Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning

Science Center, Bent Corridor

Metaphors are unique, as they possess the ability to pervade discussions of social and political issues and can directly influence the way in which we think, act, and comprehend complex and abstract problems. They express systematic connections between source and target domains. However, a major challenge for metaphor researchers is to empirically quantify the entailments of metaphors in order to make principled predictions about how metaphors affect reasoning and comprehension of the domains they describe. By way of a simple metaphorical comparison task, paired with a metaphorical framing task, we seek to reduce the reliance on researchers’ intuition when deriving hypotheses regarding metaphoric persuasion. In two/four experiments, we find significant levels of congruence between a metaphorical comparison task and a metaphorical framing task, thereby providing a principled method of empirically quantifying the persuasive capacity of metaphor frames.