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.

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?

Some observations of crime policy in the real world suggest that people may indeed take metaphors as more than just talk. For example, shifts in metaphors are often accompanied by shifts in policy. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs, with smugglers, dealers, and users defined as the enemy to be fought. Policies in line with the war on drugs mandated longer, harsher sentences for drug-related crime. Since then, the incarceration rate has more than quadrupled in the US [15].

Others have taken the crime is a virus metaphor seriously and have implemented programs to treat crime as a contagious disease. For example, a crime-prevention program run by an epidemiologist in Chicago treats crime according to the same regimen used for diseases like AIDS and tuberculoses, focusing on preventing spread from person to person [16].

Some criminal justice scholars have even implicated bad metaphor as the root of failure in crime prevention [17]. In one case described by Kelling, a serial rapist attacked 11 girls over a 15-month period before being captured by the police. During those 15 months, the police had information that (had they shared it with the community) could have prevented some of the attacks. Instead, they opted to keep that information secret to set traps for their suspect. The police, on Kelling's analysis, were entrenched in their metaphorical role of hunting down and catching the criminal, and neglected their responsibility to inoculate the community against further harm. The girls, Kelling writes, “were victims… not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor” (p. 1).

In this paper we empirically investigate whether using different metaphors to talk about crime indeed leads people to reason about crime differently and, in turn, leads them to propose different solutions to the crime problem. We will focus on two contrasting metaphors for crime: crime as a virus and crime as a beast. Do these metaphors subtly encourage people to reason about crime in a way that is consistent with the entailments of the metaphors? For example, might talking about crime as a virus lead people to propose treating the crime problem the same way as one would treat a literal virus epidemic? Might talking about crime as a beast lead people to propose dealing with a crime problem the same way as one would deal with a literal wild animal attack?

To help generate a clear set of predictions, we conducted a norming survey asking 28 participants on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com; [18]) to describe what should be done to solve a literal virus or beast problem. We asked people to imagine a “virus infecting a city” or a “wild beast preying on a city” and then to describe the best way to solve the problem that they had imagined. Participants who imagined a “virus infecting the city” universally suggested investigating the source of the virus and implementing social reforms and prevention measures to decrease the spread of the virus. That is, they wanted to know where the virus was coming from, whether the city could develop a vaccine and how the virus was spreading. They also wanted to institute educational campaigns to inform residents about how to avoid or deal with the virus and encourage residents to follow better hygiene practices. Participants who imagined a “wild beast preying on a city” universally suggested capturing the beast and then killing or caging it. They wanted to organize a hunting party or hire animal control specialists to track down the beast and stop it from ravaging the city.

Might these schematic representations for solving literal virus or beast problems transfer to people's reasoning about crime if crime is metaphorically framed as a virus or a beast? That is, if crime is talked about as a virus, will people suggest diagnosing the root cause of the problem and enacting social reform to treat and inoculate the community? If crime is a beast, will people suggest catching and jailing criminals in order to fight off the crime attack?

In Experiment 1, 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 and treating the problem by enacting social reform to inoculate the community, with emphasis on eradicating poverty and improving education. When crime was framed metaphorically as a beast, participants proposed catching and jailing criminals and enacting harsher enforcement laws.

In Experiment 2, we modified the report and repeated the study. Whereas in Experiment 1, the metaphoric frame was established using vivid verbs with rich relational meaning in phrases scattered throughout the report (e.g., crime was said to be either preying & lurking, or infecting & plaguing). In Experiment 2, we used a single word to instantiate the metaphoric frame. Despite this small difference between the virus and beast conditions in the modified report (“Crime is a virus/beast ravaging the city of Addison”), we again found that participants in the two conditions offered different problem solving suggestions. The findings of Experiment 2 demonstrate that these relational elements need not be specified explicitly. People spontaneously extracted the relevant relational inferences even given a single metaphorical noun in Experiment 2.

In Experiment 3 we tested whether the influence of the metaphor observed in the first two studies could have come about through simple spreading activation from lexical associates of the words “beast” and “virus.” Perhaps simply hearing a word like beast, even outside of the context of crime, would activate representations of hunting and caging. These activated lexical associates might then bleed into people's descriptions of how to solve the crime problem. To test for this possibility we dissociated the words “beast” and “virus” from the metaphorical frame in Experiment 3. Before reading the crime report, participants were asked to provide a synonym to the word “beast” or the word “virus” – thereby priming representations for a beast or a virus. They then read the same report about crime as in Experiment 2, but with the metaphorical word omitted (“Crime is ravaging the city of Addison”). This disconnected lexical prime did not yield differences in people's crime-fighting suggestions, revealing that metaphors act as more than just isolated words – their power appears to come from participating in elaborated knowledge structures.

In Experiment 4 we tested whether metaphors can affect not only how people propose solving the problem of crime, but also how they go about gathering information for future problem solving. If participants seek out information that is likely to confirm the initial bias suggested by the metaphor, this may be a mechanism for metaphors to iteratively amass long-term effects on people's reasoning. Indeed, when people were presented with a metaphorically framed crime problem and then given the opportunity to gather further information about the issue, participants chose to look at information that was consistent with the metaphorical frame.

In Experiment 5 we investigated the time-course of how metaphors influence the construal of complex issues. One possibility is that metaphors influence reasoning by providing people a knowledge frame that structures subsequent information. After being exposed to the metaphor, participants assimilate all further information they receive into this knowledge structure, instantiating any ambiguous information in a way that would be consistent with the metaphor. If this is the case, if metaphors actively coerce incoming information, then metaphors should have the most impact when they are presented early. This was the structure of the report in Experiment 4 (and Experiment 2): the metaphoric frame was presented in the first sentence of the report.

Alternatively, if metaphors simply activate a stored package of ideas and do not encourage the kind of active assimilation process described above, then they should be most effective when they are presented late in the narrative, as close to when people are asked to reason about a solution as possible. This way, the memory of the metaphor should be fresh and any knowledge activated by it should have the best chance to influence reasoning. This was the structure of the report in Experiment 5: the metaphoric frame was presented in last sentence of the report. Unlike the results of Experiment 4, this late metaphorical framing had no effect on people's crime-related information foraging. These findings suggest that metaphors can gain power by coercing further incoming information to fit with the relational structure suggested by the metaphor.

One of the most interesting features of the effects of metaphor we find throughout these studies is that its power is covert. When given the opportunity to identify the most influential aspect of the crime report, participants (in all four studies that include a metaphoric frame) ignore the metaphor. Instead, they cite the crime statistics (which are the same in both conditions) as being influential in their reasoning. Together these studies suggest that unbeknownst to us, metaphors powerfully shape how we reason about social issues. Further, the studies help shed light on the mechanisms through which metaphors influence our reasoning.