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Conceptual Metaphor in Social Psychology: The Poetics of Everyday Life [1 ed.]
 1848724705, 9781848724709

Table of contents :
Contents
1 Jaynes’s Challenge
2 Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor
3 Metaphor in Meaning Making
4 Motivation as Context
5 The Cultural Context: Universality and Variations
6 The Self
7 Interpersonal Relationships
8 Intergroup Relations
9 Political and Health Discourse
References
Index

Citation preview

CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

We learn in grade school that metaphor is an ornamental figure of speech reserved for poets. But we now know that it is also a key strategy people use to make sense of the world, from basic concepts like time and causation to the major social issues facing society. In this book, Mark Landau clarifies with wideranging evidence the many ways conceptual metaphor guides our thoughts and actions, shining a light on the cognitive underpinnings of social life. Conceptual Metaphor in Social Psychology synthesizes over twenty-five years of in-depth research. Drawing from innovative experiments conducted around the globe, Landau shows conclusively that individuals and groups use metaphor— often unconsciously—to grasp abstractions, make judgments and decisions, communicate, and organize their behavior. Each chapter explores metaphor’s importance for understanding a major topic in social psychology: social cognition, motivation, culture, the self, interpersonal relationships, intergroup dynamics, politics, and health. What emerges is a powerful explanation of how social behavior is shaped by and reflected in our bodily functioning, cultural context, and language use. Integrating insights from cognitive linguistics, anthropology, and personality, this book makes a compelling case that conceptual metaphor has a pervasive effect on human affairs. Researchers in social psychology will discover new ways to think about and investigate these related topics, while students of psychology will learn about an exciting development in understanding enduring questions about who we are and how we got that way. Mark J. Landau is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas, where he studies the influence of metaphor on social thought and behavior. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Essays in social psychology Series Editors Monica Biernat, Kansas University Miles Hewstone, University of Oxford

Essays in Social Psychology is designed to meet the need for rapid publication of brief volumes in social psychology. Primary topics will include social cognition, interpersonal relationships, group processes, and intergroup relations, as well as applied issues. Furthermore, the series seeks to define social psychology in its broadest sense, encompassing all topics either informed by, or informing, the study of individual behavior and thought in social situations. Each volume in the series will make a conceptual contribution to the topic by reviewing and synthesizing the existing research literature, by advancing theory in the area, or by some combination of these missions.The principal aim is that authors will provide an overview of their own highly successful research program in an area. It is also expected that volumes will, to some extent, include an assessment of current knowledge and identification of possible future trends in research. Each book will be a self-contained unit supplying the advanced reader with a well-structured review of the work described and evaluated. Published titles Nostalgia A Psychological Perspective Batcho Conceptual Metaphor in Social Psychology The Poetics of Everyday Life Landau Forthcoming titles Motivated Cognition in Relationships Murray and Holmes For continually updated information about published and forthcoming titles in the Essays in Social Psychology series, please visit www.routledge.com/psychology/series/SE0533.

CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY The Poetics of Everyday Life

Mark J. Landau

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Mark J. Landau to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Landau, Mark J. (Mark Jordan), author. Title: Conceptual metaphor in social psychology : the poetics of everyday life / by Mark J. Landau. Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Routledge, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027959| ISBN 9781848724709 (hb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781848724716 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315312019 (e) Subjects: LCSH: Social psychology. | Social perception. | Cognitive grammar. | Metaphor—Psychological aspects. | Metaphor—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM1013 .L36 2017 | DDC 302—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027959 ISBN: 978-1-84872-470-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-84872-471-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-31201-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

1 Jaynes’s Challenge

1

2 Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor

14

3 Metaphor in Meaning Making

37

4 Motivation as Context

58

5 The Cultural Context: Universality and Variations

81

6 The Self

104

7 Interpersonal Relationships

128

8 Intergroup Relations

149

9 Political and Health Discourse

171

References 193 Index 225

1 JAYNES’S CHALLENGE

A case study in metaphor’s significance and an outline of the book The psychologist Julian Jaynes, brooding upon the nature of consciousness, presents us with a challenge: If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever—except by analog. You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. ( Jaynes, 1976, p. 60; italics added) Whenever you think about time, Jaynes insists, you cannot help but imagine events as tangible objects arranged in physical space. This holds true whether you’re thinking on the grand scale of centuries or your day-to-day life. Take a moment to introspect on your past, present, and future: Does it appear in your mind’s eye as movement across a landscape or line? Do you think back to breakfast this morning and look forward to tomorrow’s yoga class? Let’s approach Jaynes’s claim from a different angle: Why might we be disposed to conceptualize time in spatial terms? One answer is that time is a very abstract idea. It is formless, vague, and evanescent—not the type of thing we can see, touch, or smell in the same way that we can, say, a muffin. Time’s abstractness makes it notoriously difficult to pin down. Basic spatial relations, on the other hand, are concrete and familiar. Most of us need only six months navigating our surroundings to figure out how moving objects affect one another (Piaget, 1962).

2  Jaynes’s Challenge

FIGURE 1.1 

 etaphor works like a “scaffold” for conceptualizing an abstraction. M Image: Wikimedia Commons

Soon after we repurpose spatial knowledge to serve as a “scaffold,” or frame of reference, to construct a mental model of time, in much the same way that builders use a physical scaffold to construct a skyscraper (Figure 1.1; Mandler, 2004). For example, you figured out early on that approaching objects, such as your Aunt Tillie drawing closer for a smooch, were usually more relevant to your interests than were objects placed behind you or stashed under the couch. From there, you came to view important events as figuratively approaching. Another example: Once you got practice moving forward along paths toward destinations (like the toy under the couch), you could represent a goal as a destination along a path. By means of these mental correspondences, your experience of time became like the experience of space, giving you some purchase on an otherwise ethereal notion. One advantage of this account is that it explains why people talk about time the way they do. Listen up when native English speakers open their mouth and you’ll hear expressions such as: “I’ve made it a lot closer to finishing this jigsaw puzzle, but I still have a long way to go.” “Christmas is coming up on us fast and we need to shop.” “I used to feel that way but those days are behind me.”

Jaynes’s Challenge  3

FIGURE 1.2 

 ultural artifacts reflect conceptual metaphors. For example, the C Statue of Liberty’s forward stride signifies historical progress. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Asked what these expressions mean, you would reply that—duh—they describe time. But take a closer look and you’ll see that, taken literally, they’re nonsensical. One can finish a puzzle while seated, Christmas is not a projectile, and there are no days piled up behind anyone. The reason they make sense is that they tap into your underlying spatial conception of time. That conception also enables you to interpret cultural images, symbols, and rituals. For instance, notice how the Lady Liberty is postured to be taking a bold step forward (Figure 1.2). The statue symbolizes historical change as a type of movement from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge—or, as the blazing torch signifies, to a state of en-light-enment (Kövecses, 1995). The notion that people’s understanding of time is built around their spatial knowledge also explains why people around the world communicate about

4  Jaynes’s Challenge

time in spatial terms, whether in everyday discourse, visual art, or ceremonies (Alverson, 1994; Evans, 2004; Haspelmath, 1997). Compare these conventional English expressions with their Hungarian equivalents (adapted from Kövecses, 2005, p. 48): English: “That’s all behind us now.” Hungarian: “Ez már mind mögöttünk van.” (This already all behind-us is) English: “He has a great future ahead.” Hungarian: “Nagy jövő áll előtte.” (Great future stands front-his) We see that speakers of both languages refer to the past as the space behind the observer and the future as extending forward from the observer’s vantage. Detailed analyses have uncovered equivalent expressions in Chinese, Hopi (a North American Indian language), and many other languages (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Malotki, 1983; Yu, 1998). These parallels make sense if we consider that people everywhere share in common many features of their body and physiological activity. We normally face the direction in which we move and approach desired locations. The types of bodies that we have create patterns in our movement, and these patterns correlate with the passage of time. Walk toward a wall and you are going to bump into it in time. We co-opt these correlations in bodily experience to reason about the time course of actions and events—even those without tangible form. For instance, we believe that a person pondering a problem is going to reach a solution even though she is not literally “going” anywhere. Because people who live in other cultures and historical epochs share such basic features of embodied functioning, the spatialization of time is a widespread, perhaps universal feature of human cognition. At the same time, though, we find interesting cultural variations in how, specifically, people mentally connect time and space (Radden, 2011). In contemporary Western cultures, including the United States, the future is in front of the observer and the past is behind. But in many East Asian languages, an earlier time is sometimes described as up and a later time as down. In Mandarin Chinese, for instance, last month is shàn-yuè (up-month) and next month is xiàyuè (down-month) (Yu, 1998). These variations mirror a group’s cultural worldview. Take the fact that speakers of some South-American Indian languages, such as Aymara, talk about the past as in front of them and the future as lying behind them (de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache, & Casasanto, 2014; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). Sound strange? Consider their reasoning: Because the past has happened, you can confidently know (see) it, just as plainly as you can see an object in front of you; the future, on the other hand, is unknown and thus behind you, where you don’t have any eyes to see it. This brings us to the big question that drives so much of the work described in this book: Do people use metaphor to conceptualize abstractions, or “merely”

Jaynes’s Challenge  5

to communicate about them? Suppose you tell your boss that a deadline “has passed us by.” It is possible that you simply reached for an idiomatic expression as a handy means of passing thoughts about time from your head into your boss’s head. You would be solving the same basic problem I faced in the previous sentence: It felt difficult to describe the process of sharing information in precise literal terms, so I leaned on the so-called conduit metaphor whereby thoughts are objects shooting out of your head and landing in someone else’s (Reddy, 1979). Behind your words, in the private theater of your phenomenological experience, there are no objects zipping around. You represent events, goals, and activities as events, goals, and activities. Literally. We need more stringent tests of whether spatial concepts play a role in temporal reasoning and perception as it occurs in real time. Cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues have done just that in a series of cleverly designed laboratory experiments (Boroditsky, 2000; Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002). They started with the idea that people can conceive the passage of time in one of two spatial configurations. In one, the self moves over a stationary landscape (“We’re getting close to Spring Break”); in the other, the self is stationary and time carries events toward and past the self like a conveyer belt (“Spring Break is getting closer”). Boroditsky hypothesized that activating one of these spatial concepts in people’s minds would produce parallel effects on their temporal perception. One group of participants was asked to propel themselves across a room in a rolling chair. This was intended to activate representations of the self’s forward movement. The others pulled the chair toward themselves with a rope, bringing to mind salient images of approaching objects. In an ostensibly unrelated task, participants were asked an ambiguous question: “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now that it has been rescheduled?” Take a moment and think about how you would answer this question. Did Wednesday’s meeting move forward to Friday, or did it move forward to Monday? As Boroditsky and colleagues expected, participants’ answer depended on which spatial configuration was salient. Those who had just experienced forward spatial motion were more likely to perceive Wednesday’s meeting as moved to Friday—they imagined hurtling forward in the week; those who experienced approaching objects perceived the meeting as moved to Monday. The effect flows both ways: People move their bodies forward when thinking about the future and backward when thinking about the past (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010). It would be difficult to explain these effects as simply due to conventional ways of talking about time. On the contrary, the findings suggest that conceptions of time are systematically structured around spatial concepts. Put another way, if our conception of time were not firmly grounded in spatial ideas, then there would be no reason to predict that temporal cognitions and bodily movements influence each other in metaphor-consistent ways.

6  Jaynes’s Challenge

A concern may be lodged at this point: Even if we do conceptualize time in spatial terms, who cares? How is that relevant to real-world concerns? One answer is that it matters for how people imagine their future and their motivation to achieve their long-term goals. People often represent a desired future goal in the form of a possible identity—an image of the self that one could become, such as “me as successful student” and “me as physically fit” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Conjuring up an image of a desired possible identity is sometimes enough to motivate goal-directed action in the present, but this is not always the case (Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004). For example, imagining a version of oneself as academically accomplished, physically fit, or professionally successful may boost optimism and positive feelings yet fail to prompt the person to hit the books, gym, or career counseling center in the here and now (Gonzales, Burgess, & Mobilio, 2001; Kirk et al., 2012; Strauss, Griffin, & Parker, 2012; Vansteenkiste, Simons, Soenens, & Lens, 2004). According to Oyserman (2015), the critical and often missing element needed to increase goal engagement is the perception of a strong connection between a salient possible identity and one’s current identity. That is, people must believe that their choices and actions in the present can help to realize a better version of themselves in the future. If this connection feels weak, then effortful activities like homework and exercising can feel like chores that can be put off until later. The question then becomes how to help people appreciate the identity connection needed for engagement. This is challenging because this connection is an inherently abstract concept that can be difficult to grasp. It cannot be observed with the senses and it refers to hypothetical outcomes projected far into the future. Metaphor use may be helpful here. We can encourage people to conceptualize goal pursuit metaphorically as a physical journey along a continuous path leading up to their possible identity. Why might this work? The key idea is that activating this journey metaphor prompts people to draw on their knowledge of prototypical journeys, even if they are not consciously aware of doing so. And one thing that people know about journeys is that the path in front of them designates an ordered sequence of steps that they must take to move from “here” (current location) to “there” (destination). Using this knowledge as a scaffold, they can visualize concretely how their current activities fit into a sequence of actions necessary to attain a possible identity. That is, with a continuous, bounded path virtually laid out in front of them, they can vividly see that each of the “steps” they take in the moment is highly relevant to reaching their “destination.” This strengthened identity connection should motivate people to invest effort into those “steps” or activities. In a series of studies testing this possibility, Landau and colleagues (2014) asked college freshmen to think about themselves in the future as an academically accomplished graduate, standing proud at the commencement ceremony after four years of stellar performance. Then, one group was led to visualize that “accomplished graduate” identity metaphorically as a destination on a physical

Jaynes’s Challenge  7

journey representing their college career. A second group dwelled further on their possible identity but without a provided metaphor. A third group visualized their possible identity metaphorically as an object located inside of a container that represents their senior year. Generally speaking, people know that objects in separate containers do not influence one another. Hence, we can hypothesize that students primed with the container metaphor would infer that they can postpone hitting the books until they “get out” of their freshman year and “in” their senior year (Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002; Li, Wei, & Soman, 2010). As predicted, compared to students primed with the literal and containermetaphoric interpretations, students led to visualize themselves as actively moving along a path toward their academic possible identity were more motivated to complete homework assignments, participate in classroom discussions, and study for tests. They eagerly consumed academic resources designed to help them succeed, such as online study guides and tutoring services. They even worked harder on a math test and solved about 12 percent more problems. This motivating effect was not a mere flash in the pan; when students took a final exam a full week after the priming manipulation, those who had imagined traveling on an academic journey received an A− grade on average, whereas those who visualized their goal as a contained entity hovered around a B+. These findings show that understanding time through spatial metaphors matters for people’s ideas of who they may become in the future, and how their future identities relate to their current identity, which in turn affects their motivation to take action now to achieve their long-term goals.

An Outline of the Book I have treated this case at some length because it encapsulates how the study of metaphor combines methods and discoveries from multiple disciplines to gain insights into how people create meaning and why it matters. Yet it is only an example. The point of this book is to show that metaphoric thinking exerts a significant and far-reaching influence on social thought and behavior. I hope to convince the reader that a serious effort to address the question “What makes people think and act the way they do?” is inadequate if it doesn’t include conceptual metaphor as a central factor.

The Takeaways Along the way we’ll encounter research findings, conceptual controversies, and practical applications. Underlying it all, though, are four core claims:

1. Metaphor Is Ubiquitous Metaphor is deeply woven into our sociocultural environments and daily experiences. Casual conversation, political rhetoric, and media messages are

8  Jaynes’s Challenge

teeming with thousands of conventional metaphors. They’re in your newspapers, your family dynamics, your day job, your music. Somewhere between 8 percent and 18 percent of English discourse is metaphorical, with an average of every seventh word being a metaphor (Steen et al., 2010a). In fact, metaphor is so widespread that it’s difficult to find expressions for abstract ideas that are not metaphorical. Metaphor pervades symbolic systems besides language that humans have invented to represent the world, such as laws, rituals, artifacts, architecture, city planning, gestures, and performing arts (for excellent interdisciplinary overviews, see Gibbs, 2006; Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009). Whenever people ask the questions—What is this thing? How does it work? How should I/we feel about it?—you can bet that they’ll engage metaphors in one or another mode of communication. What is more, metaphor is involved in virtually all aspects of human behavior that social psychologists study. It informs representations of individual concepts that lie at the center of our personal and collective lives, concepts like power, divinity, courage, patriotism, love, death. As a result, metaphor has the power to comfort, incite, mislead, titillate, and justify past actions. Metaphors also define more general domains such as emotions, social roles, personality traits, legal concepts, moral values, and social and political institutions. They saturate public discourse surrounding the major sociopolitical issues facing society today, including terrorism (Kruglanski, Crenshaw, Post, & Victoroff, 2007), immigration (O’Brien, 2003), war (Lakoff, 1992), abortion (Coulson, 2006), gender in business (Koller, 2004), cancer (Penson, Schapira, Daniels, Chabner, & Lynch, 2004), education (Cameron, 2003), and economic policy (for detailed qualitative analyses, see Charteris-Black, 2011; Musolff, 2004; Musolff & Zinken, 2009). More broadly, systems of metaphors reflect and influence our intellectual life, our culture, history, religion, and science, and even our innermost sense of self and the deep meaning we give to our lives. The upshot is that studying metaphor stands to enrich theory and research in virtually every corner of social psychology.

2. Metaphor Is a Cognitive Mechanism Most of us are taught in grade school that metaphor is one of “the figures of speech,” alongside synecdoche and aposiopesis, which uses a term for one thing to describe another because of some similarity between them. We were made to realize that when a rock musician laments how “every rose has its thorn,” he’s referring to the hazards of romantic love, not gardening. The implication is that metaphor is a decorative frill—a colorful but essentially useless embellishment to “normal” or “proper” language—and that it is the preserve of poets, artists, and high priests. Early philosophical views were not much more generous, demoting metaphor to a rhetorical gimmick or denouncing it as the enemy of reason.

166 2011

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Jaynes’s Challenge  9

50

FIGURE 1.3 

2014

2013

2012

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2007

0

 y year, number of empirical studies on metaphor published in peerB reviewed journals. Data from the PsycINFO database.

There’s only one problem with this picture. It isn’t true. The development of a formal theoretical framework, labeled conceptual metaphor theory, has revealed that metaphor is not a superfluous linguistic ornament. It is a cognitive tool that people routinely use to understand and experience abstractions in terms of different types of concepts that are relatively more concrete and comprehensible. The key mechanism, as we’ll see, is a mapping—a set of associations between elements of one concept and analogous elements of another. Through this mapping, knowledge is transferred across superficially dissimilar concepts. (The term “metaphor” derives from the Greek metaphora—literally “a transfer” or “a carrying over.”) For example, in Shakespeare’s metaphor “Juliet is the sun,” select properties associated with the sun—warmth, illumination, and the center of the known universe—are transferred to form a mental picture of Juliet as warm (kind), radiant (showing vitality), and valued (the center of Romeo’s life). Inspired by this theoretical perspective, researchers in social and cognitive psychology have articulated a number of methods for testing metaphor’s causal influence on social cognition and behavior. These methods surmount the limitations of linguistic analyses, enabling researchers to essentially “peak under the hood” of conventional language to test metaphor’s influence on cognitive processes such as visual perception, problem solving, memory, and moral judgment. Relevant studies first appeared around 2004 and have multiplied since. In Figure 1.3 we can see that the number of empirical studies on metaphor published in peer-reviewed journals has more than doubled over the past decade. This book documents the progress that has been made toward understanding conceptual metaphor and points to avenues for future theory development and research.

10  Jaynes’s Challenge

3. Metaphor Use Interacts With the Social and Cultural Context Metaphor use is a universal feature of human cognition. It is believed to have a universal function (to create and express meaning) and follow a universal process (the mapping introduced above; Chapter 2). That does not mean, however, that metaphor use is inevitable or manifests in the same fashion across contexts. It varies substantially in response to differing conditions in the surrounding social, cultural, and physical environment. These contexts partly determine whether people use metaphor, how a given metaphor is applied, and, at a broader cultural level, the content of common metaphors. These discoveries correct traditional perspectives that view metaphor as a fixed or inevitable feature of our cognitive system. I illustrate these points throughout the book with an array of research findings as well as observations of language, art, religion, and other symbol systems. We’ll see evidence that metaphor use varies across geographic regions, historical periods, and even the passing conditions of the person’s immediate environment, such as a flash of a word or a temporary sensation of physical warmth. I hope to show that identifying universal components as well as variations in metaphor use provides a deeper and richer theoretical context for explaining why similarities and differences exist between members of groups.

4. Metaphor Matters Metaphor’s role in thinking, feeling, and action has significant consequences for practically important outcomes such as moral judgments, creativity, political attitudes, compliance with health recommendations, and relationship satisfaction, to name just a few. Social metaphors can perpetuate stereotypes and dehumanizing representations of outgroups. They also make possible scientific discovery, artistic originality, and comic inspiration—the spontaneous flash of insight which shows a familiar situation or idea in a new light, and elicits a new response to it. Zooming out from the individual, dyads and groups rely on metaphors to negotiate a shared understanding of who “we” are, what we’re doing, and how we feel about it. As a result, metaphor has the potential to both facilitate and hinder coordinated social action, whether in the context of companies doing business, romantic partners resolving conflict, or entire societies managing social institutions and interacting with each other on the global stage.

