Metaphors pervade discussions of social issues like climate change, the economy, and crime. We ask how natural language metaphors shape the way people reason about such social issues. In previous work, we showed that describing crime metaphorically as a beast or a virus, led people to generate different solutions to a city’s crime problem. In the current series of studies, instead of asking people to generate a solution on their own, we provided them with a selection of possible solutions and asked them to choose the best ones. We found that metaphors influenced people’s reasoning even when they had a set of options available to compare and select among. These findings suggest that metaphors can influence not just what solution comes to mind first, but also which solution people think is best, even when given the opportunity to explicitly compare alternatives. Further, we tested whether participants were aware of the metaphor. We found that very few participants thought the metaphor played an important part in their decision. Further, participants who had no explicit memory of the metaphor were just as much affected by the metaphor as participants who were able to remember the metaphorical frame. These findings suggest that metaphors can act covertly in reasoning. Finally, we examined the role of political affiliation on reasoning about crime. The results confirm our previous findings that Republicans are more likely to generate enforcement and punishment solutions for dealing with crime, and are less swayed by metaphor than are Democrats or Independents.

Funding: This work was supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship to the first author and an NSF grant and a McDonnell Scholar award to the second author. This work was also supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via the Department of Defense US Army Research Laboratory – contract number W911NF-12-C-0022. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Introduction

Modern societies are faced with intractable social problems like crime, poverty, and climate change. How do we reason about such difficult multifaceted problems and create good social policies? The complexity and amount of information relevant for decision-making in many policy domains far exceeds what an average citizen (or even a seasoned policy wonk) can be expected to master and maintain in mind. To make matters worse, the voting public is, on average, strikingly uninformed about the workings of government and the details of social policy issues [1]–[2]. Nonetheless, citizens form policy preferences and express these preferences in their votes and campaign donations. How can average citizens get conceptual entree into social problems and make sense of complex policy issues?

One possibility presents itself in patterns in language. To discuss social and political issues, we rely heavily on metaphor [3]–[4]. Whether we’re discussing hunting down drug lords, propping up dictators, or trying to jump-start the economy, we are borrowing terms from everyday domains of knowledge (hunting, physical support, cars) to talk about complex social and political issues. Our propensity for metaphorical discussion of policy comes with both benefits and costs. Novel metaphors can lead us to think about old problems in new ways and to discover new solutions. Further, by simplifying the problem space, and allowing reuse of knowledge from everyday experience, metaphors can allow more people to participate meaningfully in policy discussion.

However, each metaphorical frame offers only a partial view of the problem space. Frames streamline information, necessarily selecting and organizing elements to simplify complex issues [5]. A given metaphor is able to accommodate only some aspects of the problem space and must exclude others. In some cases, such targeted framing may lead to an illusion of simplicity and bad policy decisions, even among experts. For example, writing about an economic stimulus bill proposed in the US Congress, economist Paul Krugman argued that the bill’s authors were misled by bad metaphors:

The deal, we’re told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragile recovery time to strengthen. I say, block those metaphors. America’s economy isn’t a stalled car, nor is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets a bit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies. And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designed, sustained support [6].

Given the ubiquitous nature of metaphor in social policy discussions, it is important to understand whether and how metaphors shape people’s reasoning about policy issues. In this paper we investigate the role of metaphor in reasoning about social policy in the domain of crime. Our studies are designed to further illuminate the mechanisms through which metaphors can shape understanding and reasoning. In particular we ask whether metaphorical framing can shape people’s decisions as they evaluate alternative solutions, and whether people need to be explicitly aware of metaphors to be influenced by them.

In previous work [7], we demonstrated that using different metaphors to talk about crime leads people to propose different solutions to addressing the crime problem. We focused on two contrasting metaphors for crime (crime as a virus and crime as a beast) and showed that these metaphors subtly encourage people to reason about crime in a way that is consistent with the entailments of the metaphors. In one study, we gave people a report about increasing crime rates in the city of Addison and asked them to propose a solution. For half of the participants, crime was metaphorically described as a beast preying on Addison, and for the other half as a virus infecting Addison. The rest of the report contained crime statistics that were identical for the two metaphor conditions. The results revealed that metaphors systematically influenced how people proposed solving Addison’s crime problem. When crime was framed metaphorically as a virus, participants proposed investigating the root causes of the problem and treating the community by enacting social reform by, for instance, eradicating poverty and improving education. When crime was framed metaphorically as a beast, participants took a much more direct approach in their proposals: catching and jailing criminals and enacting harsher enforcement laws.

