ence (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008). For instance, if the econ- omy is a vehicle and it is broken down, then getting it moving again might require a 鍖nancial jumpstart. On the other hand, if the economy is a stunted plant, giving a momentary jolt of nutrients, sunlight, and water is unlikely to be an effective long-term solution for the health of the plant. Instead, the economy might be better served by consistent sunlight, wa- ter, nutrients and a supportive environment (e.g., investments in education and job training to provide a strong workforce). Recent work has found that these implicit structural en- tailments of metaphors affect how people reason about im- portant issues (e.g., Hauser & Schwarz, 2014; Landau, Sul- livan, & Greenberg, 2009; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013, 2015). For instance, a war metaphor for cancer makes for an excellent slogan and may facilitate fund-raising efforts at a societal level, but it also seems to downplay the role of relatively mundane behavior change in cancer prevention at an individual level (e.g., smoking less; Hauser & Schwarz, 2014); priming people to think of immigration as a type of bodily contamination leads people to adopt anti-immigration attitudes (Landauer & Dumais, 1997); and framing crime as a virus (rather than a beast) leads people to favor social reforms as a tool for crime-reduction over harsh enforcement and pun- ishment (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013, 2015). Here we ask whether extending metaphoric language into the description of candidate responses can facilitate (or in- hibit) the persuasive in鍖uence of a previously instantiated metaphoric frame. Will people be even more likely to sup- port a proposal to reduce crime by focusing on the educa- tional system when such a program is described as a treat- ment for a crime virus? Can metaphor framing effects be negated (or even reversed) when an extended metaphor is used to describe a proposal that would otherwise be incon- gruent with the metaphor frame, as in The city should treat a crime [virus] by increasing the police force? Consistent extended metaphors may facilitate metaphor framing effects by (a) re-instantiating the initial frame and, in turn, further highlight the ways in which the congruent re- sponse maps on to the entailments of the initial frame (Nayak & Gibbs, 1990) or (b) by providing a lexical cue that links the frame to a response (Graesser & Bower, 1990). For in- stance, describing education reform as a treatment for a crime virus may emphasize the ways in which such a policy is similar to a treatment program for a disease (e.g., by fo- cusing on the root cause of the problem). This would suggest that metaphors play an active role in shaping representations of complex problems and that this role can be facilitated by actively situating a response in relation to the conceptual en- tailments of the frame. Alternatively, people may be drawn to treating a problem that is framed as a virus because the virus frame serves as a lexical prime for other virus-related language. Although such an account may be less compelling on theoretical grounds, if one could use an extended metaphor to persuade people to choose particular policy interventions, even through lexical priming, this would be an important and interesting result. It would suggest, for instance, that describing crime as a virus could promote a variety of policy interventions: both those that are conceptually congruent with the entailments of the metaphor and those that are not, simply by extending lan- guage that is consistent with the metaphor frame into the de- scription of the response (e.g., Treat the crime [virus] by increasing street patrols!). 1535
  • 2. Study 1: Conceptual Congruence Methods Participants Data from 99 valid participants were collected through Mechanical Turk. Materials and Procedure Stimuli consisted of 10 stories, including scenarios about cheating, crime, education, ecol- ogy, housing, income inequality, a medical mistake, partisan politics, science, and sports. Each story was paired with two metaphor frames and two candidate responses that were de- signed to re鍖ect realistic judgments relating to policy inter- ventions, risk management, or blame attribution (see, e.g., Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011). In Study 1, after reading about a non-metaphorically framed description of a target issue, participants were asked to match metaphor frames to candidate responses. For in- stance, after reading a description of a crime problem, par- ticipants were told: Two of the citys of鍖cials are debating how to solve this problem; they tend to talk about the prob- lem in different ways. One argues that crime is a virus; the other argues that crime is a beast. If you had to guess, which of the crime-reducing approaches listed below do you think is supported by each of the of鍖cials?: 1. Increase street patrols that look for criminals. 