Chapter Overview My overarching theme is the symbiotic relationship between metaphor studies and social psychology, defined as the scientific study of how the individual’s thinking, feeling, behavior, and interpersonal functioning are influenced by others, both real and imagined. Metaphor studies shed new light on the mechanisms

Jaynes’s Challenge  11

behind these phenomena, while social psychology places metaphor studies on firmer empirical ground. Chapter 2 sets the stage with an overview of conceptual metaphor theory. Researchers have made progress addressing the questions “What is metaphor?” and “How does it work in the mind?” Their insights serve as a framework for evaluating research findings and addressing unanswered questions in later chapters. The chapter then outlines how a metaphor-enriched perspective offers a fresh look on some enduring and contemporary issues in the study of social behavior. The starting point of Chapter 3 is social psychology’s core assumption that understanding and predicting social behavior require that we attend to the manner in which the relevant actors interpret or “construe” the stimulus situations that confront them (Asch, 1952; Bruner, 1957; Lewin, 1935). Metaphor theory contributes the notion that metaphor is an important part of the cognitive toolkit that people use to construct a meaningful understanding of the social world. Social psychology, for its part, provides research methods that can be used to test metaphor’s causal influence on information processing. We’ll survey evidence of metaphoric influences on a wide range of social-cognitive outcomes including person perception and moral judgments. A second core assumption of social psychology is that social behavior is determined by the combined influences of individual features of the person and specific aspects of the situation. This invites us to explore how metaphor use interacts with factors of the individual (e.g., personality traits) and the current context (e.g., salient goals). We start in Chapter 4 with a focus on epistemic motives, examining how people strategically employ metaphor to think how they want to think. Of course, this idea of the power of the situation—sometimes referred to as the “great lesson of social psychology” (Jones & Nisbett, 1971)—is too central to our purposes to confine it to one chapter. Thus, every subsequent chapter considers the broader context in which metaphoric thinking occurs. Chapter 5 focuses on the cultural context. We’ll try to explain why some metaphors are culturally widespread while others organize social life for some groups more than others. The next three chapters, 6 to 8, focus on metaphor’s role in three topics that have historically defined the field and which have seen some of the most exciting empirical developments in recent years: the self (encompassing identity, self-regulation, and self-relevant motivation); interpersonal relationships (attraction, commitment, communication, and so on), and intergroup relations (focusing on stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination). The final chapter zooms in on public discourse, particularly in the domains of politics and health. How do people respond to metaphors conveyed in campaign speeches, news articles, or a brochure in the dentist office? The outcomes are mixed: rhetorical metaphors can catalyze prosocial and healthy behaviors, but they can also misinform and breed conflict. We’ll consider ways to reap metaphor’s benefits while avoiding its pitfalls.

12  Jaynes’s Challenge

In choosing to focus on these topics, I don’t imply that other topics in the field, such as prosocial behavior and conformity, are unimportant or unamenable to a metaphor-enriched perspective. The exclusion owes to a lack of relevant research. I hope that the integration of ideas in this book will provoke researchers to examine other topics through a metaphor lens.

Intended Audiences This book serves four types of readers. The primary audience is students and researchers in social psychology interested in metaphor and the cognitive underpinnings of social behavior more broadly. Conceptual metaphors shape social-cognitive processes in ways that cannot be completely captured by traditional perspectives. In addition, conceptual metaphor theory emphasizes processes that are typically embodied in nature and is therefore consistent with recent calls for a greater focus on the body’s role in social cognition (Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005). The recent explosion of metaphor research has produced interesting findings, but may be seen as outpacing a focus on theory development. To remedy this situation, in every chapter I go beyond a summary of findings and continually ask “What’s next?” I invite the reader to step back and consider theoretical and empirical questions that need to be addressed if we are to have a complete understanding of the nature and significance of metaphor in social life. We’ll also keep our eye on applications of metaphor research to real-world problems. A second audience consists of professional researchers and students whose interests are in a particular topic, whether defined in process- or content-related terms. Conceptual metaphor theory advances understanding of several psychological processes including person perception, attitude formation, decision making, and autobiographical memory. In terms of content areas, metaphor studies offer new ways of thinking about the self, intergroup relations, political psychology, morality, and culture, among other topics. I hope that this book supplies a fertile set of discoveries from which the researcher can reap a rich harvest of fruitful ideas. Third, the book will benefit researchers in multiple fields outside of social psychology—including linguistics, anthropology, communication, and philosophy— who recognize the value of empirically based accounts of how people think about and influence one another. The past few years have seen an explosion of scholarly interest in metaphor in disciplines ranging from aesthetics to legal studies to neuroscience (Gibbs, 2006; Feldman, 2006). A metaphor-enriched social psychology can serve as a meeting ground for integrating insights across these disciplines to acquire a richer understanding of how everyday meaning making arises from interactions between the brain, body, language, environment, and culture. This interdisciplinary reach was on display in our discussion of spatial metaphors of time. Cognitive linguists provided detailed analyses of metaphoric linguistic

Jaynes’s Challenge  13

expressions, identifying parallels and variations between language communities; anthropologists documented the metaphor’s expression in cultural products and practices; developmental psychologists charted changes in temporal representations; cognitive psychologists developed laboratory procedures for testing metaphoric influences experimentally; and social psychologists examined the consequences of metaphoric thinking for long-term goal engagement. From here we can open new lines of communication with researchers in political science, the humanities, education (Holme, 2004), and neuroscience (e.g., intriguing evidence that the right hemisphere plays a special role in metaphor processing; Coulson & Van Petten, 2007). And that’s just within the scope of a single metaphor. The fourth audience is simply anyone with an abiding curiosity about the workings of the human mind. How do we see, remember, feel, and interact with other people? Where does our sense of self come from? Why are people often stubbornly intolerant of dissimilar others? These are enduring questions about who we are and how we got that way. I hope that the knowledge contained in this book will throw new light on them.

2 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY MEETS CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR

Conceptual metaphor maps dissimilar concepts. Understanding its role in cognition enriches social psychology, which reciprocates with methods to test metaphoric influences on perception, judgment, and behavior. “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor,” remarked Aristotle back in the fourth century BCE (trans. 2006). But don’t get too excited. His point was that public speakers who pepper their rhetoric with vivid metaphors can sway public opinion and get ahead in the debate circuit. For him, metaphor contributes only to the effect of a statement, the punchiness with which it gets through to an audience; it cannot help with the serious business of understanding reality. That’s because ancient Greek epistemology held that logos—clear, logical speech—was fundamentally adequate to describing pretty much anything in existence (Blumenberg, 2010). With the tone set in antiquity, metaphor remained ignored or marginalized for centuries to come. Enlightenment philosophers were outright scornful. Thomas Hobbes (1651/1968) and John Locke (1947/1689) accused metaphor of interfering with clear reasoning by using words in ways that deviate from their proper sense (see Chapter 4). In contexts where precise terminology is expected, such as scientific theory or legal policy, metaphor is to be avoided at all costs (for exceptions, see Jäkel, 1999). These killjoys did not ultimately prevail. Even the driest of medical texts, furniture instruction booklets, and—yes—Enlightenment philosophy is teeming with plenty of terms which are metaphorical when you stop to think about them.1 Still, today’s common wisdom inherited the traditional classification of metaphor among the ornaments of communication. It’s a trinket for spicing up a campaign slogan or rap lyric. The implication is that metaphor does not make

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  15

all that much difference to our lives. If it were suddenly to disappear, we would make judgments, form groups, solve problems, have sex, and do most of the things that we do just as before. But a vocal minority of theorists urges us to rethink metaphor’s nature and significance. One was Julian Jaynes (1976), whom we met in Chapter 1. He pointed out that even a casual glance at the etymology of common words reveals humankind’s efforts to understand and express reality using whatever concrete images made sense to them (see also Valéry, 1950). Consider the verb “to be.” On the surface it is as literal as words get, but it derives from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow.” Similarly, the English words “am” and “is” stem from the same root as the Sanskrit asmiy, “to breathe.” Jaynes is giddy at the implication: “It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it ‘breathes’” (p. 51). Jaynes was on to something. Detailed analyses of the world’s languages reveal that thousands of seemingly literal words and phrases trace back to comparisons between dissimilar things, suggesting that they were once discoveries before they became just part of the vernacular (e.g., Sweester, 1990). Does that mean that our ancestors clutched at crude metaphors, whereas our modern minds have upgraded to more exact forms of representation? Probably not. We witness in our time the birth of new terms climbing up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors. The “Internet,” for instance, is not literally a net or a web, nor is a “viral” video a virus. The metaphoric images give comprehensible form to abstruse digital thingamabobs. Others who underscored metaphor’s centrality in human affairs include Ernst Cassirer (1946), Susanne Langer (1979), and Hannah Arendt (1978). Each argued, in their own way, that metaphor pervades cognition and culture and buttressed this claim with analyses of communication, history, and phenomenology. Nietzsche (1873/1979) had already gone further to claim that because our minds cannot apprehend reality directly, what we take to be truth is assembled almost completely from metaphors. He flipped the ancient Greek epistemology on its head: Metaphor is now the engine of meaning and logos is the curio.

Metaphor as a Mental Mapping Early theorists stressed metaphor’s significance for cognition and culture, but they did not articulate how, at a basic cognitive level, metaphor creates meaning. This is exactly what cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (1980) accomplished in their landmark book Metaphors We Live By. In what is now commonly referred to as conceptual metaphor theory, Lakoff and Johnson provide a detailed account of how people use metaphor to understand

16  Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor

and experience abstractions. This account is consistent with scientific data at multiple levels including culture, language, learning, computer simulations, and the biology of neural circuits (Gentner, Holyoak, & Kokinov, 2001; Gibbs, 1994; Feldman, 2008; Lakoff, 1993; Ortony, 1993). Conceptual metaphor theory lays the groundwork for our investigation of metaphor’s significance in social life, so we need to outline its basic propositions (for a more complete presentation, see Kövecses, 2010). A conceptual metaphor consists of two superficially dissimilar concepts, one of which is understood in terms of the other.2 In these roles, the concepts have special names. The concept that people seek to understand is the target (also called the topic or tenor), and it is typically abstract, referring to entities and relations that cannot be directly observed with the senses. The other concept—the source (or vehicle)—is typically more concrete, referring to entities and relations that are perceptible and well understood. Many source concepts derive from familiar sensorimotor experiences and routine interactions with the physical environment, such as losing one’s balance, firmly grasping objects, moving toward destinations, and avoiding physical filth. Others represent commonplace, stereotyped knowledge acquired from one’s culture—schemas and event scripts for ideas like “downloading,” building construction, courtroom proceedings, baseball rules, and doing laundry. What does it mean to understand a target “in terms” of a source? Here we come to the key theoretical insight: Metaphor operates as a conceptual mapping, defined as a set of systematic associations between elements of the target and analogous elements of the source. This process is depicted in Figure 2.1. The mapped elements can be referents of the concepts or attributes of these referents (e.g., shape, weight, duration) as well as causal relations and other relational knowledge common to the structure of both concepts. By accessing this mapping, people can draw on their knowledge about the source as a framework for understanding and experiencing the target, even though the two concepts are unrelated at a surface level. Target concept containing pieces of knowledge about characteristic features, properties, and their relations

FIGURE 2.1 

Source concept containing pieces of knowledge about characteristic features, properties, and their relations

Depiction of a mental mapping.

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  17

Mappings Facilitate Understanding The aptness of the term “mapping” becomes apparent when we think about how we use geographical maps. A map of the globe, for example, affords a richer understanding than a mere list of geographical entities. That’s because the relations among points on the map correspond to the spatial relations out in the world. The distances between the point labeled “New York” and other points on the map correspond to the distances between (actual) New York City and its neighboring regions. Or consider the button console in my Volkswagen that is used to adjust the seat’s position (Figure 2.2). It affords a similar relational mapping. On the surface, the buttons and the car seat have little in common. The buttons are small, hard, and fragile; the seat is big, plush, and durable. But it’s their shared structure—a pattern of relations among certain features—that tells me how things work: Pivoting the top button causes corresponding changes in the angle of the seat back; pushing the bottom button to the left and right adjusts the seat’s distance to the wheel. As these examples illustrate, metaphor facilitates understanding by highlighting and downplaying select elements of the target. The button console permits four operations: pivot and push, forward or backward. These are like mental “slots” that focus my attention to only four properties of the car seat. This diverts my attention from other of the seat’s elements, from its color to its association with Volkswagen’s emissions scandal in 2015. But what I lose in cognitive fecundity I gain in seat mastery. Virtually any chart, diagram, or model—whether it is meant to represent the wiring of a radio set or the structure of a molecule or the routes of the subway—is based on the same method: transfer a system of relations from one domain to the other to highlight selected features of the target and conceal the rest (Black, 1962). What makes metaphor unique is that it borrows a system of relations from a source that, on the surface, is very different from the target.

FIGURE 2.2 

The parts and relations of this button console map onto my car seat, making it easy to adjust the seat’s position. Image: Wikimedia Commons

18  Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor

It is worth noting that a given concept is not stuck in the role of target or source. It can assume either role depending on what we seek to understand in the current situation. Switching roles does, however, change which subsets of elements participate in the mapping. Take the concept death. We often treat it as a target concept because it has stubbornly mysterious features: How is it that there exists a full-blown person at one moment and an inert body the next? We look for answers in concrete source concepts such as sleep or movement between locations (“She’s gone, passed on, departed, on the other side, in Heaven”). Compare that with your co-worker’s lament that “the printer is dead.” Here, death serves as a source concept to understand the target machine malfunction. In this second mapping, the mystery of extinguished personhood does not participate; what does is the fact that dead things are immobile and unresponsive. Semantic connections between different subsets of knowledge alternate and recombine to help us make sense of what’s happening now. We revisit this idea in Chapter 7 to see how a close relationship can be a mystifying target or a handy source for grasping remote concepts.

Mappings Guide Action In the evolutionary sweepstakes, our species got an impressive capacity for reflexive self-consciousness—the ability to take oneself as the object of one’s attention and thought—as well as the capacities to plan, think autobiographically, and envision hypothetical realities in the future. All this provides us with a tremendous degree of flexibility and choice, a freedom to respond to a given situation in a much wider range of ways than is possible for any other animal. But it comes with the cost of having to figure out what we want, who we should be, who we ideally want to be, and how to accomplish all that in a shifting and often uncertain environment. Metaphors help by mapping the target situation onto well-learned schemas borrowed from other domains. We use source knowledge as a template for reasoning about possible actions to take and what goals to take into account. In this way, metaphor not only aids understanding but also guides self-regulation: the processes through which the self alters its own responses and inner states in a goal-directed manner (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007; Chapter 6). As an illustration, Zoe conceives of her “true” self metaphorically as an “inner core” lodged inside of the “external shell” of her public image. This conception is likely to orient Zoe to prefer social situations where she feels comfortable “opening up” and being herself over those that make her “retreat into her shell.” If she construes herself with a different metaphor—say, as an actor donning different masks in the “theater” of public life—then she’ll be less likely to seek out authentic self-expression and more comfortable with “playing her role.” Zooming out from the individual, we see that metaphor guides collective action. Whether a romantic couple, company, or an entire society, social actors

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  19

have the best chance of coordinating their actions if they look at the situation from the same vantage point (Echterhoff, Higgins, & Levine 2009; Newcombe, 1959; Weick, 1979). Negotiating a shared metaphor contributes to this effort by structuring the situation around a clearly articulated source (Cameron, 2008; Gibson & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2001). Coulson (2006) illustrated how this works in her fascinating analysis of trashcan basketball (pp. 115–118). Imagine that your office mate tosses a crumpled piece of paper into the waste basket and announces, “Two points!” You rise to the occasion, leaping at the waste basket for a lay-up. A spirited game of trashcan basketball ensues. What seems like a simple game, though, requires a dynamic negotiation of conceptual mappings. You and your office mate spontaneously cue up roughly equivalent schemas for basketball. Even more impressive is that you map those schemas in essentially the same manner to structure the current situation and your actions. Your recreation is quite literally a re-creation as you tacitly define what does and does not exist: •• •• •• ••

The ball is a paper wad. The net is Lauren’s waste basket. The three-point line is the water cooler. Justin’s leg counts as backboard.

These and other correspondences provide a basis for answering the questions: Who are “we”? What kind of situation are we in? What are we doing here? That relieves you from the need for a lengthy discussion about every feature of the game. You both observe a code of behavior—the so-called “rules of the game”—which establishes shared norms (e.g., turn-taking, point-counting) and defines the range of permissible moves. The mapping is structured yet adaptable. You and your office mate are capable of swiftly oscillating from one frame of reference to the other and back as you call up elements of basketball and coordinate whether and how they are applied to the current context. For instance, sensing that paper wads don’t bounce, you tacitly agree to relax basketball’s rules for ball traveling. Even though you are playing against each other, the shared metaphor orients you and another person toward the same subjective reality, making organized social action possible. Metaphor is not just for thinking; it is also for doing.

Alternative Sources A given target can be mapped onto different sources. Love, for example, can be conceived of as a journey, a plant that needs to be nurtured, or for singer Pat Benatar, a battlefield. In another example, Kövecses (2005, p. 27) points out that intensity can be mapped onto multiple source concepts, as reflected in conventional linguistic expressions:

20  Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor

Intensity is heat: “There was heated political debate”; “The video fired up activists on both sides.” Intensity is speed: “The economy has been sluggish, but we’re seeing a sudden leap.” Intensity is strength (of physical effect): “Cheryl was hit hard by layoffs.” Because mappings are partial, mapping a target onto one source will highlight some elements and downplay or ignore others, whereas mapping that same target onto an alternate source will pick out a different set of elements. In this way, alternate metaphors produce systematic changes in the way people think about the target. This process has practical far-reaching consequences. To illustrate, understanding a slum community in terms of a “diseased” area may transfer knowledge that diseased tissue must be either treated or excised, implying that the correct response is to destroy the slums and replace them with different residential neighborhoods. In contrast, conceiving of slums as withering plants may downplay that destructive response and even promote efforts to help the community “grow” and “blossom” (Schön, 1993).

When Metaphors Go Bad When British cartographers drew up maps of North America in the early eighteenth century, they took some liberties and drew boundaries around territories in a way that emphasized British sovereignty and diminished others’ claims to property. The maps turned out to be crude caricatures inspired by nationalistic bias. Likewise, metaphor can go a long way to strengthen your subjective sense of understanding, but it is not guaranteed to be accurate or to steer you toward your best self. Imagine that a politician persuades Jason to conceive of civil rights (the target) metaphorically as a type of physical journey. This prompts Jason to put analogous elements of the two concepts into correspondence—as depicted in Figure 2.3. He finds this helpful as it allows him to build on familiar knowledge of goal-directed motion along a path to inform how he thinks and feels about civil rights. He can represent civil rights activism as having a starting point in predecessors’ pioneering efforts. He sees an egalitarian society as a destination, and evaluates historical events either as creating obstacles or moving society in the right direction. So far, so good. But ultimately Jason is basing his conception of civil rights on an irrelevant concept, without due consideration of the target issue’s unique attributes. Bits and pieces of journey knowledge may find their way into Jason’s reasoning about civil rights, biasing his attitudes. For example, Jason knows that a person on a journey usually has to pass over difficult terrain before reaching a destination. Transferring this belief, he’s convinced that the hardships suffered by civil rights activists were justified and even necessary. Or, because he knows

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  21

Civil Rights Supporters Political Goals

Travelers Destinations Impediments to Motion

Political Difficulties Lack of Purpose FIGURE 2.3 

Journey

Lack of Direction

 epiction of a portion of the mental mapping created by the metaphor D civil rights is a journey.

that a vehicle on a journey is controlled by the individual in the driver’s seat, he blames failed civil rights legislation on a sole individual and ignores systematic factors. At the broader level of the group, metaphor use can be a driving force behind bad decisions and poor judgments. Theorists argue that metaphors like good is big, war is a game, and sex is a conquest have historically spurred groups to pursue selfish, short-term, and limited goals that often turn out to have disastrous consequences for collective well-being and the planetary environment (e.g., Charteris-Black, 2011; Lakoff, 1992; Lakoff, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Voss, Kennet, Wiley, & Schooler, 1992). Such metaphors may also be seized on after the fact to justify bad behavior. Beyond pushing attitudes in this or that direction, metaphor use can “harden” attitudes, portraying a course of action as self-evidently appropriate. To illustrate, most people would agree that an infestation of vermin in one’s house is unacceptable and that one is justified in taking extreme steps to remove them. What happens, then, when Group A conceives of Group B metaphorically as vermin infesting the “home” country? They may be convinced that their prejudice against Group B needs no more justification than does any sensible person’s prejudice against vermin. Hence, to change their position would be just as unthinkable as welcoming vermin. This idea is echoed in philosopher Roland Barthes’ (2012) claim that metaphor tends to represent cultural constructs (e.g., the state, criminals) in terms of “natural” entities (e.g., organisms, wild beasts). This has the effect of “freezing” those constructs, leading people to treat as fixed and natural things which are more accurately viewed as transitory and historically contingent. Earlier we saw how metaphor helps people cooperate: it orients people toward a common goal or problem, enables or constrains particular patterns of interaction, and generally creates a frame of reference for coordinated action.