In further studies, we modified the report to use only a single word to instantiate the metaphoric frame (“Crime is a virus/beast ravaging the city of Addison”). Even with this minimal one-word metaphorical intervention, we found that participants offered different problem solving suggestions, consistent with the metaphors. Further studies showed that these metaphorical framing effects result from people instantiating metaphor-consistent knowledge structures for representing the crime situation and cannot be explained by simple spreading activation among lexical associates.

However, this previous work leaves a number of key questions unanswered. First, in the previous studies, participants were asked to freely generate a solution to the crime problem. It is possible that metaphors make some solutions more available and so easier to bring to mind than others. This free-generation method may reveal what solution comes to mind first, but leaves open the question of whether metaphors influence what solution people think is best. When people make decisions about public policy in the real world, they don’t typically just generate one solution, but instead evaluate a number of competing proposals. It is possible that the effect observed in previous studies is an ephemeral effect at solution retrieval. Do metaphors affect people’s reasoning about social issues even if they are able to evaluate and compare a number of possible solutions?

Second, if metaphors affect reasoning, how explicit is this influence? Do people know they are being influenced by metaphors and do they need to be explicitly aware of the metaphor to be influenced by it? In previous work, we asked people to identify what part of the crime report was most influential in their reasoning. Very few people (around 5%) selected the metaphor. Instead, most people cited the crime statistics (which were the same in both conditions). However, this method allows for the possibility that people did think the metaphor was influential, but simply didn’t want to choose it – possibly because they wanted to appear rational in front of the experimenter. Citing statistics as influential allows one to appear objective. In new studies reported in this paper, instead of asking what part of the story was most influential, we tested participants’ memory for the metaphor. If participants can’t explicitly recall the metaphor, will they still show effects of the metaphorical frame in their reasoning about crime?

In Experiment 1, we first tested participants’ ability to explicitly extract the entailments of the virus and beast metaphors for crime. Participants were told that two politicians were advocating for different approaches to the crime problem, with one describing crime as a beast and one as a virus. We then asked participants to guess which crime-reducing solutions each politician might prefer from a set of possibilities. This study allows participants to explicitly compare the two metaphors. The results confirmed expectations from previous work. Participants associated the beast metaphor with solutions advocating enforcement and punishment, and associated the virus metaphor with solutions advocating social reform (improving the economy and educational system).

In Experiments 2–4, we tested whether participants would themselves be swayed by metaphors when evaluating proposed policies for reducing crime. Participants first read a report that framed crime as either a beast or a virus using a one-word metaphor (as in Experiment 2 of [7]). They then evaluated 4 or 5 policy proposals and indicated which they thought were best either by re-arranging them or dragging them into a response box in order of preference. Across these variations in method, the metaphorical frame mattered. Even when asked to select the best proposal from a set of alternatives, participants were influenced by the metaphorical frame. This suggests that metaphorical framing doesn’t only influence the ease with which people can retrieve a solution or which solution comes to mind first, but can also influence the evaluation stage - which solution people see as best.

In Experiments 2–4, we also investigated the extent to which people were using the metaphor explicitly to guide their reasoning about crime. In Experiment 2 we did this by asking people to indicate which part of the passage had been most influential in their decision. As before, we found that very few participants thought the metaphor played an important part in their decision. In Experiments 3 and 4 we asked people to recall the metaphor (given the surrounding context: “Crime is a _____ ravaging the city of Addison”). We found that participants who had no explicit memory of the metaphor were just as much affected by the metaphor as participants who were able to remember the metaphorical frame. These findings suggest that metaphors can act covertly in reasoning.

Finally, we examined the role of political affiliation on reasoning about crime. We confirmed previous findings that Republicans are more likely to endorse crime-reduction programs that emphasize enforcement and punishment, and are less swayed by metaphor than are Democrats or Independents.