2. Reform educational practices and create after school pro- grams. For each issue we identi鍖ed candidate responses that seemed to map onto the conceptual entailments of differ- ent metaphor frames. For instance, a proposal to reform a citys educational system seemed more consistent with a crime virus in which a city is a body that can be brought back to health by treating the root cause of the problem whereas a proposal to increase a citys police force seemed more consistent with a crime beast. Study 1 served as a manipulation check of these intuitions. The extent to which the sample displays similar patterns of matching behavior is taken to re鍖ect the degree to which the mappings between the metaphor frames and response options are conceptually congruent. Highly consistent matching at a group level would indicate clear conceptual relationships be- tween the metaphor frames and response options. Less con- sistent matching would indicate weaker conceptual relation- ships between the metaphor frames and response options. Each participant was asked to match responses to frames for each of the 10 issues. The order of the issues, frames, and candidate responses was randomized across participants. Results The results of this task revealed that there were clear map- pings between the responses and issue frames, consistent with the design of the materials 81.1% consistent overall (95%CI: [.786, .834]). Analyzed separately (i.e., with 10 separate chi-square tests of independence), we found a sig- ni鍖cant difference in how the responses were matched to the frames for each issue, 2[1,N = 99]s > 13, ps < .001, con- 鍖rming that participants matched the response options to the frames at a rate much higher than chance (50%). This suggests that our intuitions as researchers about the conceptual relationship between the metaphoric frames and responses options were consistent with the population from which the sample in the experiment will be drawn. Study 2: Lexical Congruence In the experiment described in the following section (Study 3), we implemented a 3 frame (metaphor A, metaphor B, no metaphor) by 3 extended metaphor (consistent, inconsistent, no extended metaphor) design, thereby creating nine versions of each stimulus item. In the consistent condition, extended metaphors were paired with their conceptually congruent re- sponse (e.g., treat with education reform and attack with increasing police). In the inconsistent condition, we paired extended metaphors with their conceptually incongru- ent response (e.g., treat with increasing police and at- tack with education reform; see Table 1). Table 1: Examples of consistent and inconsistent uses of ex- tended metaphor in the description of response options to an issue that described a crime problem. Italics added to high- light the extended metaphoric language. Consistent a. Treat the problem by reforming educational practices and creating after school programs. b. Attack the problem by increasing street patrols that look for criminals. Inconsistent a. Attack the problem by reforming educational practices and creating after school programs. b. Treat the problem by increasing street patrols that look for criminals. In this section we con鍖rm that the extended metaphors did, in fact, extend the initial frames consistently and inconsis- tently by using latent semantic analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais, 1997). LSA is a tool that measures the similarity of words, phrases, and texts as a function of their contextual co-occurrence and has been shown to, among other things, reliably predict response times in for lexically primed target words in a lexical decision task (Hutchison, Balota, Cortese, & Watson, 2008). To conduct this analysis, we identi鍖ed the words that were used to instantiate the initial metaphor frames for each issue (e.g., virus plaguing and beast preying) and the words used to insatiate the extended metaphors in the description of the responses (e.g., treat and attack). Then we entered these word pairings into the LSA database, which yielded four similarity scores per issue (see Table 2). In every case two were designed (expected) to be consistent (more simi- lar) and two were designed (expected) to be inconsistent (less 1536
  • 3. similar). Table 2: Similarity scores between metaphor frames and ex- tended metaphors as measured by LSA. For this issue (about crime), virus-treat and beast-attack were designed to be consistent whereas virus-attack and beast-treat were designed to be inconsistent. Treat Attack Virus .28 .24 Beast .18 .26 For each issue, we averaged ratings of similarity between the two consistent and the two inconsistent pairings. For instance, in this case the average cosine (LSAs metric of similarity) between the consistent pairings was .27 and the average cosine between the inconsistent pairings was .21. A paired t-test revealed that the consistent matches (M = .261,SD = .139) were more similar than the inconsistent matches (M = .167,SD = .134),t[9] = 5.018, p < .001, con- 鍖rming the design of the materials. The average similarity between the consistent matches was greater than the average similarity between the inconsistent matches for all of the ten issues except one. The one issue that yielded anomalous results described a medical clinic that had made a mistake in 鍖lling prescription medication. One metaphor framed the clinic as an ecosystem and was extended with the word interactive; the other framed the clinic as an assembly line and was extended with the word station. LSA revealed that the relationship between the consistent pairings was the same as the