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The flip side of the same coin is that metaphor use may be a significant source of conflict and inefficiency. In the political realm, for example, discourse surrounding major sociopolitical issues is dominated by extreme, polarizing perspectives. This may stem in part from people’s tendency to embrace simplifying, concretizing metaphoric conceptions of the issues (see Chapter 9). A metaphor can boil down a contentious issue to a reductive caricature, preventing political parties from opening up a thoughtful debate that acknowledges the issue’s complexity and nuance. Viewpoints rooted in metaphor can seem immune from argument and refutation. This leads political parties to become mired in ideological gridlock and policy stagnation. Metaphors can hamstring collective action outside the political realm. If individuals or groups come together to interact about a business deal, military action, marriage, or class project, and they are relying on incompatible metaphors, they may not realize that those metaphors are working “behind the scenes” to structure their understanding of the situation, orienting them toward divergent goals, scripts for behavior, and criteria for effective action. Thus, even if they agree on many of the same “facts” of their situation, they may continually talk past each other. Even if people share the same metaphor at a generic level, coordination can break down if they have in mind different ideas about the source. Returning to our trashcan basketball example, if you learned about basketball from watching the NBA, whereas your office mate was raised on a steady diet of pickup b-ball in the parks of Brooklyn, your respective mappings will entail different and perhaps conflicting ranges of possible action. “What’s with the elbows to my face and trash talking?” you protest; “Hey,” your office mate fires back, “You wanted to play basketball, right?”

Social Psychology and Metaphor Studies: Stronger Together Now that we’ve sketched the outlines of conceptual metaphor theory, one may well ask: Why should any of this concern a social psychologist? My response is that integrating metaphor studies into social psychology offers a fresh perspective on several theoretical and empirical issues that have occupied researchers from the earliest days of the field to its current state. Of course, a final verdict on the scientific utility of a “metaphor-enriched” social psychology will have to wait on the empirical evidence presented in the chapters to come. But an initial survey of where the two fields intersect will help to establish criteria for what counts as a novel and practically useful advance in our understanding of social behavior.

Meaning Making One of social psychology’s core premises is that understanding social behavior requires that we attend to people’s subjective construction of reality (Asch, 1952;

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  23

Bruner, 1957; Lewin, 1935). In other words, if we are to have any chance of predicting and explaining why and how people do-what-they-do-when-theydo-it, then we have to start with what things are like from their point of view. Jennifer got a “D” on her math exam. Objectively speaking, this is not a desirable outcome, yet that alone doesn’t tell us how she’ll respond. Perhaps she is relieved that she passed because she has assimilated the cultural stereotype that women are poor at math. Or perhaps she attributes her performance to external obstacles, such as the professor’s trick questions, thereby buffering her self-esteem from the threatening implications of her poor score. Given that people think, feel, and act with relation to their subjective construction of reality, the big question becomes: What cognitive processes do people use to construct a meaningful understanding of the people, events, and ideas that they encounter in the social world? Social psychology’s prevailing account, discussed in Chapter 3, holds that people process social information using schemas: mental structures that contain abstract representations of accumulated knowledge about categories of similar stimuli3 (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Förster & Liberman, 2007; Higgins, 1996). When people face a moral conundrum, for example, they access their morality schema containing memories of moral transgressions, culturally learned beliefs about the personality correlates of moral behavior, and other bits of knowledge. This enables them to interpret and evaluate the current conundrum by relating it to what they know about stimuli of the same kind. Despite its intuitive appeal and ample empirical support, this prevailing account may not capture the dynamic complexity of human cognition. Online meaning construction undeniably depends on the standard processes of categorization and schema application, but it also critically involves mental leaps—shifting, combining, and blending knowledge from different domains to understand and express the world (Coulson, 2001; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Hofstadter, 2001; Holyoak & Thagard, 1994). One such leap is the cross-domain mapping created by metaphor. Of course, there is nothing magical about the mechanism: Like a garden variety schema, metaphor applies prior knowledge to interpret the current situation, highlighting (making salient) some features of the target stimulus and downplaying or ignoring others. But it’s unique in that it accesses knowledge from a superficially unrelated domain rather than from similar stimuli within the same domain. Put more starkly, metaphor is essentially false—the target is not the source in a literal sense—but nevertheless helps in constructing a meaningful representation. By emphasizing these points, metaphor studies suggest that a complete account of the meanings people give to social concepts requires that we look beyond schemas. We also need to model how they systematically structure those concepts around remote concepts—those that, on the surface, are unrelated and even irrelevant. What does social psychology bring to the table? Note that most empirical assessments of conceptual metaphor theory come from observational studies of

24  Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor

written and spoken discourse (Gibbs, 1994). Researchers use digital tools that track metaphoric words and phrases across different languages, cultures, and historical periods (Alexander & Bramwell, 2014; Deignan, 2008; Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayr, & Pasma, 2010a). These analyses, minutely detailed yet broad in scope, uncover patterns that would be unlikely if metaphoric language was nothing more than fancy talk invoked idiosyncratically on limited occasions. But even the most rigorous analyses of ordinary language use suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation. It may very well be the case that people employ metaphoric language as a matter of convention without necessarily accessing an underlying cognitive mapping (Haser, 2005; McGlone, 2007; Murphy, 1996; Pinker, 2007). Fortunately, social psychologists have articulated empirical strategies that can be used to test metaphor’s causal impact on social thought and behavior.

Metaphoric Transfer Strategy One strategy is based on the reasoning that if people use a concrete concept (say, vertical position) to represent—and not just talk about—an abstraction (social status), then manipulating how they understand or experience that concrete concept (e.g., shifting attention upwards) should transfer across the metaphor’s mapping, changing how they process analogous elements of the abstraction in ways that correspond to source knowledge (e.g., increasing perceived status). If, alternatively, metaphor use does not influence cognition, there would be no reason to expect such effects, because people’s representations of the target would not be systematically structured around knowledge of the source. Social psychologists are well equipped to assess this broad hypothesis because they have a large toolbox of laboratory procedures for manipulating concepts’ salience and meaning. These include primes—both implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious)—that activate embodied states (e.g., physical warmth), semantic content (e.g., words related to journeys), and nonverbal associations (e.g., words presented in light versus dark font colors). On the outcome side of the equation, they have developed numerous paradigms and validated measures for assessing a wide range of psychological processes (e.g., attention, memory) and social phenomena (e.g., self-evaluations, intergroup attitudes, relationship satisfaction). It’s important to note that the metaphoric transfer strategy presupposes that a metaphor is chronically accessible—always there, on the periphery of consciousness. That’s why we expect that variations in source knowledge will automatically transfer over to produce parallel changes in target processing. There are likely to be other cases, though, where the situation determines whether a given metaphor is accessible and used in online processing. These cases demand another empirical strategy.

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  25

Metaphoric Framing Strategy Generally speaking, a framing is a set of reference points expected to guide how people think and make judgments (e.g., Kahneman & Tversky’s 1979 work on gain-loss frames; for overview, see Entman, 1993). By framing the same event or topic in different ways, messages select some aspects of an idea and make them more salient in thought, which promotes a particular interpretation, evaluation, or guide to action. A metaphoric framing is a message comparing an abstract concept to a superficially unrelated concept that is relatively more concrete. This comparison can be conveyed in metaphoric linguistic expressions. For example, Ottati and colleagues (1999) exposed college students to an essay framing a senior thesis requirement in terms of sports competition: “The senior thesis requirement is rapidly becoming a marker that distinguishes competitive institutions from the academic little league. . . . If college students want to play ball with the best, they shouldn’t lose out on this opportunity” (italics added). Images can also be used. Landau and colleagues (2014) showed participants a political cartoon depicting the 2008 financial crisis as either a crashed vehicle or a passing storm. What are we looking for when we expose people to metaphoric framing? We’re not asking them explicitly to think about the target in terms of the source. Instead, we reason that a message comparing some target elements to source elements—a subset of connecting lines in Figure 2.1—will trigger a cascade of other associations entailed by that metaphor’s mapping. If so, then when we ask message recipients to interpret or evaluate another target element that was not mentioned explicitly in the original message, their responses should correspond to their source knowledge. Let’s illustrate how this strategy yields testable hypotheses. Check out Figure 2.4. Imagine that Jennifer hears on TV that a military battle in Afghanistan “upped the ante.” By comparing an element of military conflict to an element of games requiring bets, such as poker, this metaphoric framing may activate the broader conceptual mapping between the concepts war and games, which includes other links between pairs of elements. This indirectly shapes Jennifer’s attitudes toward unspoken aspects of the war. For instance, because she knows that a player wins a game by accumulating the most points, she may infer that the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan was a successful military operation insofar as the U.S. military accrued more “points”—that is, enemy casualties—than the Taliban resistance (Boettcher & Cobb, 2006; Lakoff, 1992). The original message did not explicitly describe what constitutes a successful military operation. Instead, the predicted inference would be based on a piece of knowledge about games sneaking across the mapping activated by comparing another element of war to another game element. If the message had compared the battle to another source, such as a chapter in a story, or described it in literal terms, Jennifer would construe the target issue differently. In our example, she may be less likely to gauge military success

26  Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor

Exposure to a metaphoric framing maps a salient feature of the target (e.g., war) onto an analogous feature of the source (e.g., a point-based game).

War A battle

A Point-Based Game Increased stake into the pool

This can prompt observers to map other target and source features,even at an implicit level of awareness. In this way, metaphor use systematically influences observers’ target attitudes in ways that are consistent with their source knowledge.

War A battle

Enemy casualties

FIGURE 2.4 

A Point-Based Game Increased stake into the pool

Points needed to win

How does exposure to a metaphoric framing shape target processing?

in quantifiable terms and more attuned to the qualitative costs of war measured in suffering and death. Many studies have demonstrated metaphoric influences on social-cognitive processes using these metaphoric transfer and framing strategies. Chapter 3 surveys these exciting discoveries.

Social Psychology Meets Conceptual Metaphor  27

Social Influence A central topic in social psychology is persuasion: intentional efforts to change other people’s attitudes. Metaphor studies reveal that persuasive messages commonly employ metaphor. For example, John Boehner, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, compared the federal budget to a typical household budget: “Every family ought to balance its budget. Washington should balance its budget as well” (Boehner, 2013). The current Speaker, Paul Ryan, echoed this metaphor: “Our plan lets Washington spend only what it takes in. This is how every family tries to live, in good times and in bad” (Ryan, 2013). These are not just from-the-hip locutions; political actors spend millions annually to design metaphors that “frame the debate” and thereby influence public opinion and policy makers to favor their desired policies (Lakoff, 1996, 2004). Outside the political realm, metaphors are used in several contexts to influence how observers think and feel about a wide range of issues. We find them in news reports, health communications, educational materials, interpersonal interactions, courtroom testimony, and the endless parade of images in the mass media. Companies often hand-pick metaphors to reinvigorate business or shed an unsavory image. So what? Commonsense wisdom would seem to suggest that metaphoric phrases and imagery are simply means of adding color or panache to a communication— they don’t affect observers’ thinking in any substantive way. But emerging evidence suggests a very different picture. Even incidental exposure to a rhetorical metaphor can change observers’ attitudes, often in very specific directions. How? By prompting them to recruit knowledge of the metaphor’s source to make judgments and decisions about the target issue, even though the two concepts are unrelated at a surface level. This becomes a real problem when a widespread metaphor leads observers to make poor judgments and bad decisions about the issues that affect people’s lives. For example, the key implication of the household metaphor just cited is that, just as families have to live within their means, the government must do the same by cutting back on spending for social programs. However intuitive, this implication contrasts sharply with the recommendations of many influential economists who urged vast stimulus spending to revive a flagging economy (Krugman, 2012; Stiglitz, 2010). Traditional models of persuasion observe that attitudes can be influenced by peripheral cues—aspects of the communication (e.g., communicator attractiveness) that are irrelevant to the true merits of the position advocated in the message (Chaiken, Wood, & Eagly, 1996; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). This occurs particularly when observers lack the ability or motivation to think carefully about the message’s central arguments. From this perspective, a metaphor used in a persuasive communication can be seen as a type of peripheral cue because it compares things that are, strictly

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speaking, unrelated. It influences attitudes by associating the attitude object with affectively charged ideas from another domain. But unlike other peripheral cues that nudge observers to link the attitude object with positive or negative stimuli in a fairly simple associative fashion, a metaphor can guide recipients to interpret the target systematically in terms of the source. It leverages their schematic knowledge of the source as a model for the target’s inner workings. In that way it can become part of the central argument, rather than a peripheral add-on, creating a unique persuasive force. Take this vignette: A middle-aged son visits his mother during Thanksgiving week and, on Day 4, she enthusiastically proposes going to the zoo. The son, weary from three days of constant bickering, tries to persuade her to forget it, arguing, “We’re at half-time so let’s hit the locker rooms and stretch out for the second half.” By invoking football terms, the son is not employing a peripheral cue, strictly speaking: Mom doesn’t have strong positive or negative feelings toward football that might color her attitudes toward the zoo, and the son knows this. Instead, he is importing a logic from the sports domain—a prefabricated scheme that defines how the parts of a football game interrelate. Anyone vaguely familiar with football knows that a half-time break is standard practice and arguably necessary to keep players healthy. Applying that unshakeable logic to make judgments about Thanksgiving week portrays canceling the zoo outing as the obvious right choice, even though it manipulates, misstates, and simply omits facts. After all, when it comes to parent–child relations, the healthier choice might be more shared activities, not separation. The upshot is that observers may stand behind familiar metaphors even when (or especially when) they believe they are thinking deeply about the information they are exposed to. As Nietzsche (1979/1873) pointed out, what seem to people to be self-evident truths are often fossilized metaphors which they have forgotten are metaphors. Chapter 9 focuses on metaphor’s persuasive influence and its implications for understanding attitude formation and change.

Motivated Social Cognition Social psychologists lean on metaphors to describe how people function, and few have influenced their thinking more than the comparison of human cognition to the information processing performed by a digital computer— encoding, storage, retrieval, and so on (Gardner, 1987). Although it inspired decades of research, the computer metaphor, like all metaphors, gives a partial and potentially skewed picture of the target. It downplays something very basic about human beings: We are in the grip of drives, needs, and motives, both conscious and unconscious. Unlike a computer passively executing commands with no vested interest in the output, we are intensely attracted to some people, ideas, and situations, and as averse to others. We orient our lifestyle

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around long-term goals. Our “hot” impulses and urges animate us, sometimes provoking irrational, disproportionate, and self-destructive reactions. Our motives interact with metaphor in interesting ways. A metaphor can transfer emotionally charged constructs like desires and fears from a source to a dissimilar target. This injects the target with a motivational force that it may otherwise not have. For example, if members of a pro-environmental group conceptualize deforestation in terms of “raping” the earth, they may be guided by the metaphor to oppose the practice with the same insistent, urgent vigor with which they maintain personal safety (Rohrer, 1995). Other cases of motivation transfer have been widely studied. We’re discovering that people’s gut-level aversion to physical dirt and pollution partly fuels their outrage over moral transgressions that are not “dirty” in any literal sense, such as stealing money from a donations box (Chapters 3 and 8).4 The theoretical implication is that if we try to explain motivated social cognition by attending exclusively to people’s conception of the target per se, we’ll miss a large part of what’s driving their thought and action. One practical implication is that well-placed metaphors can strengthen interventions designed to motivate positive change. Chapter 1 introduced evidence showing that cuing a metaphor can boost academic engagement. In Chapter 9 we’ll see how it can promote healthful habits by lending comprehensible form to abstract health risks. Social psychology returns the favor in two ways. Its models specify how motivational states influence whether a person employs a given heuristic, stereotype, or other cognitive device. In this way, it corrects the mainstream perspective that metaphor is a fixed feature of our conceptual system by highlighting variations due to factors of the situation, personality, and culture (Goatly, 2007; Kövecses, 2015). Toward this end, we’ll explore (in Chapter 4) how metaphor use responds to three epistemic motives described in Kruglanski’s theory of lay epistemology (2004): the desire for a simple, clearcut understanding and a corresponding aversion to confusion and ambiguity; the desire to understand something in a way that is consistent with previously held beliefs, values, and ideological commitments; and the desire to achieve an accurate, truthful understanding. Second, social psychologists have, in the last thirty years, spearheaded research on motives related to the self, building on the seminal insights of ego psychology and existential philosophy (Greenberg, Koole, & Pyszczynski, 2004; Koole, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2006; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2012). People are motivated to create and maintain a coherent narrative sense of self over time; to enhance and defend self-esteem; and to grow—that is, to cultivate inner potentialities, seek out optimal challenges, and integrate new experiences into the self-concept. Going one step further, we’ll see (in Chapter 6) that people satisfy these motives by creating and subscribing to metaphoric conceptions of reality and their lived experience.

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The broader point is, social psychology’s insights into motivation yield hypotheses regarding the degree and direction of metaphor use that would be difficult to formulate solely on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory.

Embodied Social Cognition The computer metaphor not only minimized motivation, it also reproduced the philosophical division between mind and body that stretches back to antiquity and was codified in Cartesian epistemology. Since the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s, many psychologists assumed that an intelligent system can be functionally described as the manipulation of arbitrary signs and symbols (the “software”), independent of the physical medium in which it is implemented (the “hardware”). From their perspective, the person’s body—their direct sensory, motor, and affective interactions with the physical environment—does not participate directly in information processing (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996). Social psychologists toed the line but eventually discovered that “higher”level cognitive processes interact with “lower”-level bodily sensations and actions in ways that didn’t jibe with a dualistic approach: even incidental physiological changes determined emotional states (Schachter, 1964; Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988); sympathetic arousal informs attitude strength (Zanna & Cooper, 1974); and abstract social concepts are implicitly tied to motoric routines (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Fortunately the intellectual climate within psychology has changed over the past few decades, and the view of minds as disembodied information-processing machines now looks both tired and incomplete. The field has taken heed of a comment by the biologist Francis Crick (1994): “There is one fact about the brain that is so obvious it is seldom mentioned: It is attached to the rest of the body and communicates with it” (p. 81). Hence the recent explosion of books and research articles on embodied or grounded cognition (Blascovich & Seery, 2007; Gibbs, 2006; Johnson, 1987; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, KrauthGruber, & Ric, 2005). Within social cognition, the most influential embodiment theory is Barsalou’s (1999, 2008) perceptual symbols systems model. The basic idea is that concepts contain representations of bodily states (e.g., sensations) that customarily occur during interactions with relevant stimuli and contexts. These inputs are not translated into abstract symbols, but are recorded by systems of neurons in sensory-motor regions of the brain (see also Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). As a result, thinking about those concepts involves the simulation, or neural reactivation, of associated bodily states, even when the individual is not currently interacting with relevant stimuli. Damasio (1994, 2001) similarly proposed that reactivated bodily states, experienced as emotions, serve as a marker or cue that informs the person’s interpretation of the current situation. The novelist Paul Auster (1990) gives us an eloquent description of an embodied simulation:

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Every once in a while, Quinn would suddenly feel what it had been like to hold the three-year-old boy in his arms—but that was not exactly thinking, nor was it even remembering. It was a physical sensation, an imprint of the past that had been left in his body, and he had no control over it. (p. 6) Like embodied simulation, metaphor is a mechanism by which bodily states inform representations of abstractions, with consequences for perception, judgment, and behavior. Yet they are distinct. In a nutshell, embodied simulation is an intraconceptual mechanism: Bodily states are represented as part of the concept they refer to, and they got there through direct sensorimotor experiences with stimuli of the same kind. In the hypothetical case of Quinn just mentioned, his concept of his son includes tactile and proprioceptive representations about his son. Metaphor is an interconceptual mechanism: Target and source operate independently, yet the source can serve as a schematic framework for thinking about analogous elements of the target. For example, a person has an elaborate schema for physical cleanliness, encompassing theories of disease and visceral disgust reactions. By means of metaphor, she can apply that cleanliness schema to make sense of abstractions as remote as immigration and guilt. Otherwise, it exists on its own (these points are elaborated in Landau, Keefer, & Meier, 2011; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Landau, Robinson, & Meier, 2014). The mechanistic particulars need not concern us here; what is important for now is the common ground between these perspectives, namely the notion that the meanings people give to abstract social concepts are inextricably bound up with their bodily states and interactions with the physical world. In this sense, metaphor studies counter the idea that social cognition can be understood in terms of abstract, symbolic information processing independent of having the particular types of bodies that we have.

Culture In the past few decades social psychologists discovered that to understand social cognition and behavior, they must relocate them within their cultural context, in the widest sense of the term, which can include the material, historical, and political situation. Toward this end, cross-national and cross-historical comparative research has documented universality and variation in metaphor use across different geographical locations and historical periods (Kövecses, 2005; Sweetser, 1990). By attending to the metaphors that people in different cultural contexts use to collectively represent abstract social concepts in their language, art, and other cultural practices, researchers can make specific predictions about which social

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meanings are likely to be culturally widespread or universal and which are culturally specific. Furthermore, conceptual metaphor theory gives us a better handle on why there is universality and diversity in patterns of social thought and behavior. Metaphor use helps people to conceptualize abstractions by repurposing concrete concepts. Hence, we can predict, a priori, that certain metaphors will have greater universal appeal because they are rooted in common human experiences, such as correlations in embodied experience typically shared by all people (Johnson, 1987; Schnall, 2014). For example, across cultures we see the metaphor good is up reflected in language, symbols, and rituals. This suggests that people everywhere use the vertical dimension of space to orient themselves to several positive and negatively valenced concepts, such as happiness, health, depression, power, success, divinity, and morality. But why? Is it just a coincidence? More likely, metaphor development and use are constrained by the workings of the body and its relation to the physical environment. Humans cannot be upright without some degree of health, and when they are sad, they tend to hold a stooped posture in which the head tilts downward (LaFrance & Mayo, 1978). These stereotyped bodily dynamics help account for the similarities in the spatial ordering of valence across languages (Kövecses, 2000). As to diversity, metaphor studies suggest that some conceptual metaphors, and associated social phenomena, are more specific to a given society or geographical region owing to variation along certain cultural dimensions. What are those dimensions? Here social psychology steps in to round out the picture. Whereas cognitive linguists and anthropologists take a mostly bottom-up approach to studying individual metaphors, social psychologists have developed broad accounts of cultural influences on construals of self and reality. They have detailed models of group differences along dimensions such as individualismcollectivism, relational mobility, and power distance. That work provides the basis for specific predictions about a group’s reliance on metaphor overall and preference for particular metaphors. Integrating models of culture and metaphor yields another exciting research direction discussed in Chapter 5: studying how, through the mediation of conceptual metaphor, aspects of a group’s local ecology—topography, technology, and intergroup contact, among others—give shape and content to its cultural worldview.

