How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning

Language helps people communicate and think. Precise and accurate language would seem best suited to achieve these goals. But a close look at the way people actually talk reveals an abundance of apparent imprecision in the form of metaphor: ideas are 'light bulbs', crime is a 'virus', and cancer is an 'enemy' in a 'war'. In this article, we review recent evidence that metaphoric language can facilitate communication and shape thinking even though it is literally false. We first discuss recent experiments showing that linguistic metaphor can guide thought and behavior. Then we explore the conditions under which metaphors are most influential. Throughout, we highlight theoretical and practical implications, as well as key challenges and opportunities for future research.

[1]  Christian Burgers,et al.  When Do Natural Language Metaphors Influence Reasoning? A Follow-Up Study to Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2013) , 2014, PloS one.

[2]  Roei Davidson,et al.  Who's to Blame When a Business Fails? How Journalistic Death Metaphors Influence Responsibility Attributions , 2011 .

[3]  J. Mahon.  The Poetics of Mind , 1996 .

[4]  D. Sperber,et al.  Meaning and Relevance , 2012 .

[5]  L. Ross,et al.  The Name of the Game: Predictive Power of Reputations versus Situational Labels in Determining Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Moves , 2004, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[6]  S. Read,et al.  When is the federal budget like a baby? Metaphor in political rhetoric. , 1990 .

[7]  Building metaphorical schemas when reading text , 2014 .

[8]  A. Katz,et al.  The Journeys of Life: Examining a Conceptual Metaphor with Semantic and Episodic Memory Recall , 2008 .

[9]  S. Flusberg,et al.  The metaphor police: A case study of the role of metaphor in explanation , 2016, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

[10]  Nathan P. Kalmoe.  Fueling the Fire: Violent Metaphors, Trait Aggression, and Support for Political Violence , 2014 .

[11]  Lera Boroditsky,et al.  Measuring Effects of Metaphor in a Dynamic Opinion Landscape , 2015, CogSci.

[12]  Richard R. Lau,et al.  The Meaning and Measure of Policy Metaphors , 2000, American Political Science Review.

[13]  Lera Boroditsky,et al.  Natural Language Metaphors Covertly Influence Reasoning , 2013, PloS one.

[14]  A. Graesser,et al.  The Effect of Metaphor on Processing Style in a Persuasion Task: A Motivational Resonance Model , 1999 .

[15]  Adele E. Goldberg,et al.  Metaphorical Sentences Are More Emotionally Engaging than Their Literal Counterparts , 2014, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[16]  H. Grice.  Logic and conversation , 1975 .

[17]  Donald A. Schön.  Metaphor and Thought: Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy , 1993 .

[18]  Kevin Dunbar,et al.  Representational change and analogy: how analogical inferences alter target representations. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[19]  Metaphor creates intimacy and temporarily enhances theory of mind , 2015, Memory & cognition.

[20]  John M Kennedy,et al.  Similes on the Internet have explanations , 2006, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[21]  Brian F. Bowdle,et al.  Metaphor is like analogy , 2001 .

[22]  A. Ortony.  Why Metaphors Are Necessary and Not Just Nice , 1975 .

[23]  F. Durgin,et al.  Productive figurative communication: Conventional metaphors facilitate the comprehension of related novel metaphors , 2008 .

[24]  K. Patterson.  The Analysis of Metaphor: To What Extent Can the Theory of Lexical Priming Help Our Understanding of Metaphor Usage and Comprehension? , 2014, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

[25]  S. Pinker.  The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature , 2007 .

[26]  S. Chaiken,et al.  The psychology of attitudes. , 1993 .

[27]  Friedemann Pulvermüller,et al.  When do you grasp the idea? MEG evidence for instantaneous idiom understanding , 2012, NeuroImage.

[28]  Joshua B. Tenenbaum,et al.  Human-level concept learning through probabilistic program induction , 2015, Science.

[29]  K. Holyoak,et al.  When reasoning modifies memory: schematic assimilation triggered by analogical mapping. , 2014, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[30]  M. McGlone,et al.  Back (or forward?) to the future: The role of perspective in temporal language comprehension. , 1998 .

[31]  N. Schwarz,et al.  Framing love: When it hurts to think we were made for each other , 2014 .

[32]  Derek C. Penn,et al.  Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds , 2008, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[33]  D. Gentner.  Structure‐Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy* , 1983 .

[34]  R. Hoffman.  Metaphor in Science , 2018, Cognition and Figurative Language.

[35]  H. H. Clark.  SPACE, TIME, SEMANTICS, AND THE CHILD , 1973 .

[36]  L. Hagendoorn,et al.  Effects of Literal and Metaphorical Persuasive Messages , 1991 .

[37]  Ursula Christmann,et al.  A German-language replication study analysing the role of figurative speech in reasoning , 2016, Scientific Data.

[38]  P. David Pearson.  The Function of Metaphor in Children's Recall of Expository Passages , 1979 .

[39]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Schema induction and analogical transfer , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[40]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  The Effect of Metaphor on Political Attitudes , 1981 .

[41]  William S. Horton,et al.  Character Intimacy Influences the Processing of Metaphoric Utterances During Narrative Comprehension , 2013 .

[42]  Stephen J. Flusberg,et al.  A Connectionist Approach to Embodied Conceptual Metaphor , 2010, Front. Psychology.