relationship between the inconsistent pairings in this case. The lack of a difference between the consistent and incon- sistent extended metaphors for this issue raises a larger is- sue about metaphor frames that has so far been overlooked: sometimes a metaphor frame can be extended in multiple ways. For instance, in the crime context, the word treat was found to be more similar to the virus than beast frame; the word attack was found to be more similar to beast than virus frame. However, viruses can be attacked and beasts can be treated. For this reason we divided the issues into two groups: those that were more ambiguous (less distinct or speci鍖c) with respect to the similarity between the initial frames and extended metaphors (i.e., cases where the initial frames were similar to both extended metaphors) and those that were less ambiguous (more distinct or speci鍖c) with re- spect to the similarity between the initial frames and extended metaphors. We will consider this dichotomy in analyzing the results of the experiment presented below. It may be the case that the extended metaphors are especially likely to facilitate (or inhibit) the effect of the initial frame when the similarity between the frame and extended metaphoric language is less ambiguous (more speci鍖c). The difference in similarity between the initial frames and metaphor extensions was signi鍖cantly higher for the 鍖ve items that were identi鍖ed as less ambiguous (more distinct and speci鍖c; M = .143,SD = .037) than for the 鍖ve items that were identi鍖ed as more ambiguous (M = .046,SD = .027), t[8] = 4.733, p = .001. Together, the two norming studies validate the experimen- tal design. For each issue, there were systematic concep- tual and lexical relationships between the metaphor frames and candidate responses. A group of nave participants in Study 1 con鍖rmed that the two response options for each issue mapped on to the conceptual entailments of different metaphor frames. Study 2 used LSA to con鍖rm that the con- sistent extended metaphors were more similar to the initial frames than the inconsistent extended metaphors. In the fol- lowing experiment, we will test whether people are sensitive to these relationships when metaphor frames are embedded in the description of a target issue and when extended metaphors are used to describe the response options. Study 3: Framing Experiment Methods Participants Data from 988 valid participants were col- lected through Mechanical Turk. Materials and Design Nine versions of each of 10 stim- ulus items were created by crossing the three framing condi- tions (metaphor A, metaphor B, none) with the three extended metaphor conditions (consistent, inconsistent, no extended metaphor). Participants were presented with one version of each of the 10 issues. Their task was to answer a follow-up question for each issue, for which there were two candidate responses. The follow-up question was designed to reveal whether people were sensitive to implicit conceptual entail- ments of the metaphor frames. In some cases, the follow- up question asked the participant to choose between policy responses (e.g., as in the case of crime); in other cases the follow-up question asked participants to attribute blame for an outcome or to speculate on some other aspect of the target domain (e.g., for the issue that described a mistake at a med- ical clinic, participants were asked whether the nurse who administered the medicine or the computer system that re- layed messages between the nurse and pharmacist was more responsible for the mistake). In the consistent and inconsistent conditions, metaphoric language was used to describe both of the response options, thereby affording careful control over the experimental ma- nipulation (see Table 1). Each participant was exposed to one of the nine versions of each stimulus item. The order and version of the stimuli was randomized across participants. Congruence To analyze data from the conditions that in- cluded a metaphoric frame, we coded responses as congru- ent or incongruent with the associated frame. For instance, in the context of the crime example, Increase street patrols was coded as congruent with the beast frame and incongru- ent with the virus frame, regardless of the presence/absence of extended metaphoric language. 1537
  • 4. This approach captures the joint effects of the pairs of metaphor frames and is consistent with prior work on metaphor framing (e.g., Robins & Mayer, 2000; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013, 2015). One advantage of such a coding scheme is that it provides a clear metric for inter- preting the degree to which metaphors in鍖uence judgments. Metaphor frames that do not systematically in鍖uence the way people think about an issue will yield a congruence score close to .5; metaphor frames that in鍖uence people to choose the response option that is consistent with the frames entail- ments will yield a congruence score above .5; and metaphors that in鍖uence people to choose the response option that is inconsistent with the frames entailments will yield a congru- ence score less than .5. For instance, the results of the current experiment found that people were more likely to think that a city should fo- cus on education reform in response to a crime virus (59.0%; no extended