The Open and Closed Mind My earlier points about social influence and motivation suggest that metaphor use makes thinking less flexible, “locking in” a rigid conception of a target based on a well-known source. We can view metaphor in an opposite light as a key for unlocking creative capacities. Consider how people look to philosophers,

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scientists, artists, and psychotherapists for inventive metaphors that throw a fresh light on an old problem or renew their sense of wonder. Take these lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (Eliot, 1974, pp. 77–78): A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings Eliot takes a mundane image of someone brushing her hair and gives it a new, strange meaning—not by deleting the literal image created by the first line but by drawing a new image across it that conjures up different, more dramatic connotations. Several theorists have explored metaphor’s expansive potential. They contend that humanity’s supreme achievements—language, religion, art, and science— gestate and take shape in metaphor; that our minds’ imaginative leaps—in music, painting, and dance; literature and cinema; utopias and dystopias and revolutions—arise from creative blends of literal and figurative, abstract and concrete (e.g., Huizinga, 1950; James, 1890/1983; Koestler, 1989). The point is that metaphor can be an instrument of both cognitive closure and openness. That’s because, unlike many cognitive devices, it is involved at both ends of the continuum of cognitive flexibility (Chapter 4). At one end, it helps us to gain a better grasp of abstractions by grounding them in concrete things. Once in place, it can infuse target conceptions with a subjective confidence that makes them resistant to change. That’s why it’s embraced by individuals, leaders, and groups to reproduce and justify preferred ideologies. At the other end, metaphor can widen our cognitive horizon and enhance the texture of experience. Metaphor is a daring gesture: it denies that the thing is entirely or merely what it is commonly deemed to be, shaking us out of our customary categories and urging us to look past the surfaces of things to discover hidden likenesses (Donoghue, 2014). This suggests that it is through the discovery and exploration of metaphor that we can reveal the unity underlying seemingly heterogeneous social phenomena. There seem to be certain domains of social life in which people are especially provincial, prejudicial, and closed-minded. Religion, ethics, politics, and intergroup relations come immediately to mind. On the other hand, there are domains that showcase the human capacities to grow, learn, and challenge the status quo, like humor, scientific and artistic discovery, and the quest for wisdom and maturity. Each one of these domains has, in recent years, become the focus of a specialized subarea of research with its own frameworks, terminology, academic conferences, and publication outlets. Specialization has its benefits, but the overall result can seem, across subareas, like analyses of entirely different social creatures: one prone to conformity, another to aggression, and yet another striving for self-development and self-expression. A common

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denominator, I believe, is metaphoric thinking: mapping two things belonging to superficially different orders of experience. That suggests that metaphor studies pave the way for a more unified, comprehensive science of social thought and behavior.

Theory Development Finally, the study of metaphor can help to clarify how social psychologists theorize about and investigate social behavior. Scholars in many disciplines rely on metaphors to construct theories and guide empirical inquiry (Bronowski, 1977; James, 1890/1983; Leary, 1990; Thagard & Beam, 2004), and social psychologists are no exception. We’ve already mentioned the computer metaphor and the portrayal of social cognition as open or closed, flexible or rigid. A few more examples: States of conscious awareness are described in terms of being spatially above/ below a threshold (Bargh, 1996) or inside/outside conscious awareness (Arndt, Cook, & Routledge, 2004); love and intimacy are described in terms of the inclusion of the other in the self (Aron & Aron, 1997); terms and concepts from the theater (e.g., backstage, script) are applied to describe social life in terms of actors inhabiting roles (Goffman, 1959; Chapter 6). Metaphor studies encourage researchers to clarify which role they intend their metaphors to fill. Are they conceptual tools intended solely for characterizing social phenomena, or do they describe what goes on in people’s heads? Take, for example, the notion that love creates an expansion of the self-concept. Is that a researcher’s lens only, or is that how people ordinarily represent love (or both)? The larger meta-theoretic concern is that researchers organize their scholarly efforts around superordinate metaphors that are appealing for the sake of clear comprehension, but which lead them to overlook important aspects of the phenomenon under study or project onto those phenomena attributes that they do not have in any literal sense. This was the concern that Allison and colleagues (1996) expressed after taking stock of research on social dilemmas. They warned that researchers’ predictions, choice of methodology, and interpretation of findings often reveal more about their devotion to a particular metaphor than they do about the phenomena (other excellent assessments of metaphor use in science include Bruner & Feldman, 1990; Gentner & Grudin, 1985; Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996; Leary, 1990; Sternberg, 1990; Tetlock, 2002; Weiner, 1991). As a brief illustration, consider the theoretical metaphors used in the persuasion literature. One cluster likens attitude change and stability to habitual experiences of manual grasping: hanging on or letting go of prior commitments, clinging desperately to one’s convictions, and embracing new ideas, which can take hold of the public imagination. But perhaps most dominant are metaphors borrowing from the domain of spatial movement:

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•• ••

•• ••

An attitude à A spatial position—a patch of ground or a pole. Disagreement or conflict à Physical distance between those positions— rifts, broad ideological schisms, divisions, divisive language, two-sided arguments, a policy split. Attitude change à Movement (of the mind or the whole person)—a shift to the center; they came to the same place, arrived at an agreement. Causes of attitude change à Physical forces. When effective, persuasive appeals push or bend a person in this or that direction. When very strong, they hit hard, knocking recipients off balance and even blowing them away. They create momentum in group discussions, polarizing shared attitudes in this or that direction. If persuasion is unsuccessful or weak, the person doesn’t budge, digs in her heels, takes a stance, sticks up for herself, and stands by her beliefs. Her feelings are too deeply entrenched or firmly rooted to move.

If we care to assess the scientific utility of this metaphor, the first step is to unpack what we know about its source. Take a moment and bring to mind a mental picture of someone getting pushed to the ground by a strong gust of wind. You have a lot of structured knowledge about this event: its characteristic sensorimotor states (discomfort), the person’s level of agency (low), forces causing movement (impersonal), time course (abrupt, not gradual). To be sure, it’s convenient to apply that event schema to represent someone’s response to a persuasive message. But to do so we might, like the mythical giant Procrustes, stretch or shorten the relevant psychological processes to make them fit into our intuitive models of spatial movement. The resulting portrait might be a misleading caricature. It doesn’t tell us anything, for example, about the “give-and-take” of the person and the message. My purpose is not to advocate any policy. My point is that a close reading of the social psychology literature will emphasize that its theories and terms derive largely from complex mappings of psychological processes and concrete concepts, many of which are apt to elude researchers as they go about scientific practice. The upshot is that researchers, and the field as a whole, will benefit from adding “metaphor management” to their to-do list. That means deciding when to revive, critique, invent, and jettison the theoretical metaphors guiding our understanding of the social animal.

Notes 1 Locke said that figurative language can do nothing but “move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment” (Book 3, Chapter 10, p. 105). But “move” and “mislead” are being used metaphorically. Other philosophers inadvertently couched their antimetaphor diatribes in metaphors like overcoming obstacles, drawing borders around ideas, and victory in battles. 2 Yes, but how dissimilar? Where is the distinction between metaphorical language/ conceptualization (e.g., “The Iraq War is a circus”) and more literal forms of similarity (e.g., “The Iraq War is Vietnam”)? This brings up the hotly debated topic of metaphoricity, and I have neither the space nor the expertise to provide a complete

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answer. I defer to linguists (Goatly, 2011) and cognitive scientists (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Gentner & Bowdle, 2001) that the distinction is a matter of degree. There is a continuum between metaphorical and literal meaning informed by a number of dimensions, including inexplicitness of the comparison and conventionality. For the purposes of this book, I’ll ask the reader to share my intuition that the examples of metaphors compare remote concepts: concepts referring to different classes of things that we relate to in different ways. 3 Similar psychological structures are variously called frames of reference, associative contexts, mental sets, and schemata. 4 Is this the same point made by research on the misattribution of arousal and emotion? This work shows that when we observe our own behavior to figure out why we feel physiological arousal (e.g., due to a triple espresso), we can mistakenly ascribe that arousal to another stimulus (e.g., a slow driver). As a result, we can experience emotional reactions that we wouldn’t normally feel in response to that second stimulus (road rage) (Schacter, 1964; Zanna & Cooper, 1974). One difference is that a metaphor can be stored in memory, thereby transferring motives and valence independent of momentary fluctuations in arousal. A more interesting difference is that metaphor can structure a target around sources with specific, differentiated emotional tones and connotations, and can therefore transfer a wider palette of motivational states than sympathetic arousal alone.

3 METAPHOR IN MEANING MAKING

Experimental evidence attests to metaphor’s influence on a wide range of social-cognitive processes. Take a moment and look around your surroundings. What is happening? As for me, I’m sitting at a table in a student union. I see my laptop in front of me and some papers nearby, along with my half-eaten lunch. Scores of people stream by, each with a unique appearance and personality. The wafting smell of Kung Pao chicken and a blaring TV impinge on my senses. Just within this room, things are already pretty complex. I don’t have the mental capacity to attend to and process every aspect of the environment. The sheer quantity of stimuli is only part of the problem. Another is that bits and pieces of this cognitive collage are ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations. Consider that unattended backpack over there: Maybe its owner stepped away for a moment to grab a straw; maybe it’s a homemade bomb planted by an amateur terrorist, like the one planted by the Tsarnaev brothers at the 2013 Boston Marathon. A related but unique challenge is that the ideas currently in play are inherently abstract and difficult to grasp in their own terms. In the last hour I encountered: snippets of conversations about love, friendship, and fun; energy drink packaging boasting the power to increase intelligence and creativity; online articles about patriotism and morality; and health brochures about risk, depression, and happiness. Unlike concepts that refer to things that we directly perceive with our senses, these social concepts lack a concrete referent “out there.” You cannot see and smell creativity or guilt in the same way you can, say, Kung Pao chicken. Indeed, their abstractness is what keeps this student union’s bookstore packed with hefty tomes that try to pin down their precise meaning.

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In light of these challenges, the centuries-old perspective known as naïve realism—the idea that we can truly know external reality—starts to look, well, pretty naïve. A more accurate characterization is that we construct a meaningful reality in the course of everyday life (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Bruner, 1957). We absorb information from the social environment and filter, elaborate on, distort, suppress, and reorganize it in an ongoing, creative process steeped in our past experience, emotions, and expectations. Of course, meaning isn’t constructed in isolation. It happens in relation to others and within a specific culture and language. The notion that we construct meaning has a long history in philosophy and the social sciences. The contribution of social psychology—particularly its subarea social cognition—is to provide a general account of the mental processes, both conscious and unconscious, by which we make sense of things. Next I summarize the currently prevailing account, reproduced in popular overviews of the field (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Hamilton, 2005; Kunda, 1999; Moskowitz, 2005; Taylor & Crocker, 1981; Wyer & Srull, 1989), and suggest how we can enrich it with the study of metaphor.

Enriching the Standard Meaning-Making Story People classify the stimuli in their social environment into categories. This usually happens quickly and effortlessly. For example, each person I see in the student union has unique characteristics, but for now I lump them all into the category strangers. In fact, for added convenience, I lump the strangers, the suspicious backpack, and whatever’s blaring on the TV into the ad hoc category things that I don’t have to deal with right now. Once we classify a stimulus as an instance of a category, we access a repository of knowledge about that category. This includes beliefs about attributes of category members, expectations of what they are like, and plans for how to interact with them, if at all. This knowledge is accumulated through experience with similar stimuli and stored in long-term memory in a representation structure called a schema. Think about it this way: Your computer’s hard drive stores folders containing documents, pictures, and other items that relate in some way—Taxes; Hannah’s Bar Mitzvah; Benghazi emails. Much like these folders, the schemas stored in your long-term memory contain all the bits of knowledge you’ve accumulated about categories—Nazis; Korea; doorknobs; dinner party etiquette; and millions more. Hence, if you categorize a person as (say) a librarian, you can “open” your librarians schema to access knowledge about which traits are generally shared by members of that group (“organized”), theories about how librarians’ traits relate to other aspects of the world (“She probably doesn’t enjoy extreme sports”), and examples of other librarians you have known. In addition to representing knowledge about social groups (called stereotypes; Hamilton & Sherman, 1994), schemas represent knowledge about personality types (implicit personality theories;

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Schneider, 1973), events (scripts; Minsky 1975; Schank & Abelson, 1977), interpersonal relationships (internal working models; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007), the self (self-schema; Markus, 1977), political-economic systems (ideologies; Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2013), and reality in the round (cultural worldviews; Greenberg, Solomon, & Arndt, 2008). But the similarities end there. Whereas computer folders are passive repositories, schemas exert an active, “top-down” influence on thinking. How? When they are made salient by situational cues or otherwise activated, schemas guide the person to attend to, interpret, and remember information in such a way as to confirm what they already know (or think they know)—commonly referred to as the confirmation bias. In one illustrative study (Langer & Abelson, 1974), trained therapists watched a videotaped interview with a man. Half were told it was a job interview; the other half that it was an interview with a mental patient. Although everyone watched the same interview, therapists who thought the man was a mental patient saw more signs of mental illness. For instance, when the interviewee described conflicts with his bosses in past jobs, those who thought he was a mental patient tended to interpret his actions as stemming from his defensiveness, repression, and aggressive impulses. Those who thought it was a job interview interpreted the same actions as signs of a healthy realism. Thousands of studies contribute to a detailed portrait of how schemas enable people to “go beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1957)—to reconfigure, revise, and extend available information in light of prior beliefs and feelings (e.g., Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Devine, Hirt, & Gehrke, 1990; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Dunning & Sherman, 1997; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Higgins, 1996; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979; Snyder & Cantor, 1979; Stangor & McMillan, 1992; Trope & Liberman, 1996). Indeed, a comprehensive review of this work would be a serviceable history of the field. I skim over the details to highlight the crux of the standard meaning-making story: People make sense of something based on what they know about that kind of thing. While this is hardly a controversial claim, the full picture may be more complex. If social cognition operates solely on schemas, then why do people routinely talk about social ideas metaphorically in terms of different types of things? Why do we say “I can’t get out of that commitment” when we know that commitments are not solid containers that can be entered and exited? Or “The president’s speech threw the crowd into a frenzy” when the president had no contact with the crowd? Why do we talk about sadness as though it were a drop in spatial position?: A: “I’m feeling down.” B: “How about an uplifting story?” A: “That will make me sink even lower.” According to conceptual metaphor theory, we communicate metaphorically because we think metaphorically (Chapter 2). In our everyday efforts to understand

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and negotiate social ideas, we are not relying exclusively on knowledge about those ideas; we also sometimes rely on metaphor to conceptualize them in terms of dissimilar ideas that are easier to grasp. Schemas and metaphors both construct a representation of the target on the basis of selective perception, but in the case of metaphor the selection criteria are borrowed from a superficially unrelated category or domain of experience. As researchers, knowing that people access metaphors (consciously or not) enables us to predict social-cognitive outcomes that aren’t captured by the standard schema-based account. Suppose that Trevor conceptualizes sex metaphorically in terms of competitive sports. We can ask: What features of his sports schema does he project onto sex? What aspects of sex are hidden, changed, or distorted in this metaphoric representation? We can predict that the metaphor leads Trevor to infer that it’s better to have more sexual encounters (players win a game by scoring more points), regardless of their emotional repercussions (in sports, objective performance matters; players’ “feelings” are irrelevant). This theorizing has inspired researchers to study the impact of conceptual metaphor on social information processing. Most of this work employs the empirical strategies introduced in Chapter 2 to test whether activating source concepts, or exposure to a metaphoric framing, produces metaphor-congruent effects on target interpretation. Next I review some findings, organized by socialcognitive process: person perception, reasoning, problem solving, attitudes, decision making, memory, and creativity. I can showcase only a small fraction of this literature, which has exploded over the last twenty years or so. Still, these findings are representative of the exciting discoveries being made in the study of metaphoric social cognition, and highlight metaphors’ far-reaching influence on meaning making (for other reviews, see also Landau et al., 2010, 2014).

Person Perception Forming an impression of another person’s personality can be difficult because the characteristics that we’re interested in—like friendliness, power, compassion—are not directly observable (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). It’s not surprising, then, that people talk about these characteristics metaphorically in terms of concrete things (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Solomon Asch (1946) pointed this out years ago: When we describe the workings of emotion, ideas, or trends of character, we almost invariably use terms that also denote properties and processes observable in the world of nature. Terms such as warm, hard, straight refer to properties of things and of persons. We say that a man thinks straight; that he faces a hard decision; that his feelings have cooled. We call persons deep and shallow, bright and full, colorful and colorless, rigid and elastic. Indeed, for the description of persons we draw upon the entire range of sensory modalities. (p. 86)

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But Asch sidestepped the big question: Does the presence of metaphoric talk tell us anything about the way people ordinarily conceptualize imperceptible “trends of character”? Emerging studies suggest that the answer is yes. Perceptions of interpersonal power, for example, are linked to vertical position in a manner consistent with conventional linguistic metaphors: powerful is up (“She’s a rising star in Anthropology”) and powerless is down (“They’re at the bottom of the hierarchy”). Study participants judged a group’s social power more accurately when powerful groups were presented at the top of a computer screen and powerless groups were shown at the bottom of the screen (Schubert, 2005). Increasing the vertical, but not the horizontal, distance between pictorial representations of a manager and subordinates (7 cm vs. 2 cm) led participants to view the manager as more powerful (Giessner & Schubert, 2007; Lakens, Semin, & Foroni, 2011). Participants tasked with choosing a portrait of a leader to promote their social cause preferentially selected images of the leader gazing up rather than level or down (Frimer & Sinclair, in press). Similar effects pertain to other person characteristics: ••

•• •• •• •• ••

Induced sensations of warmth heightened perceptions of target individuals’ friendliness and emotional attachment (IJzerman & Semin, 2009; Williams & Bargh, 2008). Hot backgrounds bias perceptions of facial anger (Wilkowski, Meier, Robinson, Carter, & Feltman, 2009). Touching hard (vs. soft) textures results in greater strictness in social judgment (Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh, 2010). Fishy smells increase doubts about others’ trustworthiness (Lee & Schwarz, 2012). Sweet tastes increase others’ agreeableness (Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, & Robinson, 2012). Sports teams with dark (vs. light) uniforms were rated as more malevolent (Frank & Gilovich, 1988).

These findings are surprising in part because priming studies in person perception research focus on the activation of knowledge structures that have a relatively obvious bearing on the target stimulus. For example, priming words pertaining to the traits adventurous or reckless led perceivers to view an extreme sport enthusiast in positive or negative terms, respectively (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977). That manipulating concrete sensorimotor states would systematically influence processing with respect to a more abstract social concept represents a major departure from this traditional focus, and attests to metaphor’s role in person perception (Bargh, 2006).1 What’s next? Researchers could complement their focus on individual characteristics by exploring the metaphors underlying person perception more generally. One conventional, overarching metaphor likens a person to a container and personal qualities to objects stored within: “You have a lot Irish in

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you”; “Find the passion inside you” (Chapter 6). It’s possible that perceivers access this metaphor when they take the perspective of an entity theorist, viewing an attribute (e.g., intelligence) as a stable and enduring entity that a person can’t control or change (Dweck, 2012). When perceivers instead take the perspective of an incremental theorist, they see an attribute as a malleable quality that can change incrementally over time. Do they then abandon the container metaphor? Do they access alternative metaphors of the person, like a plant that grows under the right conditions?

Reasoning People often make inferences in complex situations, trying to figure out from limited information what something is like or predict the consequences of an action. It helps to refer to relevant schemas. Knowing the prototypical features of a stimulus, one can make non-random assumptions about its unknown aspects. Metaphor is also useful. To illustrate, imagine that Ariel learns in school to think about the atom in terms of the solar system: the atom’s nucleus is orbited by electrons, just as the sun is orbited by planets. This metaphor downplays surface-level differences between these ideas (e.g., electrons are smaller than planets) and highlights their common relation: small objects revolving around a larger object. This allows Ariel to use a well-learned schema about the solar system to make inferences about the less familiar target. This can lead to errors, of course. Ariel might erroneously infer that because planets in closer orbit to the sun are hotter, some electrons are hotter than others. But overall the metaphor affords a basis for reasoning. Consistent with this analysis, studies show that activating a metaphor guides people to make inferences about a target that correspond to their source knowledge, even if they are not consciously aware of reasoning with metaphor. In one study (Morris, Sheldon, Ames, & Young, 2007), participants read commentaries comparing trends in the stock market to either living agents (e.g., “This afternoon the NASDAQ starting climbing upward”) or inanimate objects (e.g., “This afternoon the NASDAQ was swept upward”; italics added). Next, they predicted what would happen to those trends the following day. Morris and colleagues reasoned that people generally know that living agents, in contrast to inanimate objects, move with the intention of reaching destinations. Therefore, those exposed to the agent-metaphoric framing would transfer this knowledge and infer that the price trends would continue along their current trajectories. This is exactly what they found.

