Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning

[thinker_jeff]

Abstract

 

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.

 

Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016782

 

 

 

[lemur]

Well put, but what do you want to discuss about it?

[Mr Skeptic]

Nice find. I guess this explains why people are so fond of comparing things they don't like to Nazis when there are far better metaphors.

[lemur]

Nice find. I guess this explains why people are so fond of comparing things they don't like to Nazis when there are far better metaphors.

I don't think that is really what the OP is talking about. There's some books by Lakhoff and Johnson on this topic and they mostly talk about the metaphors used to structure language. For example, Nazi propaganda used metaphors like referring to the nation as a house and certain kinds of people as pest-infestations of that house. Another example is when society is described as a body that can be sick or healthy. Generally, all structural approaches to social/political science tend to use metaphors to describe society and groups as unified collectives in some way or other. There have been attempts to modernize structuralism so that it only refers to language and cultural structuring, but usually this is met with a backlash that attempts to re-establish the collective-unit approach for describing language or culture in terms of bounded societies. I don't know why I went into this except because you mentioned nazism (national socialism), but there are many other examples/studies of how such metaphors work to structure thought and discourse. You should google Lakhoff and Johnson or read Metaphors We Live By or Philosophy in the Flesh. There are probably other titles but I can't think of them off hand.

[Marat]

An interesting sidelight on that is the question why English is so heavily-laden with overt metaphors compared to other languages. Foreign language speakers starting to learn English are always astonished at how long the lists of stock metaphorical expressions are that they have to learn. You would think this resort to metaphors would have arisen from a lack of nouns to make all the necessary conceptual distinctions, but English has more nouns than any other language except Ancient Greek.

[thinker_jeff]

Well put, but what do you want to discuss about it?

I always think that many troubles between countries are caused by cultural difference. The people in one country interpret the motivations of the people in another country in the way different from each other, especially when they are in different languages and cultures. This research supports my thought, that why I post it here.

 

 

[lemur]

I always think that many troubles between countries are caused by cultural difference. The people in one country interpret the motivations of the people in another country in the way different from each other, especially when they are in different languages and cultures. This research supports my thought, that why I post it here.

"Troubles between countries" are mostly caused by collective identity (ego-identification) that is propagated in discourses of national vs. international relations. E.g. if you look at most news websites, they divide the news into national and international or world news. The implication is that there is a national sphere that is separate from the global sphere. Then, nationalism is narrated using the pronoun/adjective "we/our" consistently in discourse. This promotes a form of collective egoism by stimulating people to constantly identify themselves as being part of (or excluded from) a national "we." Promoting this sense of collective identity/unity allows for discourse about "our culture," which promotes the idea that culture is collectively homogenized and that individuals identifying with the collective/national identity have no choice but to be defined by the culture that supposedly naturally defines them as subsidiaries of the collective. This is of course all arbitrary cultural ideology, but people experience it as naturally factual because of the way it is propagated.

 

Thus, when people are sub-consciously ideologically convinced that they are part of a cultural body that makes their nation distinct and separate from others, it is not a far stretch to characterize different nations as collective entities that interact in ways similar to how individuals interact with each other (e.g. conflict, cooperation, etc.). This discourse of global social life as the interactions of national giants, i.e. collective entities as individuals, has similar mythological function as religions where multiple gods interact with each other in a sort of complex yet comprehensible narrative. These mythological narratives have the function of 1) promoting social solidarity among people ascribed the same national identity 2) structuring interactions between people ascribed different national identities. In other words, it makes people feel comfortable to have national relations to structure their interactions with strangers. That way, they don't have to take the risk of thinking independently and assessing people they meet on the basis of interactional information. Instead, they can rely on stereotypes about the global discourse of international relations they are familiar with. E.g. "you are part of an imperialist nation and my nation is victimized by yours therefore I must distrust, dislike, and otherwise hold you personally accountable for the things I attribute to your nation." This logic is central to many global minoritarians, imo. Without it, many would be completely lost in dealing with global social complexities.

Edited February 26, 2011 by lemur

[Marat]

Perhaps we can grant Lemur's point but still accept that there is some role for purely linguistic factors in accounting for the dissonances between cultures that seem to resist all efforts to build bridges by finding a common rationality.