metaphor condition) than beast (51.9%; no ex- tended metaphor condition). Since the shift is consistent with the predicted effects of the metaphor, the congruence score for this item is greater than .5 (.590 + (1 .519) = 1.071;1.071/2 = .536). In other words, 53.6% of responses to this item were congruent with the metaphor frame (i.e., 7.2% more participants chose the response option that was congruent with the virus metaphor when crime was framed as a virus compared to when crime was framed as a beast). Note that if everyone, in both framing conditions, thought that the city should increase the police force in response to the crime problem, the congruence score for the item would be .5: all of the responses in the beast condition would be coded as congruent with the frame but none of the responses in the virus condition would be coded as congruent with the frame (1 + 0 = 1;1/2 = .5). In this way, transforming par- ticipants judgments into a congruence score allows for clear comparison across issues with different metaphor frames and response options. Coding responses as congruent or incongruent with the metaphor frame requires that we collapse over the two metaphor frames for a given issue. As a result, congruence cannot be computed when the issue is presented without an initial metaphor (i.e. for the no metaphor frame trials). Results We found that participants chose the congruent response op- tion 54.9%, 51.3% and 50.1% of the time in the consistent, no extended metaphor, and inconsistent extended metaphor conditions, respectively. A mixed ANOVA on the mean con- gruence ratings for the 10 issues with extended metaphor con- dition treated as a factor and issue as a repeated measure re- vealed a statistically signi鍖cant difference in the degree to which participants chose the congruent response by extended metaphor condition, F[2,18] = 4.011, p = .036. Due to the relatively small number of items, no pair-wise differences between extended metaphor conditions were sig- ni鍖cant in post-hoc testing. However, the pattern of results suggested that extending consistent language into the de- scription of the response options made people more likely to choose the congruent response whereas extending incon- sistent language into the description of the response options made people less likely to choose the congruent response. We present additional analyses that help to distinguish between the conditions below. Did the speci鍖city of the extended metaphor matter? In order to test whether the quality of the relationship between the initial frame and the extended metaphor affected this pat- tern of behavior, we added an additional factor into this anal- ysis: whether LSA scored the relationships between the ini- tial frames and extended metaphors as more ambiguous (i.e., both frames were similar to both extended metaphors) or less ambiguous (i.e., the frames were much more similar to the matching consistent extended metaphor and less similar to the inconsistent extended metaphor). The result was a statistically signi鍖cant interaction be- tween this factor and the extended metaphor condition, F[2,16] = 3.872, p = .043. As shown in Figure 1, differences in congruence between the no extended metaphor, consis- tent extended metaphor, and inconsistent extended metaphor conditions were greater for items that were less ambiguous, F[2,8] = 7.137, p = .017, than for items that were more am- biguous, F[2,8] = .134, p = .877. Baseline Consistent Inconsistent 0.4 0.5 0.6 Less ambiguous (more specific) More ambiguous (less distinct) Congruence Extended Metaphor None Consistent Inconsistent Figure 1: Proportion of congruent responses by extended metaphor condition for items with a less ambiguous rela- tionship between the initial frame and extended metaphor (more speci鍖c to the consistent extended metaphor) and for items with a more ambiguous relationship between the initial frame and extended metaphor (indicating that the extended metaphor may be somewhat appropriate in the context of both frames). This analysis suggests that the degree to which extended metaphors facilitate the persuasive in鍖uence of a frame de- pends, in part, on the speci鍖city of the extended metaphor. For instance, although the word treat 鍖ts a virus frame bet- ter than it 鍖ts a beast frame (and the word attack 鍖ts a beast frame better than a virus frame), treat can also be used in reference to a beast (similarly, the word attack can be used in reference to a virus). For this issue, people chose 1538
  • 5. the congruent option more in the consistent than inconsis- tent extended metaphor conditions (55% compared to 51%); however, this difference is relatively small when compared to items in which the initial frames were speci鍖cally more related to the consistent, and not the inconsistent, extended metaphor. For instance, another issue described a research scientist as either climbing a mountain (extended with gains ground) or solving a puzzle (extended with looks for con- nections). For this issue, 72% of responses were congru- ent in the consistent condition compared to 50% in the in- consistent condition). Not only was the relationship between a given frame and the matched extended metaphor relevant to participants judgments, but the relationship between the frame and the alternative extended