Problem Solving When a problem is complicated or poorly defined, people may not be sure what actions are available, what goals to take into account, or how to weigh

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the costs and benefits of different options. Through metaphor they can draw on a more familiar or concrete scenario to think through the various aspects of the target situation. Metaphors intervene at the early stage of judging a problem’s importance. A common metaphor links importance to weight: certain topics are heavy; some considerations carry more weight than others; we take seriously those situations with gravity and ignore flimsy concerns. These are more than figures of speech. When college students were given a survey on issues at their university, those who completed the survey on a heavy clipboard (2.29 lb.) judged the issues as more important than did students who handled a light clipboard (1.45 lb.; Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). In another study, participants subtly induced to perform a gesture that metaphorically “weighs” what is on one hand against what is on the other preferred “balanced” solutions to everyday problems of time allocation and product choice (Lee & Schwarz, 2011). The gesture, it seems, led them to assign equal importance to relevant considerations. Another aspect of problem solving is evaluating solutions that are already available. We can predict that when a salient metaphor maps a target problem onto a known problem, people’s evaluations of candidate solutions will reflect their knowledge of the known problem. In one study, participants imagined that they were officials at the state department faced with a diplomatic crisis in which a militaristic country was set to invade a weaker country, which was asking for U.S. support (Gilovich, 1981). In the materials that some participants received, maps and documents subtly suggested similarities between this hypothetical crisis and prior U.S. military engagements. For one group, the map of the region included labels like the “Gulf of A” as well as other subtle cues (e.g., the President was said to be from Texas) to suggest metaphoric mapping to Vietnam. For another group, cues instead suggested mapping to World War II (e.g., the impending invasion was described as a “Blitzkrieg invasion”). Compared to those who read a non-metaphoric framing of the target crisis, those exposed to the Vietnam framing were the least supportive of military intervention, whereas those given the WWII framing were the most in favor of aggressive action. Metaphor also informs the solutions that people come up with on their own. Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) asked participants to read a report about the crime rate in the (fictitious) city of Addison. For some participants, the crime problem was framed as a “beast preying” on Addison; for others, it was a “virus infecting” Addison. Both groups then read identical crime statistics before being asked to propose a solution to Addison’s crime problem. The “beast” metaphor led participants to generate solutions based on increased enforcement (e.g., calling in the National Guard; imposing harsher penalties). In contrast, the “virus” metaphor led participants to generate solutions that were diagnostic and reform-oriented (e.g., finding the root cause of the crime wave; improving the economy). When asked what influenced their thinking, participants tended

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to mention the crime statistics, but the results clearly show that they generated solutions that were consistent with their source knowledge: if crime is a beast, it must be “fought”; if it is a disease, it must be “treated.” A follow-up study showed that priming the concepts “beast” or “virus” did not, in itself, color problem solving: only when these concepts framed the target problem did participants come up with source-consistent solutions. Chapter 9 will discuss metaphor’s impact on problem solving in the health domain. We’ll consider metaphoric influences on people’s affective responses to health risks, evaluations of prevention behaviors and treatments, and confidence that they are personally capable of making healthy lifestyle changes.

Attitudes Attitudes are evaluations of an object or state of affairs somewhere on the continuum between good and bad, or likeable and unlikeable. Mainstream perspectives hold that people base their attitudes primarily or exclusively on knowledge structures that have a relatively obvious bearing on the target stimulus (Greenwald et al., 1968). Why is Monica averse to immigration? Because she accesses a schema containing negative information about immigrants. Metaphor theory goes further to suggest that attitudes can be systematically structured around dissimilar concepts—even perceptual concepts that have no obvious relevance to the attitude object. In some of the earliest experimental studies of metaphor, Meier, Robinson, and Clore (2004) began by observing that language links positive affect to brightness (a bright future) and negative affect to darkness (a dark thought). They randomly paired positive affect words (e.g., hero) and negative words (e.g., liar) with lighter or darker font colors and asked participants to evaluate them as quickly as possible. Despite the irrelevance of the font color manipulation, positive (negative) affect words were evaluated more quickly when assigned to the brighter (darker) color (see also Sherman & Clore, 2009). In fact, people see positive words as brighter than negative words (Banerjee, Chatterjee, & Sinha, 2012; Meier, Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007). Meier and Robinson (2004) also examined metaphors linking good to high regions of space (and upward motion) and bad to down. Participants were faster in determining whether a word had a positive (negative) meaning if it was shown in a higher (lower) location on a computer screen. These results suggest that people conceive of good and bad as being spatially located along a vertical dimension, and that this metaphoric association has an automatic and unconscious influence on attitudes (see also Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007; Meier, Sellborn, & Wygant, 2007). Rapid-fire responses to words are one thing; what happens when we ponder questions of right and wrong? A long-standing tradition in Western thought views moral judgment as based on eternal principles and universally applicable

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truths. Whether the Ten Commandments, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, or the utilitarian standard of the greatest good, morality is believed to exist “out there” in the objective world. Echoing this tradition, many psychologists saw moral judgment as the output of a deliberative, rational computation—one that is not in any fundamental sense dependent on the body (Bloom, 2011; Haidt, 2001). For example, Kohlberg (1963) proposed that a person capable of abstract moral calculations based on universal principles (e.g., reciprocity) has reached an advanced stage of cognitive development, outgrowing fuzzy intuitions and gut-level emotions. Recent discoveries, however, have begun to alter this one-sided picture. We now know that moral cognition and judgment are grounded to a significant degree in our embodied interactions with the material world (Haidt, 2007; Pizzaro, Inbar, & Helion, 2011; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2009; Schwarz & Clore, 1998). To be sure, not all of the connections between embodied states and moral judgments are metaphoric, but many are. Researchers have focused primarily on the metaphoric link between morality and experiences of physical dirt and cleanliness. They propose that humans have evolved mechanisms of disgust to keep them away from sources of physical contamination. By means of metaphor, they apply those mechanisms to judge the morality of things that are not harmful substances in any literal sense. That explains why they talk about clean records, dirty deeds, and scrubbing the Internet of filth. Still, does this metaphor really inform moral judgments? To find out, Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008) asked participants to read about individuals committing various kinds of moral violations, such as not returning a found wallet to its rightful owner and falsifying a résumé, and to rate how morally wrong those actions are. Half the participants made their judgments in a dirty work area: the desk was stained and strewed with food remains, and an overflowing trash can lay nearby; the other participants made their judgments in a clean work area. The mere presence of filth led participants to condemn moral violations more severely, even though the target transgressions did not present a literal threat to physical health and hygiene. Subsequent studies show that situationally induced disgust (via exposure to foul tastes or smells, recalling disgusting experiences, watching a gross film, hypnotic suggestion) and dispositional proneness to disgust predict severe moral judgments pertaining to religion and atheism (Ritter & Preston, 2011); fairness in economic interactions (Moretti & di Pellegrino, 2010); homosexuality (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009); charitable giving (Liljenquist, Zhong, & Galinsky, 2010); sexually explicit media (Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009); and many other social domains (reviewed in Ivan, 2015). The cleanliness metaphor also affects judgments of one’s own actions. After transgressing with their mouth by conveying a lie on someone’s voice mail,

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participants were concerned with the physical cleanliness of their mouth, preferring mouthwash over hand sanitizer as a gift for participating. Those who transgressed with their hands by typing a dishonest email clamored for the hand sanitizer to wash away their unethical act (Lee & Schwarz, 2010). Such specific, parallel responses suggest that moral judgment is closely mapped onto embodied experiences with purity and pollution. The act of physical cleansing is not only more attractive after acting unethically; it also works to increase judgments of personal moral integrity. The simple act of hand washing assuaged participants’ feelings of guilt over their past misdeeds, and it squashed their urge to engage in moral restoration behaviors such as volunteering (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). At this point I imagine a critic bursting out, “Did exposure to filth or the act of hand washing really lead participants to ‘transfer’ their knowledge of physical cleanliness to make moral judgments, or did it simply lead them to associate target stimuli with something else that they find pleasant or unpleasant?” I’ll try to answer this question later in this chapter by comparing metaphoric transfer to spreading activation.

Decision Making In classical models of rational choice, decisions are based on the expected utility of an outcome (Becker, 1976; Elster, 2006; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Yet research increasingly shows that decision making is heavily influenced by “extra” factors related to perceptions of the decision task and the surrounding social context (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 2006; Schwarz, 2009; Smith & Semin, 2004). These factors include concerns with fairness and altruism (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999), perceived ability to choose short-term gains over longer-term rewards (Chapman & Elstein, 1995; Ersner-Hershfield, Garton, Ballard, Samanez-Larkin, & Knutson, 2009); anticipated emotional reactions to potential future outcomes (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005); and the degree of abstract meaning tied to choice alternatives (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Add metaphor use to this list of “extra” factors. Note that the language of decision making brims with metaphors: go back and forth between options; choose the correct path; step back and get the bigger picture; get out of a narrow decision; immobilized by doubt; flexibly consider options; seize an opportunity or take a hands-off approach; no-strings-attached choices won’t tie you down. If people use these metaphors to think, and not “just” talk, then experimentally altering source representations should cue metaphorically associated thoughts, goals, and feelings regarding the decision task and the surrounding situation, which in turn should influence decision making. Several studies show such effects across decisions in economic, consumer, and social domains. Some of this work focuses on evaluations of trust. Imagine that a financial consultant offers you a deal. Whether you take it or not depends partly on how

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much you trust her. You may suspect that something about her offer is fishy. Just a figure of speech? When participants played an interactive trust-based game, those who were incidentally exposed to fishy smells were more suspicious about the motives and trustworthiness of their interaction partner (Lee & Schwarz, 2012). As a result, they were less willing to invest money in a pool of shared resources. The effect was not due to the generic valence of the sensory experience: incidental exposure to a fart smell did not elicit suspicion or decrease cooperation. That fish smell has passed and you’re warming up to her offer. Simply holding a warm (vs.) cold temperature pack makes people more trusting and cooperative (Kang, Williams, Clark, Gray, & Bargh, 2010). What happens, though, if the financial consultant treats you as a softy? You might correct that perception by taking a hard line in your negotiation. It might help to switch your chair. Participants in one study (Ackerman et al., 2010) imagined shopping for a new car, making an offer to the dealer, being rejected, and having to make a second offer. If they were sitting in a hard (vs. soft) chair, they receded less from the first to the second offer. These studies show that embodied interactions with the immediate surroundings produce metaphor-consistent effects on evaluations of others’ trustworthiness, an important aspect of many decision situations. Other work examines metaphor’s role in more general processes behind decision making. Consider, for example, how people linger on past experiences when making decisions. Imagine that Harold struggles with the decision whether to join an online dating site. He’s heard it’s a good way to meet people, but he cannot get over the time and money he wasted on a similar site a couple years ago. Harold may want to “wipe the slate clean,” to metaphorically remove residual concerns about previous choices and “start fresh.” A little soap might do the trick. Using the free choice paradigm developed in dissonance research (Brehm, 1956; Cooper, 2007), Lee and Schwarz (2010) asked participants to rank ten CDs in order of preference, choose one of two closely ranked CDs to take home, and later on re-rank the CDs. Replicating the classic finding, participants justified their choice by changing their perception of the choice alternatives: They ranked the chosen CD higher in the second ranking compared to the first, whereas they ranked the rejected CD lower. By exaggerating the alternatives’ pros and cons, they could put to rest any lingering dissonance over their choice. But here is the twist: After choosing a CD and prior to making a second ranking, participants were asked to help with an unrelated product test. Half evaluated a bottle of hand soap by washing their hands; the others examined the bottle but didn’t wash up. As expected, the classic “spreading of alternatives” effect was eliminated when participants washed their hands (Figure 3.1). Having metaphorically washed away their postdecisional dissonance, they no longer felt compelled to justify their choice (Lee & Schwarz, 2011).

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FIGURE 3.1 

 ostdecisional dissonance after hand washing or no hand washing (data P from Lee & Schwarz, 2010, Study 1). Higher values indicate higher preferences for the chosen alternative. Error bars represent standard errors.

Memory So far we’ve discussed how people make sense of social things in front of them, but what about our memory for people, events, and ideas that are not currently available? Traditional models likened memory processes to computer operations, but today we know that there is no “hard drive” in our brains where memories are stored and wait passively to be retrieved in original form. The act of remembering is a creative process that involves not only “information” in the traditional sense but also the way our bodies sense, feel, and move around (Gibbs, 2006). Many of these embodied influences are metaphoric. Crawford (2014) has shown, for example, that memory for emotionally evocative stimuli is informed by the metaphors good is up/bad is down (Crawford, 2014). Imagine that you are a participant in one of her studies. You stare at a computer screen as photos from a high school yearbook appear in various locations before disappearing. Also, each photo is paired (randomly) with a positive or negative vignette about the pictured student. One student is described as kind, loyal to her friends, the captain of her school’s soccer team, and respected by all her teammates. Another is described as a bully who used to make fun of poor people. Later on, each photo is shown again and you’re asked to use your mouse to move it to the location where you remember having seen it previously. Can you recall exactly where the “mean girl” first appeared? How about the soccer team MVP? In the actual study, participants’ memories of photo locations were biased upward (downward) when the photos depicted positively (negatively) evaluated students. The students in the yearbook photos were strangers, so obviously participants could not have had direct interactions that associated the girls with high

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or low areas of space (i.e., the kind that underlie other embodied influences on memory; Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Gibbs, 2006). A more likely interpretation is that people generally conceptualize the abstractions good/bad metaphorically in terms of up/down, and they spontaneously rely on that orientational metaphor to retrieve information about emotionally charged stimuli. Besides influencing the content of memories, metaphor affects people’s ability to remember the target at all. Keefer and Landau (2015) built on work showing that individuals high in attachment avoidance—those who expect close others to be unsupportive—are motivated to actively suppress relationship-relevant thoughts and feelings because they are reminders of others’ neglect and rejection (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). They recall less information about a relationship story compared to their securely attached peers, even when they are offered a cash incentive to improve their performance (Fraley & Brumbaugh, 2007; Fraley, Garner, & Shaver, 2000). Set that finding aside for a moment and peruse today’s newspaper or listen up when people chat about current events. You’ll be sure to hear metaphors describing political events using the vocabulary of interpersonal relationships: Married nations; companies divorcing; voters falling out of love with candidates, and so on. Connecting that with the studies just cited yields a hypothesis: exposure to such metaphors will prompt people to transfer their customary style of thinking about relationships to the political domain; more specifically, avoidantly attached individuals will defensively block out information about the target political event, despite it having nothing literally to do with close relationships. An initial test of this hypothesis assessed individual differences in attachment style using measures developed by Fraley et  al. (2011). Participants thought about their relationships with parents, romantic partners, and friends and indicated their agreement with statements like “I prefer not to show this person how I feel deep down.” In an ostensibly unrelated task, they read one of two randomly assigned articles describing President Obama’s strained ties with the predominantly Republican Congress. One article described this political dynamic metaphorically in terms of a troubled romantic relationship (e.g., “He didn’t quite break up with Congress, but he made it clear that their relationship wouldn’t be supportive anytime soon”); the other substituted the relationship metaphors with military metaphors (e.g., “He didn’t quite deploy his full arsenal, but he did make it clear that he would be willing to strike where he could”). Later on we surprised participants with a pop quiz assessing their memory for details of the article. As predicted, romantic avoidance predicted poorer memory of the romantic-metaphoric article, but not the military-metaphoric article. Also, the effect was due specifically to romantic feelings: avoidant feelings toward friends and parents did not predict poorer recall in either metaphor condition. But one wonders: Did we observe this avoidance of political information only because the metaphor emphasized a relationship going sour? We assessed this alternative explanation in a follow-up study that extended the first study in two

50  Metaphor in Meaning Making 10 9 8 7 6 5 Relationship Harmony Avoidance Prime FIGURE 3.2 

Team Harmony Security Prime

Control

Recall of a political topic as a function of attachment prime and metaphoric framing condition (Keefer & Landau, 2015, Study 2). Higher values indicate better recall of article details (out of 11). Error bars represent standard errors.

critical ways. First, we manipulated state attachment style by asking participants to think about times when close others were there for them or let them down in a time of need (Mikulincer, Shaver, & Rom, 2011). Second, we modified the articles to emphasize positive relationship dynamics. Participants read one of two articles about nations working together to develop a United Nations climate change treaty. One article compared the UN to a family coming together to help one another (e.g., “The UN may not always be the most supportive family, but if we look after each other . . .”); the other compared the UN to a sports team working together to win the fight against climate change (e.g., “The UN may not always be the most organized team, but if we keep our eye on the ball . . .”). Participants then received the pop quiz assessing recall of the article. We found that participants primed with avoidance recalled fewer details compared to those in the other attachment prime conditions, but only if the article framed the political dynamic as a close relationship (Figure 3.2). In contrast, the attachment prime did not affect recall of an article featuring closely matched sports metaphors. (Note, too, that priming attachment security improved recall of the family-metaphoric article, which is consistent with the guiding theorizing.) Here we see metaphor transferring cognitive styles—like defensive avoidance—between dissimilar domains, with consequences for people’s ability to process information.

Creativity Sometimes we achieve meaning by thinking creatively, whether that means exploring unfamiliar ideas, discovering hidden connections, or coming up with

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innovative solutions to old problems. But what does it take to do so? It seems that certain people have a knack for creative thought whereas others find it difficult and even aversive. Indeed, many psychologists claim that creativity is an inherent capacity of the person that remains constant from one situation or life stage to the next (McCrae & Costa, 1999). But context matters too, and by studying metaphor we get a fresh look at how situations can promote creative insight. Let’s start by looking at how creativity is talked about and visually depicted. We liken it to fluid movement, like rolling water and flexible fabric; if we lack creativity, our thinking is stiff, rigid, and dry. Studies show that activating these bodily concepts stimulates creative thinking. Participants who traced a fluid shape (in an ostensible assessment of hand-eye coordination) were more creative than participants who traced an angular shape (Slepian & Ambady, 2012). Specifically, after simply moving their hand fluidly, participants had an easier time seeing relationships between things that are only remotely associated, and they generated more—and more original—ideas for how to use a common object. Priming fluid movement did not influence performance on non-creative problem-solving tasks (e.g., difficult math problems), but—in line with the conventional metaphor—specifically bolstered performance on tasks that required creative thought. Another common metaphor likens creativity to illumination. We say that someone has a bright idea or a spark of insight; that a novel solution to an old problem can emerge from the shadows and finally dawn on someone. The poet Percy Shelley (1821/1954) put it eloquently: “The mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (p. 294). But although Shelley traced this “invisible influence” to the unconscious, research suggests that the current situation can help it along. Simply working near an illuminated light bulb (compared to diffuse overhead light) helped people to come up with creative solutions to problems and “light upon” remote associations (Slepian, Weisbuch, Rutchick, Newman, & Ambady, 2010). In related studies by Leung and colleagues (2012), enacting embodied metaphors for creativity (e.g., stepping outside of a box) facilitated the generation of new ideas and connections. Together these findings show that creative cognition is intimately tied to concrete bodily experiences. This corrects the traditional view that creativity is a skill that a person is either blessed with or not.

Is This Just Spreading Activation? When some psychologists hear about the range of findings just reviewed, they ask “Aren’t these just demonstrations of spreading activation?” I suspect that the reader is familiar with associative network models of spreading activation and semantic priming given their centrality in contemporary social psychology (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2008). In a nutshell, the activation of one thought in memory spreads to activate other thoughts that come to be associated through repeated

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pairings over time (Collins & Loftus, 1975). For example, priming the concept salt will likely render pepper more accessible to consciousness, presumably because the concepts share a well-learned association. If these models can explain metaphoric transfer and framing effects, then parsimony demands that we do without the unique mapping mechanism described by conceptual metaphor theory. Consider transfer effects involving bodily experiences. Perhaps source primes (e.g., sensations of physical warmth) simply activate a concept with literal and figurative connotations (e.g., warm and “warm”), which in turn influences perceptions related to abstract concepts (e.g., friendliness). The framing effects? A simple matter of affective priming, whereby observers assimilate global connotations of the source into their evaluations of the target. Show people a metaphor comparing a job to a jail cell, and you’d expect the negative valence of jail to bleed over, making them less thrilled about going to work. Nothing special. Can metaphoric influences be understood in terms of spreading activation processes? I believe that the most accurate answer is “yes and no.” Understood broadly, metaphor involves patterns of associations between pieces of knowledge, and the effects we’ve seen likely involve spreading activation across some of these associations. This is expected given that spreading activation is the most common (one might even say generic) mechanism proposed for information retrieval and application in all of cognitive theory. There’s no good reason to drive a thick wedge between these mechanisms. But a closer look reveals three unique features of metaphor. The first thing to notice is that the concepts that participate in metaphor are dissimilar, at least at the surface level. It’s not surprising that salt and pepper are closely linked in our associative networks, because they share obvious similarities (both are granulated substances), and we interact with them in similar ways (seasoning). By comparison, consider the metaphor theories are buildings. On the surface, theories and buildings are nothing alike, and we relate to exemplars of these categories in different ways. It is in spite of these surface-level differences that metaphor does its work, highlighting correspondences in the underlying structure of the two concepts. Those structural correspondences are what make it possible for the person to access a coherent schema for buildings—a schema containing knowledge about buildings’ characteristic features and their relations—and apply it to represent analogous aspects of theories: Theories must have a solid foundation and be well supported by the data or they will crumble; you can construct them from the ground up, buttress them with new arguments, and then have your opponents tear them down brick by brick. A second, related feature of metaphor is that the mapping between the source and the target is partial, meaning that not all elements of the source are used to structure representations of the target (e.g., people do not conventionally think about whether a theory’s rest rooms are handicapped accessible). Third, metaphors typically map structure from a concrete source to a relatively more

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abstract target, not the other way around. We can get a better grasp on theories by conceptualizing them in terms of buildings, but we do not normally rely on our knowledge of theories to think and talk about buildings. Those we know. Although some (but not all) models of spreading activation could be retrofitted to accommodate these three features of metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory specifies them a priori. Put differently, metaphoric transfer and metaphoric framing effects are due to spreading activation, but of a particular kind hitherto unappreciated in schema-based models of social cognition: partial, unidirectional mappings between superficially unrelated concepts. If we’re still not convinced, we can lean further on conceptual metaphor theory to devise more stringent empirical tests of metaphoric influences.