[thinker_jeff]

"Troubles between countries" are mostly caused by collective identity (ego-identification) that is propagated in discourses of national vs. international relations. E.g. if you look at most news websites, they divide the news into national and international or world news. The implication is that there is a national sphere that is separate from the global sphere. Then, nationalism is narrated using the pronoun/adjective "we/our" consistently in discourse. This promotes a form of collective egoism by stimulating people to constantly identify themselves as being part of (or excluded from) a national "we." Promoting this sense of collective identity/unity allows for discourse about "our culture," which promotes the idea that culture is collectively homogenized and that individuals identifying with the collective/national identity have no choice but to be defined by the culture that supposedly naturally defines them as subsidiaries of the collective. This is of course all arbitrary cultural ideology, but people experience it as naturally factual because of the way it is propagated.

 

Thus, when people are sub-consciously ideologically convinced that they are part of a cultural body that makes their nation distinct and separate from others, it is not a far stretch to characterize different nations as collective entities that interact in ways similar to how individuals interact with each other (e.g. conflict, cooperation, etc.). This discourse of global social life as the interactions of national giants, i.e. collective entities as individuals, has similar mythological function as religions where multiple gods interact with each other in a sort of complex yet comprehensible narrative. These mythological narratives have the function of 1) promoting social solidarity among people ascribed the same national identity 2) structuring interactions between people ascribed different national identities. In other words, it makes people feel comfortable to have national relations to structure their interactions with strangers. That way, they don't have to take the risk of thinking independently and assessing people they meet on the basis of interactional information. Instead, they can rely on stereotypes about the global discourse of international relations they are familiar with. E.g. "you are part of an imperialist nation and my nation is victimized by yours therefore I must distrust, dislike, and otherwise hold you personally accountable for the things I attribute to your nation." This logic is central to many global minoritarians, imo. Without it, many would be completely lost in dealing with global social complexities.

 

Impressive theory. I am interested on how many theories in political science backed by researches in psychology.

 

Perhaps we can grant Lemur's point but still accept that there is some role for purely linguistic factors in accounting for the dissonances between cultures that seem to resist all efforts to build bridges by finding a common rationality.

 

Based on my personal experience, generally people in U.S. have less knowledge about other countries than the foreign people's knowledge about U.S. I guess that is the reason of the low efficiency of U.S. diplomatic resources.

Edited February 26, 2011 by thinker_jeff

[lemur]

Perhaps we can grant Lemur's point but still accept that there is some role for purely linguistic factors in accounting for the dissonances between cultures that seem to resist all efforts to build bridges by finding a common rationality.

I can't tell if by "dissonances between cultures," you mean ideological conflicts or social conflicts. First, it would help if you would distinguish between culture and people/individuals. Individuals have/practice culture but they are not culture itself. Culture is learned and practiced. In order for "cultural dissonance" to be interpreted as such, there has to be a cultural basis for 1) distinguishing them as being different in the first place and 2) recognizing difference as conflicting/dissonant. This, of course, presumes that everything it culturally-situated, including the perception of culture itself. One culture may recognize cultural difference between, say, Catholicism and Protestantism while another culture may see them as part of the same culture of Christianity. Dissonance from one cultural perspective, thus, might appear as consonance from another. Which culture do you then validate? Or are they equally valid in their relativity?

 

Based on my personal experience, generally people in U.S. have less knowledge about other countries than the foreign people's knowledge about U.S. I guess that is the reason of the low efficiency of U.S. diplomatic resources.

I am sure there are people of every national citizenship who have more or less knowledge of "other countries." The interesting thing is not to compare which country has more or less awareness of other countries but rather to study how awareness of national difference influences human behavior. Imo, people who learn a lot about multiple countries also learn to differentiate themselves more strongly according to the differences they attribute to national difference. Someone who doesn't even understand that global nationalism divides the world according to national lines is more likely to simply be confused why someone they meet wouldn't speak in a way they understand, yet they would have no basis for attributing national difference because as far as they are concerned the whole universe has only people like them.