metaphor mattered as well. How strongly did the metaphors affect judgments? So far, we have shown that people were more likely to choose the conceptually congruent response when it was described using consistent extended metaphoric language and that the speci鍖city of the relationships between the initial frames and extended metaphors moderated this effect. However, we have not tested whether people chose the conceptually congruent response more often than one would expect by chance in any of the three conditions. Here, we use mixed-effect logistic regression to test this important question and to make further comparisons between the conditions. On this approach, analyses are conducted at the level of the individual trial, rather than by averaging data over items or participants (i.e., by 鍖tting a single model to participants binary judgment for each issue; Bates, Maech- ler, Bolker, & Walker, 2013; Jaeger, 2008). This allows us to take advantage of the statistical power afforded by the rel- atively large sample and increases the reliability of the re- sults (by reducing the probability of a Type 1 or Type 2 er- ror; Jaeger, 2008). In the model, we included random effects for participant and issue to simultaneously account for error variance associated with these factors (i.e., participant and issue were treated as repeated measures; cf. Clark, 1973). An additional advantage of this approach is that it allows us to compare across all three levels of the framing manipula- tion (metaphor frame A, metaphor frame B, and no frame) as well as all three levels of the extended metaphor manipulation (consistent, inconsistent, and no extended metaphor). We 鍖rst con鍖rmed the results presented above by test- ing for an interaction between the framing and extended metaphor manipulations. We compared two models1: one that included predictors for interactions between these fac- tors and one that did not. We found that including pre- dictors for the interactions signi鍖cantly improved the 鍖t of the model, 2[4] = 11.378, p = .023. Post-hoc testing (Bonferroni-corrected 留 = .017) revealed that participants were more likely to choose the congruent response in the con- 1The deviance between the models (i.e., difference in likelihood ratios) is reported as an index of model 鍖t: model deviance approxi- mates a chi-square distribution with the number of added parameters as its degrees of freedom (Menard, 2002). sistent extended metaphor condition than in the inconsistent metaphor condition, 2[1] = 10.410, p = .001, or the no ex- tended metaphor condition, 2[1] = 7.608, p = .006. There was no difference between the inconsistent and no extended metaphor conditions, 2[1] = .646, p = .422. We then tested whether people were signi鍖cantly more likely than one would expect by chance to choose the congruent response option for each of the three extended metaphor conditions. We found that the metaphor frames af- fected participants judgments when the candidate responses were described with consistent extended metaphors, 2[2] = 25.812, p < .001, and when the candidate responses were described with no extended metaphors, 2[2] = 13.203, p = .001. However, the metaphor frames did not affect par- ticipants judgments when the candidate responses were described with inconsistent extended metaphors, 2[2] = 3.963, p = .138. In sum, these analyses con鍖rmed the omnibus difference in participants likelihood of choosing a congruent response by extended metaphor condition, and additionally revealed that people were signi鍖cantly more likely to choose the congruent response when extended metaphors were used consistently to describe the candidate responses, relative to the inconsistent or no extended metaphor conditions. It also revealed that people were more likely to choose the congruent response than one would expect by chance in the consistent and no extended metaphor conditions but not in the inconsistent ex- tended metaphor condition. In other words, these analyses revealed evidence of a sim- ple metaphor framing effect when the candidate responses were described without extended metaphors, which was am- pli鍖ed (facilitated) when the candidate responses were de- scribed with consistent extended metaphors. This effect was not negated when the candidate responses were described with inconsistent extended metaphors, as responses in this condition were no different from what one might expect by chance (i.e., this condition did not show a metaphor framing effect). General Discussion The results of this study indicate that metaphor framing is es- pecially persuasive when consistent metaphoric language is extended to descriptions of candidate responses. Although people are more likely to endorse approaches to crime- reduction that emphasize social reform when crime is framed as a virus, they are even more likely to do so when the re- form is described as a treatment (i.e., in the context of a re-instantiation of the initial metaphor frame). We found differences of about 10 (54.9% congruent) and 3 (51.3% congruent) percentage points in the consistent and no extended metaphor conditions that were attributable to the metaphor frame. Of note, we also found that the speci鍖city of the extended metaphor mattered. Extended metaphors that were speci鍖cally related to the matching frame, and distinct from the non-matching frame, were most likely to facilitate 1539