Measure Source Knowledge Most metaphor research assumes that while abstract concepts are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, everyone has more or less the same knowledge of source concepts. This assumption is plausible, but in some cases there may be significant individual differences in source knowledge. That points to a prediction: If observers have been prompted to think with a metaphor, then differences in their source knowledge will predict analogous differences in their target attitudes. To test this prediction, my colleagues and I (Landau, Keefer, & Rothschild, 2014) started with a metaphor comparing the failure of a social system to a vehicle accident. You hear it in expressions like “the economy is veering off course” and “our book club is headed for a ditch.” People generally understand that a vehicle driver directs and controls a vehicle’s direction and speed, and therefore is typically at fault for allowing the vehicle to stall, run off course, or crash. So what happens when they’re led to think about a system failure in terms of a crash? If they transfer their vehicle knowledge to interpret the system failure’s causes, they may be more likely to blame the system failure on the high-ranking individual in charge of total management of that system—that is, the person in the “driver’s seat”—as opposed to other relevant parties or contextual factors. And if they are making systematic mappings between the concepts, this effect should occur even if the subject of blame is unmentioned. And yet, people differ in how much they blame drivers for vehicle accidents. If metaphoric framing exposure prompts a transfer of source knowledge, then these individual differences should predict blaming of the system’s leader. So, early in the semester, we asked college students to read a news story about a vehicle accident and rate how much the vehicle’s driver was to blame for that accident. They also rated a home resident’s responsibility for causing a fire. We reasoned that if exposure to a metaphoric framing maps a target on a particular source, then it should lead observers to base target attitudes on their knowledge of that source, specifically, not on related concepts. Although the vehicle wreck

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5.5

5

4.5

4 Low Blame (−1 SD)

High Blame (+1 SD)

Driver blame perceptions Vehicle-metaphoric Message FIGURE 3.3 

Non-metaphoric Message

Attributions of blame to a company’s CEO for causing the company’s bankruptcy. Framing condition (vehicle-metaphoric vs. nonmetaphoric) interacted with preexisting perceptions of vehicle drivers’ responsibility for causing accidents. Note: Scale range: 1–7.

and fire were both described as unforeseen and destructive accidents, blaming others for fires shouldn’t interact with a salient vehicle metaphor. Weeks later, in an ostensibly unrelated study, participants read a news report on the bankruptcy of a (hypothetical) computer software company, and the resulting unemployment and stockholder losses. Critically, this report said nothing about the cause of the company’s failure. To manipulate framing, we told one group that many people have compared the bankruptcy to an automobile accident; others were told that it’s been described as a negative event with harmful consequences. Finally, participants indicated how much they blamed the company’s failure on its CEO, its employees, and the conditions of the national economy. As you can see in Figure 3.3, the degree to which participants blamed a driver for a vehicle accident (again, weeks earlier) positively predicted how much they blamed the company’s CEO, but only if they had been exposed to a vehicle-metaphoric framing of the bankruptcy. Driver blame perceptions did not predict participants’ willingness to blame the company’s employees or economic conditions, regardless of the framing provided. These findings suggest that activating a vehicle metaphor highlighted the responsibility of the system’s leader and did not simply increase a general tendency to assign blame. Also supporting the effect’s specificity, metaphoric framing conditions did not interact with individual differences in blaming an accident-prone home resident.

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The vehicle metaphor didn’t call up their beliefs about responsibility for causing just any accident. It is just as important to note that when the vehicle metaphor was not primed, driver blame perceptions did not predict CEO blame. That means that individuals who score high on driver blame scale are not generally punitive. When there was no salient metaphor prompting them to map corporate bankruptcy on car crashes, those concepts remained sealed off from each other. It would be difficult to attribute these results to affective priming; instead, they are consistent with the idea that activating a metaphor prompted people to transfer their source knowledge to form judgments about the target.

Manipulate Source Knowledge This brings us to another empirical strategy for distinguishing metaphoric influences from garden-variety priming effects: Manipulate the salience of an evaluatively charged source; then, in a separate manipulation, expose only some individuals to a metaphoric framing comparing that source to the target. Standard affective priming is promiscuous. If it were the sole operating mechanism, we would expect only a main effect: juxtaposing an aversive source and a target will decrease liking for the target. A metaphoric framing, on the other hand, is said to activate a mapping that guides observers to conceptualize the target in terms of the source. In that case, priming an aversive source should influence target attitudes only when a salient metaphoric framing compares them. Landau and colleagues (2009) used this strategy to study immigration attitudes. They based their hypotheses on evidence that anti-immigration rhetoric in the early twentieth century viewed the nation as analogous to a physical body that is vulnerable to corruption by invading external entities (O’Brien, 2003). Do people transfer concerns with protecting their own bodies from contamination to negatively judge immigrants entering into their country? To find out, the researchers manipulated contamination threat by priming participants to view airborne bacteria in their environment as either harmful to their physical health or innocuous. Participants then read an ostensibly unrelated essay describing the United States (they were all U.S. citizens). In the metaphoric framing condition, the essay contained statements subtly comparing the U.S. to a body (e.g., the “The U.S. experienced a growth spurt”); in the non-metaphoric framing condition, those statements were replaced with literal paraphrases (“The U.S. experienced a period of innovation”). Increasing participants’ concerns with bodily contamination increased aversion to immigration if they were additionally led to think of their country as a physical body. In contrast, the mere salience of contamination threat, although globally negative, did not influence immigration attitudes when the nation was framed without a metaphor. For those participants not exposed to the country is a body metaphor, there was no meaningful relation between protecting their own

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body from foreign elements and the abstract issue of immigration. But when a salient bodily metaphoric framing led participants to map those concepts, they transferred aversive feelings about bodily contamination to harshly judge immigration into their country. These effects appear to be mediated by a systematic conceptual mapping between the source and the target, not by a simple spillover of negative valence from one concept to another. A related empirical strategy stands to distinguish metaphoric influences from affective priming and processing fluency, or the ease with which information is processed. One can test whether alternate metaphoric framings of the same target change target interpretations in distinct ways that correspond to knowledge of the respective sources. This should hold even if the alternate sources are matched in overall valence. We see this discrimination in the study by Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) reviewed earlier: an aggressive beast and a harmful virus are both negative ideas, but using them to frame a city’s crime problem produced distinct crime solutions that parallel commonplace knowledge of combating beasts vs. viruses. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that if metaphoric influences are due specifically to metaphor use, and not related mechanisms, then these effects should emerge particularly under the conditions when people are theorized to rely on metaphor to think. Chapter 4 examines what these theoretically specified moderators might look like.

Conclusion and Onwards We’ve covered highlights from thirty years of experimental research showing that metaphor operates at a conceptual level to influence such basic mental operations as perception, problem solving, and memory. In light of this work, the commonsense view that metaphor is simply a highfalutin literary device or prosaic linguistic phenomenon looks quaint at best. Instead, conceptual metaphor use is basic to meaning making. We reviewed evidence that subtle perceptual cues—a mere blip on a screen or passing odor—produced metaphor-consistent effects, suggesting that, consciously or not, we are employing metaphors all the time. One implication is that social-cognitive theory, to achieve explanatory adequacy, should incorporate these effects; it should also acknowledge conceptual metaphor as standing on its own alongside schemas, associative networks, heuristics, and other mechanisms guiding our efforts to make some larger sense of things. Another implication provides the grist for later chapters: A deeper understanding of metaphor’s working is relevant to the study of social phenomena at several levels of analysis—cultural (Chapter 5), intrapsychic (Chapter 6), interpersonal (Chapter 7), and intergroup (Chapters 8 and 9). But first, metaphor wouldn’t be a big part of everyday life if it didn’t benefit people in one or more ways. In the next chapter we consider why people think metaphorically.

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Note 1 At any given moment, perceivers are experiencing, or have recently experienced, a number of sensorimotor states at varying levels of consciousness.The studies I reviewed show that metaphor can serve as a “conduit” between those states and person perception, but it’s unlikely that this conduit is so undiscriminating that any and all bodily states are assimilated in this way. If participants in Schubert’s (2005) study stared at a bright screen, would they have also perceived target groups as “bright”? If the cubicle was cold, would they have also viewed the groups as “cold-hearted”? A challenge for future research is to discover the conditions under which a bodily state serves as the input to a metaphor vs. when, to paraphrase Freud, a bodily state is just a bodily state.

4 MOTIVATION AS CONTEXT

Metaphor use can satisfy motives to think in certain ways. By knowing how those motives vary in strength across situations and individuals, we can predict variation in metaphoric social cognition. The previous chapter summarized empirical evidence that conceptual metaphor shapes people’s construal of the social world. We saw that two kinds of situational cues—sensorimotor experiences and exposure to metaphorically framed messages—influence processing of abstract social concepts in ways that parallel conventional linguistic metaphors. These findings back up the core proposition of conceptual metaphor theory: Metaphor is not a “mere” matter of words; it is a cognitive mechanism that plays a vital and far-reaching role in everyday life. A new question arises: When does metaphor influence social cognition, and why? For some theorists this question misses the point. They hold that metaphors (at least the important ones) are so fundamental to our grasp of reality—so entrenched in our conceptual system—that we don’t “choose” to think with them, we just do. This view is reflected in, for example, Julian Jaynes’s claim (Chapter 1) that representing time through spatial metaphors is automatic, unconscious, and inevitable. Yet if there is one thing we’ve learned from a century of social psychology, it’s just how flexibly cognition changes under certain conditions. Indeed, the field grew out of Kurt Lewin’s notion that a person’s thinking and behavior is a joint function of that person (traits, moods, goals, etc.) and his or her lifespace—the psychological environment produced by the immediate situation and encompassing other people, the physical setting, recently encountered symbols, current task demands, and a great deal else.

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Lewin’s lesson invites us to model how metaphoric social cognition varies across individuals and situations. If he is right, though, there are too many relevant factors to model all at once. One approach is to get a handle on what metaphor is for. Inasmuch as metaphor serves a psychological function, then variations in the need for that function will predict changes in metaphor use. Of course, metaphoric conceptualization serves diverse, often overlapping, functions at several levels of analysis: individual, dyad, group, culture, and species. This chapter starts at the individual level and considers the role of epistemic motives—desires to achieve and maintain particular types of knowledge. Later parts of the book expand this functional approach to encompass cultural norm maintenance (Chapter 5), self-relevant motives (Chapter 6), and collective thought and action (Chapters 7 to 9).

Epistemic Motives To gain a broad and empirically generative account of motivational factors, I start with the theory of lay epistemology developed by Kruglanski (1989, 2004). The theory is premised on the idea that navigating the social environment requires that we make choices about when to stop thinking about something and reach conclusions that feel certain, or certain enough. Whether we are forming an impression of a new dating partner or musing over a political issue, there is always more information that we could consider, but eventually we have to reach a conclusion and move on. The theory identifies three motives that can influence this choice: to be certain; to maintain preferred knowledge; to be accurate. Let’s look at each motive before circling back to metaphor use.

Certainty Motivation Originally labeled the need for nonspecific closure (Kruglanksi & Webster, 1996), this is the motive to stop thinking and grab hold of the first handy judgment or decision, quickly and without extensive effort. By nonspecific we mean that the person does not have a strong preference for one interpretation over another; rather, she desires a conclusion—any definite conclusion, as opposed to being uncertain or lost in equivocation. This motive is triggered by situations where thinking involves a lot of effort or is otherwise unpleasant. If we feel that we are under time pressure to make a decision, if we have a lot of things on our mind, or if we are simply exhausted from a long day at work, we will be more inclined to terminate the thinking process early and reach closure on a “good enough” (simple, clear-cut, concrete) interpretation of something. If, in contrast, we have a lot of cognitive resources at our disposal, we will be more tolerant of complexity and ambiguity, and we’ll feel more comfortable gathering relevant information and deliberating on it before reaching a conclusion. In one study (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983),

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participants told that they had to form an impression of someone in a limited amount of time (which zaps mental energy) tended to reach a conclusion based on the first bits of information they received, failing to take into account relevant information that they encountered later.

Consistency Motivation Also called the need for specific closure, this is the motive to interpret something in a way that jibes with prior beliefs and attitudes. Many studies (a conservative estimate is one gazillion) show that people are more likely to apply a knowledge structure to interpret the current situation when doing so confirms (versus contradicts) what they already believe or feel, a phenomenon called the confirmation bias. Consistency motivation takes priority when current stimuli bear on one’s knowledge about the way the world works, or should work. This includes the person’s deep-seated moral convictions (Skitka, 2005) and value-laden concepts such as honor and justice (Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000). It also flares up when prior knowledge is simply made salient (e.g., via implicit priming), or when the situation creates the perception that one’s understanding of the world is being challenged by contradictory information.

Accuracy Motivation This is the desire to achieve an accurate, truthful understanding of a given stimulus. Unlike closure motives, accuracy motivation drives the person to methodically gather relevant information and scrutinize it to reach a wellreasoned conclusion. People are likely to handle information in this way when there is a risk that a false judgment or a poor decision would have negative repercussions for themselves or others. Imagine that a presidential candidate advocates aggressive military action while another candidate promises peace. If a voter believes that military involvement would impact her or the people she cares about, then accuracy motivation will kick in, impelling her to think long and hard about making the right choice.

Motivation to Use (and Reject) Metaphor In many real-world contexts where people might employ metaphor—the courtroom, the classroom, the bedroom—they are not neutral toward the issues at hand; rather, they desire particular types of knowledge. With lay epistemology theory as a framework, let’s see how the three epistemic motives intervene in metaphor use, and why it matters.1

Certainty Motivation Metaphor helps us achieve a clear, confident understanding of a target (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Ortony, 1975; Roberts & Kreutz,

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1994). This idea goes back at least to Aristotle (ca. 330 BCE; trans. 1924), who set aside his distrust of metaphoric speechifying to concede that “it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh” (1.1410). William James (1890/1983, p. 987) observed that we apprehend unfamiliar ideas by furnishing “parallel cases”—essentially, by first coming up with metaphors. Even intellectual elites start with metaphor to get a handle on elusive concepts (Dunbar, 1997; Koestler, 1989; Thagard & Beam, 2004). Lay epistemology theory reminds us that the desire to be certain is not a psychological constant; it varies across individuals and situations. This urges us to ask whether metaphoric influences—of the type reviewed in Chapter 3—will be stronger when certainty motivation is increased. To answer this question, we borrow a validated experimental paradigm for manipulating certainty motivation (Landau, Kay, & Whitson, 2015). It’s premised on the idea that people’s subjective sense of certainty is reduced when they perceive a target to be unfamiliar, abstract, complex, unstable, or obscure. Uncertainty is unpleasant, and we expect people to compensate for it. They can do so by conceptualizing the target metaphorically in terms of something else that seems familiar, concrete, simple, consistent, or discernable. In contrast, when people feel as though they have a satisfactory grasp of the target in its own terms, they will be less likely to use an available metaphor. Keefer and colleagues (2011) tested these predictions in the context of examining metaphors linking positive (negative) valence to high (low) vertical position. In Chapter 3 we saw these metaphors influencing language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), visual perception (Meier & Robinson, 2004), and memory (Crawford, 2014). Might their influence be moderated by certainty motivation? To find out, the researchers asked college freshmen to write about one of three topics: uncertainties about the value of their college experience, a recent bout of intense physical pain (a generally aversive topic for comparison with uncertainty), or mundane experiences with shelving books. Students were then asked to think back to their decision to attend their current university rather than another college or university. They were handed a worksheet with six vertically arranged lines and asked to list the factors behind that decision in an upward or downward orientation, depending on condition. Specifically, those in the “up” condition summarized the earliest factor on the bottom line, a subsequent factor on the next line up, and so forth, with the most recent factor at the top. Their “down” counterparts listed their decision factors downward from the earliest (top line) to the most recent (bottom line). Finally, participants were asked how satisfied they were with their decision. As you can see in Figure 4.1, arranging decision factors on a vertical axis influenced decision satisfaction in line with the metaphors up is good and bad is down, but only when college-relevant uncertainties were salient. Those made unsure about college’s value judged an up-oriented decision as a “step up” and a down-oriented decision as “going downhill.” As important,

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Decision Satisfaction

6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Neutral

Pain Up

FIGURE 4.1 

College Uncertainty Down

Metaphors of up and down affected satisfaction with one’s university decision only when uncertainties about college were salient. (Error bars represent standard errors.)

participants who were not made uncertain about college’s value did not rely on the verticality cues to inform their attitudes. These findings suggest that presumably “fundamental” conceptual metaphors are not built-in features of our perceptual apparatus; rather, they are tools that come in handy for giving some structure to uncertain feelings. Subsequent research examined whether certainty motivation moderates the effects of exposure to metaphorically framed messages. The researchers (Landau, Keefer, & Rothschild, 2014) focused on the conventional metaphor comparing the failure of a social system to a vehicle accident. They asked one group of participants to answer difficult questions about arcane bankruptcy laws, a task that left them feeling uncertain about bankruptcy’s causes and consequences. A comparison group got an easy quiz on bankruptcy. All participants then read a (fabricated) news article framing a company’s bankruptcy as a vehicle accident, and afterward they were asked who bore responsibility (see details in Chapter 3). As predicted, the uncertain participants seized on this metaphor, transferring their vehicle knowledge to assign blame: a single driver (not the passengers) controls a vehicle’s speed and direction, so the company’s sole CEO (not other relevant parties) is to blame for the company failing. In contrast, participants led to feel as though they already understood bankruptcy did not lean on their vehicle knowledge to interpret the target bankruptcy, so they didn’t focus blame onto the CEO. Complementing this focus on uncertainty, Jia and Smith (2013) manipulated a target’s perceived abstractness. They built on Construal Level Theory’s claim that people construe ideas in a more abstract manner when those ideas are

Motivation as Context  63 New York FAR (Abstract) 5 4.6 4.2 3.8 3.4 3 Literal Description Bullish Days

Metaphoric Description Bearish Days

New York NEAR (Concrete) 5 4.6 4.2 3.8 3.4 3 Literal Description Bullish Days FIGURE 4.2 

Metaphoric Description Bearish Days

Framing the New York Stock Exchange as an intentional agent influenced market forecasts when the market appeared psychologically distant (abstract), but not near (concrete). Data from Jia and Smith (2013).

psychologically distant—removed from the immediate experience of the self in the here and now (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Distance has been operationally defined in terms of time (remote future), space (far away), and reality (hypothetical). Jia and Smith reasoned that increasing a target’s psychological distance, and hence abstractness, would encourage greater reliance on an available metaphor to interpret that target. In one study, participants living in Indiana were asked to predict the behavior of the New York Stock Exchange. Half were reminded that the stock market of interest is located in New York City, “some 800 miles from here, all the way to the East Coast.” The others were told that New York City is “less than a day’s drive from here.” Look at the New York Far condition—the top panel of Figure 4.2. When those participants later read commentaries that

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framed the stock market as an autonomous agent (e.g., “Today the New York market leaped and bounded higher”), their market forecasts were much higher for days that showed an upward trend (bullish days) than for days that showed a downward trend (bearish days). They seem to have applied the intentional agent metaphor to infer that price trends would continue along their current trajectory in the same manner that agents move deliberately toward destinations (replicating Morris, Sheldon, Ames, & Young, 2007; see Chapter 3). But now look at the bottom panel: The agent-metaphoric framing was inert when the stock market appeared near and hence concrete. People seize on an available metaphor to grasp abstractions, not the concrete. In this study and elsewhere, people find it helpful to conceptualize abstract entities and systems as though they were intentional agents with beliefs, goals, and other psychological characteristics. Examples abound of groups and individuals personifying things they don’t adequately comprehend: “His theory explained to me the behavior of repeat offenders.” “This fact argues against your position.” “Love has cheated me.” “Inflation is eating up our profits.” “Heroin has a chokehold on our community.” People are particularly prone to personify, say Epley and colleagues (2007), when they desire to understand, predict, and control their environment—what they term effectance motivation, and which overlaps with certainty motivation. In other words, when we’re motivated to navigate our surroundings, but we cannot directly observe what’s causing the behavior of some nonhuman thing, it helps to map its activity onto a familiar schema of folk psychology. Indeed, people are more likely to impute humanlike characteristics to gadgets, machines, and consumer products portrayed as behaving unpredictably (Waytz et al., 2010).2 Personification also increases when people are pressed to make quick judgments (Keleman & Rosset, 2009), a condition known to temporarily deplete processing capacity and increase preference for simple conclusions (Kruglanski, 2004). The picture emerging from these studies is clear: experiencing a bodily cue, or encountering a metaphor-laced communication, does not inevitably result in metaphor-consistent effects on target processing. Instead, people apply metaphors to conceptualize targets that appear uncertain, abstract, and unpredictable, supporting our theoretical claim that certainty motivation is one catalyst for thinking metaphorically. From here we can point to some directions for future research. One is to build on evidence that confronting people with broad, existential threatening realities, such as meaninglessness and mortality, instigates compensatory efforts to seek simple, clear-cut interpretations of social information (Koole, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2006; Landau, Kay, & Whitson, 2015; Sullivan, Landau, & Kay, 2012).

