When a bad metaphor may not be a victimless crime: The role of metaphor in social policy

When a bad metaphor may not be a victimless crime: The role of metaphor in social policy Paul Thibodeau (pthibod1@stanford.edu) James L. McClelland (mcclelland@stanford.edu) Lera Boroditsky (lera@stanford.edu) Stanford University, Department of Psychology Jordan Hall (Bldg 420), 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305 USA Abstract describes a case in which a serial rapist attacked 11 girls over a 15-month period before being captured by the police (Kelling, 1991). The police later revealed that they had deliberately withheld information from the public that could have prevented at least 8 of the attacks, because it might have compromised the traps they had laid for the suspect. The girls, Kelling argues “were victims… not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor” (p. 1, 1991). The police in this view were too entrenched in the role of hunting down and catching the criminal, and neglected their responsibility to inoculate the community against further harm. In this paper we empirically test whether metaphors indeed structure how people reason about social issues like crime. We also present a computational model that explores the mechanisms through which metaphors may shape people’s thinking. Metaphors are pervasive in our discussions of abstract and complex ideas (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and have been shown to be instrumental in problem solving and building new conceptual structure (e.g., Gentner & Gentner, 1983; Nersessian, 1992; Boroditsky, 2000). In this paper we look at the role of metaphor in framing social issues. Our language for discussing war, crime, politics, healthcare, and the economy is suffused with metaphor (Schon, 1993; Lakoff, 2002). Does the way we reason about such important issues as crime, war or the economy depend on the metaphors we use to talk about these topics? Might changing metaphors lead us to different conceptions and in turn different social policies? In this paper we focused on the domain of crime and asked whether two different metaphorical systems we have for talking about crime can lead people to different ways of approaching and reasoning about it. We find that framing the issue of crime metaphorically as a predator yielded systematically different suggestions for solving the crime problem than when crime was described as a virus. We then present a connectionist model that explores the mechanistic underpinnings of the role of metaphor. The Current Study We focus on two common frameworks for talking about crime: “crime as a predator” and “crime as a virus.” Both are used frequently and productively in discourse about crime. However, if we take these metaphors seriously, they offer very different implications for how societies should deal with crime. For example, to deal with a dangerous predator on the loose, one might try to hunt, trap or cage the animal. If crime is like a predator, then the best way to deal with crime is to catch and imprison as many criminals as possible. Solutions to the crime problem might include increasing the police force, harsher enforcement of laws, longer prison terms, and so on. If crime is a disease, the set of implications is rather different. To treat a disease, one might attempt to diagnose and treat the root cause of the problem, and one would also aim to restore the organism’s immune system so that it is not susceptible to future infections 1 . If crime is a disease, then really dealing with crime involves not only treating the symptoms, but getting Keywords: Metaphor, analogy, connectionism, social policy Introduction We use a variety of metaphors when discussing crime. In some cases, crime and criminals are described as predators, preying on the public, lurking in the shadows, stalking their victims. As William James put it, “Man… is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species” (p. 846, 1904). The police in this set of metaphors are meant to hunt down, lay traps and attempt to catch or capture the criminals, so as to lock them away. In other cases, crime is described as a disease or epidemic. It infects cities and plagues neighborhoods. On this framing, the job of police is centered on diagnosing and treating the root cause of the problem, stopping the spread of the infection, identifying risk factors to prevent future outbreaks, and restoring the health of the community. Public health researchers have explicitly proposed that treating crime as a disease will help us find the cure (Guerrero & Concha-Eastman, 2001). A violence prevention program operated by an epidemiologist in Chicago takes this metaphor to heart, treating crime according to the same regimen used for contagious diseases like AIDS and tuberculoses (Kotlowitz, 2008). In some cases, scholars have even cast bad metaphors as a societal danger. George Kelling, a criminal justice scholar, There are two somewhat different metaphorical frameworks that treat crime as an illness. In one, the community or population is seen as an organism, and crime is a disease that is developing inside that organism (e.g., “ Violent crime is a cancer that eats away at the very heart of society. ). In another, the community is seen as individual agents and crime is a contagious disease that can be passed on from one person to another forming an epidemic. In this paper the stimuli did not strongly distinguish between these two metaphors, but doing so would be an interesting extension of this work, as the two metaphors suggest somewhat different implications for treating crime.