[43]  W. Horton.  Metaphor and readers’ attributions of intimacy , 2007, Memory & cognition.

[44]  D. Gentner,et al.  Flowing waters or teeming crowds: Mental models of electricity , 1982 .

[45]  S. Flusberg,et al.  The mind is an ecosystem: Systemic metaphors promote systems thinking , 2016 .

[46]  S. Flusberg,et al.  Metaphorical Accounting: How Framing the Federal Budget Like a Household's Affects Voting Intentions. , 2017, Cognitive science.

[47]  Brian Falkenhainer,et al.  The Structure-Mapping Engine: Algorithm and Examples , 1989, Artif. Intell..

[48]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Metaphors We Live By , 1980 .

[49]  Teenie Matlock,et al.  Metaphors for the War (or Race) against Climate Change , 2017 .

[50]  Gerard J. Steen,et al.  A method for linguistic metaphor identification : from MIP to MIPVU , 2010 .

[51]  John T. Cacioppo,et al.  The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion , 1986, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

[52]  Zoltán Kövecses,et al.  Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts , 1986 .

[53]  David J. Hauser,et al.  The War on Prevention , 2015, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[54]  Marcia K. Johnson,et al.  Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall , 1972 .

[55]  Brian F. Bowdle,et al.  The career of metaphor. , 2005, Psychological review.

[56]  David Allbritton,et al.  METAPHOR-BASED SCHEMAS AND TEXT REPRESENTATIONS : MAKING CONNECTIONS THROUGH CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS , 1995 .

[57]  R. Giora.  On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language , 2003 .

[58]  M. Morris,et al.  Metaphors and the market: Consequences and preconditions of agent and object metaphors in stock market commentary , 2007 .

[59]  C. Dweck.  Mindset: The New Psychology of Success , 2006 .

[60]  L. Boroditsky.  Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors , 2000, Cognition.

[61]  Graham D. Low,et al.  The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought: Metaphor and education , 2008 .

[62]  P. Thibodeau.  Extended Metaphors are the Home Runs of Persuasion: Don’t Fumble the Phrase , 2016 .

[63]  Richard E. Mayer,et al.  The Metaphor Framing Effect: Metaphorical Reasoning About Text-Based Dilemmas , 2000 .

[64]  G. Givens,et al.  The Commons Dilemma as Metaphor: Memory, Influence, and Implications for Environmental Conservation , 1993 .

[65]  M. McGlone.  Hyperbole, Homunculi, and Hindsight Bias: An Alternative Evaluation of Conceptual Metaphor Theory , 2011 .

[66]  Myra Luna-Lucero,et al.  Light Bulbs or Seeds? How Metaphors for Ideas Influence Judgments About Genius , 2017 .

[67]  Distance makes the metaphor grow stronger: A psychological distance model of metaphor use , 2013 .

[68]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Far-Out Thinking , 2014, Psychological science.

[69]  M. Landau,et al.  Epistemic motives moderate the effect of metaphoric framing on attitudes , 2014 .

[70]  L. Boroditsky,et al.  Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning , 2011, PloS one.

[71]  W. S. Rholes,et al.  Category accessibility and impression formation , 1977 .

[72]  J. Dillard,et al.  The Persuasive Effects of Metaphor: A Meta‐Analysis , 2002 .

[73]  Galen V. Bodenhausen,et al.  Resistance is futile: The unwitting insertion of analogical inferences in memory , 2005, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[74]  Teenie Matlock,et al.  The integration of figurative language and static depictions: An eye movement study of fictive motion , 2007, Cognition.

[75]  M. Black.  Models and metaphors , 1962 .

[76]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Nonintentional analogical inference in text comprehension , 2007, Memory & cognition.

[77]  S. Sontag.  Illness as metaphor ; and, AIDS and its metaphors , 1990 .

[78]  T. Matlock.  Fictive motion as cognitive simulation , 2004, Memory & cognition.

[79]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought , 1999 .

[80]  John E. Hummel,et al.  Distributed representations of structure: A theory of analogical access and mapping. , 1997 .

[81]  G. Moseley,et al.  A Randomized-controlled Trial of Using a Book of Metaphors to Reconceptualize Pain and Decrease Catastrophizing in People With Chronic Pain , 2013, The Clinical journal of pain.

[82]  T. Cohen.  Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy , 1978, Critical Inquiry.

[83]  D. Rumelhart.  Metaphor and Thought: Some problems with the notion of literal meanings , 1993 .

[84]  Herbert L. Colston,et al.  Interpreting Figurative Meaning , 2012 .

[85]  Albert N. Katz,et al.  Experimental Support for Conceptual Metaphors with an Episodic Memory Task , 2010 .

[86]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought: How the mind computes the meaning of metaphor , 2008 .

[87]  M. Landau,et al.  Embodied metaphor and abstract problem solving: Testing a metaphoric fit hypothesis in the health domain , 2014 .

[88]  Jan Bosman,et al.  Persuasive Effects of Political Metaphors , 1987 .

[89]  D. Oyserman,et al.  The college journey and academic engagement: how metaphor use enhances identity-based motivation. , 2014, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[90]  T. Hartman.  Toll Booths on the Information Superhighway? Policy Metaphors in the Case of Net Neutrality , 2012 .

[91]  D. Gentner,et al.  As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space → time metaphors , 2002 .