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Indeed, the threat can be quite subtle. Brief exposure to stimuli that seem out of place or inconsistent with expectations (e.g., viewing nonsensical word pairs) makes people more eager to restore a global sense of meaning by shoring up their ideological convictions (Proulx & Heine, 2008, 2009). Such threats should motivate people to cling onto metaphors affording a secure sense that the world is meaningful and ordered rather than chaotic. Initial evidence shows that people personify to compensate for threats to their sense of personal control (Barrett & Johnson, 2003; Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008). When participants wrote about a personal experience over which they had no control (vs. one where they were totally in control), they doubled down on their belief in an anthropomorphic god. What’s interesting here is that the motive behind metaphor use originated in an unrelated context and doesn’t pertain to the target directly. That is, free-floating doubts over one’s control did not directly alter representations of the target; rather, they prompted people to compensate in a global manner by seizing on any concretizing interpretation of their environment. It’s also worth noting that certainty motivation varies across individuals as well as situations (Rokeach, 1960). People with a high dispositional preference for well-structured knowledge—as measured with scales like need for closure (Kruglanksi, Webster, & Klem, 1993) and personal need for structure (Thompson, Naccarato, Parker, & Moskowitz, 2001)—feel especially uncomfortable when confronted with ambiguous or confusing situations. Others are more tolerant of being unsure, and may even view uncertainty and abstraction to be the very spice of life. These individual difference constructs are useful for predicting who will compensate for dips in certainty by seizing on metaphors (see Rothschild, Landau, & Sullivan, 2011, reviewed in Chapter 6). Finally, the interplay of certainty motivation and metaphor may be more nuanced than I’ve portrayed it. We might expect metaphors to take hold when a target seems totally unfamiliar, but sometimes the effects are stronger when perceivers know at least something about the target (Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh, 2010; Chandler, Reinhard, & Schwarz, 2012). One explanation is that prior knowledge provides an initial hypothesis about the target that is tested against metaphoric cues.

Consistency Motivation In many contexts people want more than certainty; they want to reach conclusions that square with their worldview, which encompasses their explanations for how the world works, standards of appropriate conduct, values, and visions of the future. Mac users want to think that Macs are better than PCs; most people want to believe their country is great; and we want to think our friends are good people. Two means by which metaphor helps people to believe what they want to believe are “concretizing” and “highlighting and downplaying.”

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Concretizing People are determined to sustain faith in their worldview, to imbue their sense of reality with order, meaning, and permanence. The problem they face is that their worldview’s systems of meaning and personal value are abstract, symbolic, and thus fragile. Our local norms, group identities, and institutions may seem real, but they are ultimately unverifiable constructs in the collective imagination, in constant need of affirmation from others who share our beliefs, and under constant assault from those who do not (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Metaphor gives tangible form to these constructs—making visible the invisible— in a way that bolsters faith in their validity. To illustrate, consider that in multiple traditions from around the world, artistic representations of death figure prominently in ceremonial rituals and celebrations such as Halloween and The Day of the Dead (El Dia de los Muertos). In these contexts, art forms such as image making and dance employ metaphor to transform the meaning of death from an abstract and unpredictable eventuality into an anthropomorphized agent—a witch, reaper, thief—or simply a place, another plane of existence, where people (or their souls) “go” after physical death (Gonzalez-Crussi, 1993; Guthke, 1999; Stookey, 2004, p. vii). Putting memorable faces and shapes on mortal terror makes the abstract idea of death concrete and manageable. After all, if death were a person, it could be reasoned with, bargained with, tricked, or overwhelmed by one’s own superior wit or strength or that of a magical intercessor. Concretizing metaphors similarly reify institutional arrangements of power. The Catholic Church has codified a strict hierarchy of officials along a vertical dimension, starting at the bottom with the laity and ascending up through priests and bishops to the pope at the top. The same metaphor features in widely publicized depictions of the caste system in Nepal (Figure 4.3). It also grounds the so-called tree of life models that dominated biology in its early days (see Haeckel’s quintessential illustration in Figure 4.3) and continue to guide thinking to this day (Brandt & Reyna, 2011; Gould, 1994). In this anthropocentric conception, life forms are progressively superimposed on each other until the human race, at the apogee, represents the supreme fruit of creation, not an evolutionary accident. The details vary but the motive is the same: When people are committed to maintaining a stratification system and ensuring its “lines” don’t blur, they rely on metaphor to give those institutional arrangements tangible form (Chapter 8). The broader point is that metaphor can reinforce valued abstractions by embodying them in cultural products and practices. In this way, metaphor is central to the socialization process by which individuals internalize their worldview and sustain faith in its validity.

Highlighting and Downplaying A central tenet of conceptual metaphor theory is that the mapping created by metaphor filters information, leaving only a partial representation of the target

BRAHMINS Priests KSHATRIYAS Warriors and rulers VAISYAS Skilled traders, merchants, and minor officials SUDRAS Unskilled workers PARIAH “Harijans” Outcastes, “Untouchables,” “Children of God”

FIGURE 4.3 

Two of the many cultural images that employ a vertical metaphor to concretize hierarchical distributions of power and moral worth.

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(Chapter 2). Specifically, metaphor selectively highlights (makes salient) and downplays (inhibits) aspects of the target depending on their “fit” to the mental slots provided by the source schema. This has obvious advantages for individuals seeking consistency: it focuses attention on target aspects that line up with their interests and ideological stance, and it casts a shadow on potentially relevant but undesired ideas. Whether the result of this filtering is a highly contrived and simplified representation of reality is beside the point, or rather is the point. Just this morning I listened to a podcast in which a 22-year-old man diagnosed with cystic fibrosis reflected on his mortality: “Death is a deadline,” he says. “You have to finish everything you wanna do before then” (Davis, 2015). This metaphor highlights the comforting idea that death, like a term paper deadline, is set to take place at a predictable time. By the same coin, it downplays the unsettling idea that one’s death can occur at any moment from random sources of misfortune that are impossible to fully anticipate or control. Going beyond anecdotal observations, we find detailed analyses of how individuals and groups endorse particular metaphors, often at an unconscious level, to legitimize and perpetuate their preferred worldviews. These analyses span various academic disciplines, from mythology to gender studies and political science, and examine metaphors as expressed in legal discourse, ritual, artifacts, gesture, and other modes of communication. An introduction to this work would quickly become a book in itself, so we have to restrict our scope to the broadest outlines. In some cases, metaphor reinforces a group’s advantaged position in a performance domain. It compares that domain to an unrelated domain in which that group is stereotyped to be superior or more capable than other groups. For example, discourse surrounding business and negotiation is often framed metaphorically in terms of male-dominated competitive sports like basketball, football, and boxing: “Acme Airlines is up against the ropes; it better come in swinging next quarter.” These metaphors reinforce the received cultural prejudice that men are intrinsically better-suited than women to conducting business (Koller, 2004). Business is not literally a sport, but if you’re going to slam dunk a contract or take a merger to the end zone, then (the metaphor implies) you’re better off putting a man in charge. Metaphor can also be used to obscure undesirable aspects of an idea or situation—the inconvenient truths, in Al Gore’s words. We see this, says Lakoff (1992), when government officials attempt to legitimize military aggression by framing war as a point-based game, such as poker. This metaphor highlights the notion that the side with the most “points”—enemy casualties, that is— is the clear victor. More to the point, it screens out war’s qualitative aspects, particularly the costs of human suffering and death. Based on this analysis, we would expect people who are motivated to suppress those disturbing thoughts to embrace the game metaphor and defend its aptness. Similarly, metaphor strategically highlights and downplays agency. In our personal and political lives, we’re constantly making attributions of volition,

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responsibility, and guilt. Should I feel guilty about my rude remark? Who is to blame for this violation of human rights? Metaphor can bias these interpretations by mapping the target scenario onto sources that clearly imply intentionality or a lack thereof. Consider the “domino theory” that governed much of U.S. foreign policy beginning in the 1950s. It held that the “fall” of Indochina (a communist victory) would lead rapidly to the “collapse” (communist takeover) of neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. The U.S. government firmly embraced this theory to justify its support of South Korea’s non-communist regime and its involvement in the Vietnam War. It was a misleading metaphor because it portrayed nations as inanimate objects and did not take into account their unique character and political ambitions. The same could be said about the so-called “reverse domino theory,” or the belief that the implementation of a democratic government in Iraq would help spread democracy and liberalism across the Middle East (Tanenhaus, 2003). From here we can formulate a testable hypothesis: When people encounter a metaphor that frames agency in a manner that supports their preferred view of the target situation, they will adopt that metaphor, bringing their target attitudes in line with their source knowledge. But if that metaphor contradicts prior agency beliefs, it will be rejected. In a study testing this hypothesis, we (Landau et  al., 2014) conceptually replicated the effect, reviewed earlier, of a salient vehicle accident metaphor on blaming of a system’s leader, extending the effect to judgments of responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis. Participants exposed to a vehicle-metaphoric framing of the crisis (compared to a non-metaphoric framing) focused blame on the economy’s single governing institution—the federal government—even though the original message did not address who or what caused the crisis. More importantly, though, this effect did not hold for participants who, weeks prior to the study, indicated on a survey that they firmly believe that no single individual or institution is to blame for the crisis. The vehicle accident metaphor may, in general, support the inference that the party in the “driver’s seat” bears the ultimate responsibility, but if people are already convinced that responsibility is distributed across many individuals and institutions, or that the event in question was caused by random forces, then they block this metaphor from coloring their judgments.3

Accuracy Motivation “Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? (Virginia Woolf, 1931/2007, p. 714) On the subject of truth, and the proper method for achieving it, many Western philosophers can agree on at least one point: There is a special place in hell for metaphor.

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Socrates took pains in the hours before his execution to warn against any form of embodied cognition: Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. (Plato, trans., 1977, pp. 72–73) Aristotle advised speechmakers to use linguistic metaphors very sparingly to spice up their rhetoric. Safer, he said, to stick to the meat-and-potatoes meanings of things that are sanctioned by social convention. He was liberal by comparison with Hobbes, who called not for moderation but abstinence: “In reckoning, and seeking of truth, [metaphors] are not to be admitted” (1651/1968, p. 114). Descartes (1644/1985) said that if there is any hope of knowing the world in its ultimate reality, it lies in clear and distinct concepts. That’s when our perception of something “is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear” (pp. 207–208). At its worst, metaphor is deceptive and beguiling; at its best, it’s an I.O.U. on the truth; if we must resort to it (indulge in it?), then we can do so only provisionally. We’re obliged to eventually replace it with a precise literal definition. You get the point.4 For our purposes we can sidestep debates over truth in an absolute metaphysical sense. Here we’re interested in the ways ordinary citizens engage metaphor when they desire the truth and care about thinking accurately (regardless of their success, objectively speaking). When we look for an answer in lay epistemology theory, we don’t get a simple moderation hypothesis as we did in the case of certainty and consistency motives. Instead, we (or at least I) have dueling intuitions. On the one hand, accuracy motivation is likely to block metaphor use. When people want to know something in a way that cannot be denied or doubted, they’ll concentrate on that thing’s unique features and properties. They’ll want to say, in the spirit of Descartes, that that thing is exactly what it says it is: a rose is a rose is a rose. Hence, when they come upon a metaphor comparing that thing to something else, they will view it as detracting from direct contact with reality. We lack direct tests of this possibility, but indirect support comes from evidence that accuracy motivation increases avoidance of seemingly irrelevant or distracting bits of information. For example, when people are motivated to know someone’s “true” character, perhaps because they’re slated to work with

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that person on a shared task, they are likely to set aside convenient stereotypes that might apply (e.g., based on gender, age) and put effort into learning the person’s unique qualities (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Also, people recognize that persuasive messages often contain peripheral cues—aspects of a communication that are irrelevant to the merits of the object or position advocated in the message, such as a catchy jingle or a sexy spokesperson. When they are motivated (and able) to think deeply and accurately about that object or position, they are careful to prevent those cues from swaying their attitudes (Frey & Eagly, 1993). On the other hand, it seems equally intuitive that accuracy-motivated individuals will seize on metaphors. The source concepts used in many metaphors have a well-known structure. They may refer to physical things, so that their parts and processes are easy to observe. By mapping a target onto such an established source, a metaphor gives the person a satisfying picture of how the target “works”—what its parts are and how they interrelate. This isn’t news for educators, who regularly concoct metaphors to help students comprehend an unfamiliar network of relations in terms of an analogous, well-known schema—the heart is a pump; electricity is water flowing through pipes; the brain is a computer (Vosniadou & Ortony, 1989). Nor would it surprise the students seeking to accurately grasp those complex concepts, as they are highly receptive to instructional metaphors (Low, 2008; Midgley, Trimmer, & Davies, 2013). When it comes to moral conundrums, metaphor can also give an (apparent) stamp of validity. Pop in a DVD and you see a public service announcement on the legality of downloading movies off the Internet. The words “You wouldn’t steal a car” appear on the screen, followed by a dramatic reenactment of a car theft. Then “You wouldn’t steal a purse.” After reminding you of other objects you don’t intend to steal, the message concludes: “Downloading pirated films is stealing.” It wants you to see these activities as sharing the same underlying structure. Through metaphor, it reduces the complexities of copyright law to a simpler scenario with a self-evident prescription for moral conduct: snatching an elderly lady’s purse is obviously wrong. If you’re motivated to establish beyond a doubt that downloading is unethical, you’ll find it helpful to anchor that judgment in the source domain of pilferage.5 To find out how accuracy motivation intervenes in metaphor use, Landau et  al. (2014) built on studies operationalizing accuracy motivation as concern with making a bad decision or poor judgment. They asked participants how concerned they are about the negative impact of corporate bankruptcy on society. Later on, participants read about a bankruptcy framed either as a vehicle crash or in equivalent non-metaphoric terms. When the highly concerned participants read the vehicle framing, they felt that they had a more accurate sense of what actions were necessary to prevent bankruptcy’s harmful consequences in the future. They were also more likely to blame that particular bankruptcy on the company’s leader, presumably because they were drawing

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on their knowledge of vehicle accidents to interpret the causes of system failure. In contrast, participants who couldn’t care less about corporate bankruptcy did not employ the vehicle metaphor to make judgments. Recognizing the limitations of any single study, here we see accuracy motivation leading people to embrace metaphors. Ottati and colleagues (1999) proposed a different way in which accuracy motivation moderates reactions to a metaphor. When people encounter a metaphoric message, their interest in the source domain determines how much effort they put into thinking deeply about the message. In one study, college students read strong or weak arguments that they be required to complete a new, difficult hurdle before being allowed to graduate (cf. Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In one condition, the message was interspersed with sports-metaphoric statements (e.g., “If you want to play ball with the best . . .”); in a comparison condition, these statements were replaced with literal paraphrases (e.g., “If you want to work with the best . . .”). Among participants who knew and cared about sports, sport-metaphoric statements led to more positive attitudes toward the new requirement when the arguments were strong, but not when they were weak. Compared to those who cared less about sports, they seem to have devoted more mental energy to evaluating the quality of the persuasive arguments before making a decision.

Two Other Epistemic Motives Creativity Motivation: Expand Cognitive Horizons I can’t get enough of watching Claire Underwood fry eggs. If you watched the TV show House of Cards, you know that Claire (Robin Wright) possesses unbounded political ambition that pits her against feminine conventionality. So when she ends a long day of political maneuvering by cracking eggs—her facial expression zealous, her motions clipped—she is not just making dinner; she is shattering the quintessential symbol of motherhood and frailty. It’s a scene pregnant with meaning (couldn’t resist). The larger question looms: What makes this metaphor enjoyable? It didn’t seem to satisfy the three epistemic motives we’ve discussed so far: It didn’t reduce nagging uncertainty, verify an existing belief, or improve accuracy. If anything, it helped me see Claire’s character anew. This hints at the idea that metaphor use can satisfy a fourth epistemic motive: to think about things differently, to throw a fresh light on a familiar idea, and even destabilize conventional meanings. Let’s call this creativity motivation. The imaginative strength of metaphor is hardly news, of course. Diverse scholars have championed metaphor as a driving force behind creative processes of novelty seeking, experimentation, and curiosity. It opens up a mental space, they say, where meanings can be fluidly recombined and transformed (Donoghue, 2014). Freud (1914/1958) defined this space using his own creative

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metaphor, calling it a tummelplatz, or playground, where the real and unreal are free to intermingle. We enter this space when, for example, we come across a striking image in a poem, or when a teacher invites us to reimagine the American Dream. In these contexts, metaphor brings to life a new shade of emotion, a shift in perception, or a connection between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas. The fact that we often seek out and enjoy romping around in metaphor’s playground tells us something deeper about our full range of epistemic motives. People are not concerned exclusively with imposing structure (i.e., simplicity, clarity, consistency, stability) on the social environment and their experiences, as one might understandably conclude from dominant perspectives on social cognition. As humanistic theorists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow emphasized, we are also motivated to seek out challenges and master and integrate new experiences. When we check out new art, travel to exotic countries, or take a class in an unfamiliar topic, we are setting out energetically to investigate and explore our worlds, to think of things afresh, even if it means giving up some certainty and control. Although these expansive tendencies undoubtedly recruit many cognitive processes, metaphor helps us exercise assimilative powers, open the self up to new experiences, and express ourselves. These ideas suggest that engagement with imaginative metaphors is a large part of what makes many social activities intrinsically rewarding, and hence why individuals and societies invest resources in them. Let’s consider a few examples.

Play Freud’s playground metaphor is apt, as children take full advantage of metaphor in their imaginative play. Vygotsky (1978) observed that, in play, a symbol or word for one thing shifts to mean something else. The cardboard box becomes a house or a military bunker or a child-eating monster. The same essential process seems to be at work when grown-ups create clever clues for an urban scavenger hunt or a confessional game at a bachelorette party. The fun inheres in taking a meaning from the context in which it is habitually used and applying it to another.

Humor In The Act of Creation (1989), Koestler distilled the varieties of humor to a core process. We find humor, he said, in perceiving a situation or event in “two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of references.” Let’s unpack that. In most of our normal grown-up lives, we toggle between different frames of reference—what Koestler also calls matrices—suited to the occasion at hand. Dealing with a friendship issue? Call up the friendship matrix; for plumbing concerns, use your plumbing matrix. Each matrix has its own “code” or system of logic that governs the content and structure of thought (what makes

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FIGURE 4.4 

 aoul Hausmann’s sculpture blends elements of disparate domains— R human and machine—to provoke viewers to see the world anew. Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time), assemblage circa 1920, image from Wikimedia Commons.

it “self-consistent”). Something is funny when it blends—or rather, abruptly collides—two remote or incompatible matrices. A funny pun, for example, prompts us to view a word or phrase in two matrices simultaneously. Or take the cartoon of the hapless robot bumbling its way through the metropolis: it smashes together the human and machine matrices, eliciting shrieks of laughter (Bergson, 1911/2005).

Artistic and Scientific Discovery Koestler proposes that the same creative process that gives rise to humor lies behind artistic and scientific discovery (see also Dunbar, 1997). All these creative

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leaps of the imagination, he says, consist in fusing matrices that were previously thought to be different in kind. They differ only in their intention and emotional tone. For example, the cartoonist blends the mechanical with the biological, but so did Raoul Hausmann in his sculpture, The Spirit of Our Time (Figure 4.4). So too did the pioneering cognitive scientists who compared human thought to digital computation (Gardner, 1987). Of course, they were not intending to be funny. Hausmann aimed to confront us with a mordant commentary on bureaucracy, while the psychologists sought a synthetic perspective on the mind’s inner workings. But they all used metaphor to spur the creative intellect. Like Koestler, Bronowski (1977) argued that the operating motive behind art and science is the search for an underlying order or structure to nature and experience. Artists and scientists may appear to reside in separate galaxies, but they both seek “hidden likenesses” between things which were not thought alike before. And, Bronowski stresses, finding and contemplating hidden likenesses is intrinsically pleasurable. It is thrilling to find a new unity in the variety of nature. That’s why, for many people, these activities are valuable for their own sake, independent of whatever practical benefit is to be gained. In sum, a well-rounded understanding of motivated metaphor use needs to model creativity motivation in addition to the epistemic motives discussed earlier. This calls for experimental tests of whether heightened creativity motivation makes people more likely to seek out and enjoy metaphors. Researchers could activate this motive by inducing people to feel that their environment, or life in general, has become monotonous, oppressively banal, or burdened by routine. They may compensate by searching for an inventive, unusual, or arresting metaphor (e.g., in a song or movie) that yields fresh insight into some experience or situation. Or they may feel that metaphors (e.g., in political rhetoric) reach them in a more vital way than can literal forms of expression. Hegel put this hypothesis more eloquently: Metaphor may arise from the wit of a subjective caprice which, to escape from the commonplace, surrenders to a piquant impulse, not satisfied until it has succeeded in finding related traits in the apparently most heterogeneous material and therefore, to our astonishment, combining things that are poles apart from one another. (1998, p. 407; italics added)

Reactance Motivation: Don’t Tread on Me We’ve seen that engaging metaphor can express one’s desire to be free from the grip of conventional meaning. This brings us to another motive: to be free from other people’s attempts to restrict what we think and do. Brehm’s theory of psychological reactance (Brehm & Brehm, 1981) starts with the idea that people have certain free behaviors, or things they believe they have the right and the capability to do. When people sense that their freedom to

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pursue one of those behaviors is threatened, they experience an uncomfortable emotional state, called reactance, which they are motivated to reduce. They may reduce it by performing the threatened behavior and thus restoring their sense of freedom. Or they may simply assert their ability to engage in that behavior, even if they don’t follow through on it. This theory explains why forceful, demanding efforts to compel obedience, compliance, or persuasive attitude change can backfire. Across domains such as consumer decision making and romantic interests, people resist persuasive messages when they feel like they are being manipulated or that a restriction is being placed on their freedom to choose what to think (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Driscoll, Davis, & Lipetz, 1972). They also devalue options perceived to be forced on them (Ross, 1995; Thompson et al., 2004). For example, mock jurors who received a forceful (vs. mild) admonition to ignore inadmissible evidence (“You have no choice but to disregard it”) were motivated to reestablish their freedom by more heavily weighing precisely the information they had been told to disregard (Wolf & Montgomery, 1977). Reactance stands apart from the three epistemic motives identified by lay epistemology theory. It is not a desire to comprehend something with certainty. It’s not consistency motivation because even if people lack a preexisting preference for a given thought or behavior, if they sense that their freedom is threatened, the ensuing reactance will make that thought or behavior more attractive (case in point: tell a child she cannot play with a toy that sits unused in the closet, and watch that heretofore neglected toy become her favorite). Whereas accuracy motivation aims to achieve the truth rather than folly, reactance is about preserving the integrity of one’s executive boundaries, and pushing back against attempts to restrict one’s freedom to think for oneself. “I may be wrong about something,” the reactance-driven person says, “but at least I’m making up my own mind, in my own way.” How will reactance motivation direct metaphor use? Research on this question is scant, but I see three possibilities.