 

Now, the ironic thing about this is that while global cosmopolitans would call that view naive, it is actually the material reality. All humans are actually the same species and it is entirely possible to look at all linguistic and cultural differences as cultural distinctions within the same population. In other words, you can as easily look at the world as a single multicultural society as you can look at it as multiple national societies. Ultimately, I think it is confounding to view it as multiple nations/societies, because this requires multi-level analyses. I.e. you can look at, say, Germany and France as interacting as national units - but you can also analyze Fritz and Jacques working together to fix up a flat in Barcelona, for example. Imo, it makes far more sense to part with the national-unit level analysis and just view global interactions as having nationalism influencing them in some ways. But you can't ignore that the national-units are structuring metaphors at the cognitive and institutional levels.

 

 

[thinker_jeff]

I can't tell if by "dissonances between cultures," you mean ideological conflicts or social conflicts. First, it would help if you would distinguish between culture and people/individuals. Individuals have/practice culture but they are not culture itself. Culture is learned and practiced. In order for "cultural dissonance" to be interpreted as such, there has to be a cultural basis for 1) distinguishing them as being different in the first place and 2) recognizing difference as conflicting/dissonant. This, of course, presumes that everything it culturally-situated, including the perception of culture itself. One culture may recognize cultural difference between, say, Catholicism and Protestantism while another culture may see them as part of the same culture of Christianity. Dissonance from one cultural perspective, thus, might appear as consonance from another. Which culture do you then validate? Or are they equally valid in their relativity?

 

 

I am sure there are people of every national citizenship who have more or less knowledge of "other countries." The interesting thing is not to compare which country has more or less awareness of other countries but rather to study how awareness of national difference influences human behavior. Imo, people who learn a lot about multiple countries also learn to differentiate themselves more strongly according to the differences they attribute to national difference. Someone who doesn't even understand that global nationalism divides the world according to national lines is more likely to simply be confused why someone they meet wouldn't speak in a way they understand, yet they would have no basis for attributing national difference because as far as they are concerned the whole universe has only people like them.

 

Now, the ironic thing about this is that while global cosmopolitans would call that view naive, it is actually the material reality. All humans are actually the same species and it is entirely possible to look at all linguistic and cultural differences as cultural distinctions within the same population. In other words, you can as easily look at the world as a single multicultural society as you can look at it as multiple national societies. Ultimately, I think it is confounding to view it as multiple nations/societies, because this requires multi-level analyses. I.e. you can look at, say, Germany and France as interacting as national units - but you can also analyze Fritz and Jacques working together to fix up a flat in Barcelona, for example. Imo, it makes far more sense to part with the national-unit level analysis and just view global interactions as having nationalism influencing them in some ways. But you can't ignore that the national-units are structuring metaphors at the cognitive and institutional levels.

 

I feel a little lost. Could you summarize your points in a few sentences?

[lemur]

I feel a little lost. Could you summarize your points in a few sentences?

There's no point. If not even a single sentence or phrase caught your attention enough to ask about it specifically, I doubt I could summarize anything in a way that works for you. My guess is that you don't think about culture at the empirical level of everyday details. You probably just think in terms of broad macro-social lines, which usually totally misses what's actually going on at the individual/interactive level.

[thinker_jeff]

There's no point. If not even a single sentence or phrase caught your attention enough to ask about it specifically, I doubt I could summarize anything in a way that works for you.

 

Did my question cause offense to you? If so, I am very sorry.

Be honest, I am a new member and still learning the culture in this forum.

Personally I like to think based on the facts, especially on the facts supported by research. Of course, I want to hear the novel opinions as far as I can catch the points.

[lemur]

Did my question cause offense to you? If so, I am very sorry.

Be honest, I am a new member and still learning the culture in this forum.

Personally I like to think based on the facts, especially on the facts supported by research. Of course, I want to hear the novel opinions as far as I can catch the points.

If you like dealing with facts, address specificities specifically. I don't mean to be rude or give you the impression that there is some general "forum culture" that my posts are representative of. I just think, personally, that if you want to discuss something you quote the line(s) you want to discuss and respond to your quote with your thoughts on it. You don't need to conform to any "forum culture." Just be intelligent and avoid rudeness; and of course observe and respect forum rules and other posters. Moderators tend to be pretty easy going, I've found, but that could be due to the low levels of obnoxiousness compared to some forums.