  • 6. persuasion (58.9%; a shift of about 18 percentage points). For instance, the facilitative effect of the extended metaphor was less pronounced in the context of crime because viruses and beasts can both be treated and attacked. For comparison, in prior work, we have found shifts on the order of 15 percentage points in a free response task and 8 percentage points in a forced choice task, when response op- tions were described without extended metaphors (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013). One notable difference between the present work and prior studies is the use of multiple tar- get domains and pairs of metaphor frames. Thus, we are in a position to make a more general claim about how metaphor frames in鍖uence reasoning, as well as to explore some of the boundary conditions of metaphor framing effects in future work (Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014). As noted in the introduction, there are at least two rea- sons that extended metaphors may facilitate persuasion: ei- ther because they re-instantiate the conceptual structure of the initial frame or because they provide a more associative (lexical) link to the initial frame. The present work sug- gests that the conceptual entailments and lexical associations of metaphors are mutually bene鍖cial sources of information (see, e.g., Patterson, 2014), as people were most likely to be in鍖uenced by the metaphor frame when the conceptually related response option was described with a matching ex- tended metaphor. Although it is valuable to think about how these distinct sources of information contribute, separately and in combi- nation, to long-term and on-line representations, it may not be possible to dissociate them completely. Further, at a pro- cess level, both of these sources of information can be can be modeled as a spreading activation in an associative network (Flusberg, Thibodeau, Sternberg, & Glick, 2010; Rogers & McClelland, 2008; John, 1992). References Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2013). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using eigen and s4. R package version, 1(4). Clark, H. H. (1973). The language-as-鍖xed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12(4), 335359. Flusberg, S. J., Thibodeau, P. H., Sternberg, D. A., & Glick, J. J. (2010). A connectionist approach to embodied con- ceptual metaphor. Frontiers in Psychology, 1(197), 1-11. Graesser, A. C., & Bower, G. H. (1990). Inferences and text comprehension. (Vol. XIX; G. H. B. Arthur C. Graesser, Ed.). Academic Press. Hauser, D. J., & Schwarz, N. (2014). The war on pre- vention bellicose cancer metaphors hurt (some) prevention intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 0146167214557006. Hutchison, K. A., Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., & Watson, J. M. (2008). Predicting semantic priming at the item level. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(7), 10361066. Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from anovas (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 434 446. John, M. F. S. (1992). The story gestalt: A model of knowledge-intensive processes in text comprehension. Cognitive Science, 16(2), 271306. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press. Landau, M. J., Sullivan, D., & Greenberg, J. (2009). Evidence that self-relevant motives and metaphoric framing interact to in鍖uence political and social attitudes. Psychological Science, 20(11), 14211427. Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to platos problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of ac- quisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psy- chological review, 104(2), 211. Menard, S. (2002). Applied logistic regression analysis (Vol. 106). Sage. Nayak, N. P., & Gibbs, R. W. (1990). Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119(3), 315. Patterson, K. J. (2014). The analysis of metaphor: To what extent can the theory of lexical priming help our under- standing of metaphor usage and comprehension? Journal of psycholinguistic research, 122. Robins, S., & Mayer, R. E. (2000). The metaphor framing effect: Metaphorical reasoning about text-based dilemmas. Discourse Processes, 30(1), 5786. Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2008). Pr卒ecis of seman- tic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(06), 689714. Sopory, P., & Dillard, J. P. (2002). The persuasive effects of metaphor: A meta-analysis. Human Communication Re- search, 28(3), 382419. Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A., Kren- nmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identi鍖cation: From mip to mipvu (Vol. 14). John Benjamins Publishing. Steen, G. J., Reijnierse, W. G., & Burgers, C. (2014). When do natural language metaphors in鍖uence reasoning? a follow-up study to thibodeau and boroditsky (2013). PloS one, 9(12), e113536. Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS One, 6(2), e16782. Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). Natural language metaphors covertly in鍖uence reasoning. PloS one, 8(1), e52961. Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2015). Measuring effects of metaphor in a dynamic opinion landscape. PloS one, 10(7), e0133939. 1540