Reject All Metaphors People may reject a metaphoric communication if they perceive it as a coercive tactic meant to manipulate how they think and feel about the topic at hand. The average citizen may have never heard of conceptual metaphor theory, but I suspect that they have an armchair appreciation that metaphor can mush together dissimilar things and, in that way, subtly constrain which ideas are brought to the fore and deemed fit for consideration. Hence, they may distrust metaphor much as they occasionally distrust irony, riddle, and other rhetorical devices for saying one thing and meaning another. For them, the tacit message of any metaphor is: “You are not able or allowed to think about this topic in its own terms.”6

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This line of reasoning led Charteris-Black (2011) to propose that metaphor in public discourse is more persuasive when it acts in combination with other rhetorical devices rather than in isolation, much like a pill is easier to swallow when tucked in a tablespoon of peanut butter. Dazzling the audience’s attention with, say, anecdotes, rhetorical questions, and literary allusions will distract from a metaphor’s constraining influence, assuaging concerns over being manipulated or exploited. Charteris-Black gives the example of Winston Churchill’s World War II public addresses, which interwove metaphors into overarching narratives to dramatically portray the United Kingdom and its allies as locked in a mythic battle of Good and Evil—a narrative that strengthened national unity and stoked patriotic fervor.

Reject Pandering Metaphors If communicators ask us to think about a target in terms of a source that seems simplistic, or overly tailored to our presumed interests and lifestyle, they can come across as skeptical that we might also, like them, be capable of comprehension or cultivated sensibilities. The tacit message here is: “You’ll need to think about the target in terms of this limited set of things that you can grasp.” An example will help clarify. Between 2012 and 2014, Republican groups like Americans for Shared Prosperity bankrolled a series of anti-Obama ads that tried to woo female voters by depicting President Obama as a bad boyfriend. In the ad, a woman describes her declining “relationship with Barack”: “In 2008, I fell in love. His online profile made him seem so perfect,” she says. “Smart, handsome, charming, articulate, all the right values. I trusted him . . . by 2012, our relationship was in trouble. But I stuck with him because he promised he’d be better.” In another ad, a woman complains to her friend, “Why do I always fall for guys like this?” A third shows a woman talking to a cardboard cutout of the president: “You’re just not the person I thought you were. It’s not me, it’s you,” she says before a voice-over intones, “tell us why you’re breaking up with Obama.” Long story short: this communication strategy seriously backfired (Brand, 2014). Many women were offended by the implication that they could only evaluate political candidates through a prism of romantic relationships rather than level-headed reason and serious consideration of policy. Here, reactance motivated a rejection not of any metaphor, but specifically a metaphor whose source caters to the lowest common denominator.

Embrace Metaphor Tom Harkin, a candidate in the 1992 presidential primary campaign, had this to say about incumbent George H.W. Bush: “He’s a guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Harkin’s not talking about baseball; his point

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was that Bush’s success in politics wasn’t due to natural talent and hard work, as Bush would like you to believe, but to his privileged background. Catching Harkin’s drift may seem easy, but as Coulson (2001, p. 172) explains, it requires listeners to perform a sophisticated mental mapping between the domains of baseball and politics. Most pertinent to reactance theory is Coulson’s point that you generated that conclusion. Harkin’s metaphor invites you to pull up your schematic knowledge of baseball and fill in the blanks to work out for yourself what he meant about Bush’s success. Because that mapping process feels self-determined, you may be more receptive to Harkin’s message. If Harkin had instead told you, in direct literal terms, what to believe about Bush, he could be seen as restricting your freedom to think, tripping off your reactance alarm. This vignette illustrates the idea that metaphoric communications have the power to lift recipients out of their typical passive roles as observers and enlist them into collaborating with the communicator to create meaning. This relaxes their reactance motivation, making it possible to consider a view or to take advice without feeling like they are directly being told what to think or do. This is likely why metaphor features prominently in myths, fables, allegories, and other cultural devices designed to transmit instructions for how to act and live: It gives recipients room to connect the dots for themselves (Hyde, 2010). I’ll extend this idea in Chapter 5 to propose that cultures differ in their degree of overall metaphor use because they are differentially willing to impose on others.

Summary To summarize this chapter, imagine that Andrea takes some time out this evening to YouTube the U.S. Senate debates on the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which many remember as Operation Desert Shield/Storm (yes, she’s that bored). She finds a colorful menu of metaphors: George H.W. Bush is described as a gambler who upped the stakes and rolled the dice, as well as a captain who asks us to get on board; U.S. military intervention is said to be a nightmare, a chess game, an unpredictable tiger ride, unleashing a mad Middle East genie from its bottle, and the opposite of the Super Bowl and an Easter-egg hunt (Lakoff, 1992; Pancake, 1993; Rohrer, 1995; Sandikcioglu, 2000; Voss, Kennet, Wiley, & Schooler, 1992). Will she adopt each successive metaphor to think about the crisis, automatically and passively, or will she instead be more selective in “choosing” (most likely implicitly) the metaphors she thinks with? The theory and research that I have outlined here point to several predictions: Andrea will strategically adopt metaphors that help her to gain an adequate understanding of difficult concepts (certainty motivation); she’ll embrace metaphors that reinforce her prior ideological commitments (consistency motivation). For example, if she is uneasy with

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a picture of war in which people act cruelly, she’ll be drawn to the image of war as a storm, or other natural force, because it minimizes the role of human agency (Pancake, 1993). If she has a strong desire to determine whether military intervention was ultimately the right decision (accuracy motivation), she could go either way: reject metaphors as obscuring the central issues (“This is not the Super Bowl”); or seize on metaphors linking the intervention to another thing that has a self-evident structure (“Goes to show: Poke at a dog long enough and it bites you”). If she’s seeking a fresh perspective on the issue (creativity motivation), she’ll embrace novel metaphors. Finally, if she is intent on thinking for herself (reactance motivation), she’ll reject metaphors seen as manipulative or patronizing, but she may be receptive to metaphors that invite her to form her own mental picture. These five epistemic motives are constantly at work, sometimes below our conscious radar, filtering which of the surplus of metaphors we are sensitive to, how we interpret and apply them, and which we bring to mind to justify what we want to believe. In fact, the full motivation story is likely to be much more complex and interesting: We haven’t even touched on the possibility that the same situation taps into different epistemic motives, which may work in concert but may pull the individual in opposing directions. Imagine that Andrea is a committed pacifist: the metaphor war is a nightmare may initially appeal to her consistency motivation, but her accuracy motivation—her desire to know what’s truly going on—compels her to disavow it. Evidence that epistemic motives direct metaphor use takes us beyond the traditional view that metaphors automatically, unconsciously, and inevitably constitute target domains in a static conceptual system. But it doesn’t take us far enough. These motives represent only a portion of the person’s lifespace—Lewin’s aforementioned term for the total situation shaping social behavior. A next step is to situate metaphor use in the broader context of the person’s culture. That is the goal of Chapter 5.

Notes 1 Epistemic motives are not sharply demarcated. Many social-cognitive processes blend the different motives or alternate between them (a point I return to in this chapter). Still, their situational triggers and consequences are distinct, allowing us to consider them separately. 2 If increased effectance motivation spurs personification, does the act of personifying satisfy this motive? It does. Participants led to describe a product in anthropomorphic (vs. objective) terms rated the product as being more predictable and controllable (Waytz et al., 2010). 3 A question for future research: If we break metaphor processing into a series of steps, when does consistency motivation intervene? In this study, for example, it is possible that all participants initially transferred their vehicle knowledge to infer who is to blame for the crisis, and only afterward did they accept or reject that inference in light of prior attitudes. On the other hand, consistency motivation may have intervened earlier to disrupt metaphor comprehension, prior to the stage of application.

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4 Nietzsche bravely broke ranks with the anti-metaphor dogma. He argued the opposite—that what we take to be truth rests upon layers of baked-in metaphors “which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding” (1979/1873, p. 84). That is, our received truths are fossilized metaphors which we have forgotten are metaphors—coins that we’ve circulated for so long that their figurative quality has rubbed off. 5 This is why metaphor is the bête noire of many philosophers: a concretizing metaphor can feel indisputable even as it mangles the truth. 6 It is worth noting that culture plays a big role in determining the importance people place on freedom. Individual agency and a sense of personal freedom are more important to people in Western individualistic cultures (e.g., European Americans) than it is to those from collectivistic cultures (e.g., Asian and Latin Americans; Jonas et al., 2009). Reactant responses to metaphor may therefore play out differently across cultures.

5 THE CULTURAL CONTEXT Universality and Variations

Culturally shared metaphors originate in universal aspects of bodily functioning. Cultural variation in metaphor use is constrained by the wider context of social norms, ideology, and ecology. Some years ago I visited the Smithsonian art galleries in Washington, D.C. (who can resist free admission?). One gallery exhibited works from India and the Himalayas in the fifth century BCE. While studying the brightly painted ceremonial plates and bowls, I detected a pattern by virtue of my acute powers of semiotic deconstruction (okay, I read about it in the exhibit catalogue). On those pieces depicting multiple deities, the larger deities ruled over the smaller ones. Another gallery displayed Iranian pieces from the thirteenth century. Guess what? Ancestral spirits of greater stature were portrayed as larger than their human or superhuman counterparts. Fast forward to 1947, when 10-year-old children took part in a study led by Bruner and Goodman at Harvard University. Some children were asked to hold various coins in their closed left hand and, with their right, turn a nob to adjust the diameter of a light beam until it was the same size as the coins. Other children performed the same essential task but with cardboard discs instead of coins. Children accurately judged the size of the cardboard discs, but they “saw” the coins as far bigger than they are. Also, the greater the value of the coin, from a penny to a quarter, the more children exaggerated its size, with up to a 35 percent deviation from reality. Does this just show that children have a hyperactive imagination? Unlikely. Adults also perceived significant symbols as physically larger than size-matched neutral shapes, regardless of whether the symbols had a positive connotation

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(dollar sign) or a negative one (swastika) (Bruner & Postman, 1948). Cole and colleagues (2016) replicated this effect experimentally by manipulating target valence. Politically conservative Americans perceived a political rally supporting same-sex marriage as physically larger than it really was (even when offered a monetary incentive to be accurate), but only if they were presented with evidence that gay marriage is on the rise in the United States. Similarly, Jewish Israelis saw a politically contested strip of land as geographically larger if they had just been told that the Jewish state is in jeopardy. Threats look big. Here we have geographically dispersed groups, centuries removed from each other, who communicate and perceive social significance in terms of size. We also see this metaphor expressed in several languages. Just as an English speaker would say, “This is a big problem, and it is only going to grow,” a Polish speaker would say “To duży problem i będzie się jeszcze powiększał” (the problem is big and will grow). If, like my just-put-upon Polish friend, you’re skeptical of whether such utterances are metaphoric at all, take a closer look: Problems are not objects with mass. This is no isolated case. Studies reveal strikingly consistent patterns in metaphoric communication across unrelated languages and the myths, rituals, artifacts, and cosmologies of diverse groups (Kövecses, 2005, provides an excellent overview). This matters because social psychologists are increasingly interested in understanding how culture conditions the person’s mental life (i.e., perceptions, motives, values, beliefs, identities) and social behavior. One way that metaphor studies contribute to this effort is by explaining how metaphors originate from embodied interactions with the physical environment. This gives rise to novel hypotheses about which social meanings are culturally widespread or universal. Of course, it almost goes without saying that a lopsided emphasis on universality gives only a partial picture. I say “almost” because metaphor theorists have, in fact, traditionally assumed that metaphor is a fixed feature of the human mind, leaving little room for cultural variation (Kövecses, 2005).1 Social psychology stands to correct this view. It’s amassed evidence that a person’s cultural context profoundly shapes her or his worldview, self-concept, and behavior. This work points to several potential sources of cultural variation in metaphor use, including group differences in source knowledge and social norms surrounding communication. We see one kind of variation in a follow-up study by Bruner and Goodman. They compared the responses of well-off children recruited from an elite private school to under-privileged children living in a settlement house in a Boston slum. The children with scantier resources, who presumably have a greater subjective need for money than their economically advantaged counterparts, relied more on the important is big metaphor to estimate the coins’ size. There is another takeaway from this study. In thinking about culture, social psychologists tend to focus on differences between geographically

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separated nations on broad psychological dimensions such as individualismcollectivism. Here, though, the two groups of children lived in the same city—perhaps even a few blocks apart—and still we see a sociocultural factor predicting metaphor use in a way that makes theoretical sense. The implication is that a metaphor can represent a local, but no less significant, unit of cultural meaning—a way to build a shared understanding using whatever conceptual resources are at hand. I hope to show that this notion sets the stage for a fine-grained picture of the connections between social cognition and the particulars of place and time—a picture that gives us a purchase on why groups think and act differently.

Universality in Metaphor Use Culture consists of patterns of meanings, expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which members of collectives develop, perpetuate, and communicate knowledge about and attitudes toward reality (Geertz, 1973; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). With that definition in mind, we won’t fully understand culture’s impact on behavior if we treat cultures as though they were neatly bounded entities defined by national borders, ethnicity labels, and other traditional boundaries. Instead, we aim to characterize an underlying set of shared meanings reflected in symbolic communication, social practices, and artifacts. If we start by looking at language, we find that speakers of every language use metaphors in ordinary discourse (Kövecses, 2005). Also, they use metaphor to do the same kinds of things: to negotiate aspects of social interactions and define their personal and collective identity; to explore and explain the nature of the physical environment, the mysteries of creation, death, and the afterlife; and to reproduce their shared understanding of their group’s significance within history, society, and the cosmos. At a more detailed level of analysis, we find remarkable parallels across languages in the particular metaphors that people use to talk about social concepts (Micholajczuk, 1998; Sweetser, 1990; Taylor & Mbense, 1998; Yu, 1995). A case in point is the event structure metaphor, which maps aspects of events (state, change, cause, action, means, purpose) onto analogous aspects of physical space and movement (Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Each analog link in this mapping is reflected in similar patterns of expressions in different languages, as exemplified in these Chinese expressions and their English translations (from Yu, 1998, as reproduced in Kövecses, 2005, pp. 44–45): States à Locations or bounded regions “Guo-you qiye chuyu lianghao zhuangtai.” (state-owned enterprises be-located-in fine state) “The state-owned enterprises are in a fine state.”

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Change à Motion from one location to another “Gai xiangmu qidong le.” (this project get-into-motion) “This project got into motion (i.e., got started).” Causes à Physical forces “Zhexie zhizhu chanye de xingcheng dai-dong le zhengti jingji de fazhan.” (these industries—formation bring-move—overall economy— development) “The formation of these industries brought into motion (i.e., gave impetus to) the development of the overall economy.” Difficulties à Impediments to motion “Women yao paichu Xianggang pingwen guodu daolu shang de renhe zhang’ai.” (we should remove Hong Kong smooth transition road on— any obstacles) “We should remove any obstacles on the road of Hong Kong’s smooth transition.” A host of other metaphors appear across such diverse languages as Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Zulu (spoken in South Africa), and Wolof (spoken in West Africa). One such metaphor treats systems (e.g., relationships, companies) as buildings (Kövecses, 2005, pp. 72–79): English: “He tore down my theory brick-by-brick.” Japanese: “keezai-no kiban-o yurugasu jiken-ga oki-ta.” (trans: “There occurred an event that shook the foundation of the economy.”) Portuguese: “O casamento deles esta em ruinas.” (trans: “Their marriage is falling into ruins.”) Tunisian Arabic: “bna Hayaatu min jdiid ba3dma Tallaq.” (trans: “He started to build a new life after his divorce.”) Other candidates for universal or near-universal linguistic metaphors include: happiness is up (“lift my spirits”); time is spatial movement (“That’s all behind us now”); understanding is grasping (“Foucault is slipping through my fingers”); intensity is heat (“The competition is heating up”); understanding is seeing (“Look at the big picture”); intimacy is closeness (“I feel closer to mom lately”); and self-control is object possession (“He lost himself reading”). If we zoom out from language to consider other forms of communication, we see widespread metaphors expressed in sounds and gestures, and embodied in sociocultural practices, institutions, and artifacts (Forceville, 1996; McNeill, 1992; Taub, 2001). To mention just a few examples, groups across the globe: fabricate ritual objects conveying good/evil as light/dark (Eliade, 1996; Langer, 1979); stage ritual performances that establish physical boundaries between the

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sacred (ordered, clean) and the profane (disordered, dirty; Douglas, 1966; Turner, 1995); and produce images and symbols depicting death as an intentional agent (Guthke, 1999). The question becomes: Why do people in such different cultures, who speak such different languages, nevertheless communicate using such similar metaphors? Kövecses (2005) suggests three possibilities: Comparable metaphors appeared by accident in various languages and cultures; languages “borrowed” them, pre-assembled, from other languages that “invented” them; or they arose independently in historically unrelated languages around the world. Mere coincidence is doubtful given that the languages in question belong to different language families. The “borrowing” explanation cannot account for why, in several cases, the cultures in question did not have much contact with each other when the relevant metaphors emerged. The third answer is provocative because it suggests that members of different cultures share other psychological process that motivated the emergence of common metaphors. Which processes are those?

The Embodiment Hypothesis The embodiment hypothesis states that developmentally early, nonmetaphoric associations between social experiences and interactions with the physical environment form the basis for metaphoric conceptions of those experiences later in development (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). This hypothesis is also known as a scaffolding account, as it states that abstractions are built up around the conceptual scaffold of familiar bodily experiences (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). Let’s unpack this idea. It assumes that many bodily states and processes are commonly and similarly experienced by all or most humans on account of the types of bodies we have and our manner of negotiating our surroundings. Despite the important differences between you and people inhabiting different time zones and historical epochs, you have the same essential physiology, biomechanical comportment, sensory modalities, and motor routines. We all feel our body heat up during vigorous work or exercise; we all lie down when we’re ill; we all avoid unpleasant smells. You get the point. Many such experiences manifest in stereotyped ways that we learn through repetition. For example, from experiences of manually handling things you’ve built up a rich network of associations about how to grasp, what a firm grasp affords, when to let something go, and so on. These knowledge structures are called experiential gestalts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) or image schemata (Kövecses, 2005). I’ll call them bodily experiential schemas (clunky but apt). A bodily experiential schema provides a mental scaffold—a framework or template—to construct a metaphoric representation of an abstraction. Returning to our manual grasping example, you’ve spent a lifetime habitually approaching

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desired objects and pulling them toward you, and likewise distancing yourself from/pushing away undesirable objects. Based on these experiences you learned a bodily experiential schema of physical approach/avoidance. Later in cognitive development you extended that schema to conceptualize positive valence as toward/close and negative valence as away/distant, even with relation to stimuli that—and this is critical—do not literally take up space. That explains why, if you are an English speaker, you say things like “I’m moving toward socialism.” And because people raised in, say, Korea have similarly applied the same essential bodily experiential schema to represent valence, they say things like: “애써 그 사람이 그리운 생각을 밀어냈다” (trans: “With much effort I pushed away my longing for him”). The point is, our metaphors do not come about by accident; they are constrained by the way the human body works.2 The embodiment hypothesis puts cultural psychology on a firmer foundation. It provides a basis for theorizing about what social meanings underlie social behavior across sociocultural categories—language communities, ethnic groups, nations, and historical eras, among others. So long as we have reason to believe that different groups are motivated to represent and communicate about a given abstraction, and that they share a bodily experiential schema, then we can hypothesize the operation of shared conceptual metaphor based on that schema. How do we empirically test those hypotheses to assess claims about universality in metaphoric conceptualization? We’ve already seen one method at work: look for parallels across groups in the linguistic metaphors that express the hypothesized conceptual metaphor. Still, just because there is a certain amount of shared linguistic ground between groups does not mean that they think the same. Besides, spotlighting a few idiomatic expressions ignores the larger linguistic landscape (Gibbs, 2014). Stronger tests leverage conceptual metaphor theory’s account of how metaphor operates: a mapping that systematically links elements of the target abstraction onto analogous elements of the source (Chapter 2). If we hypothesize that a bodily experiential schema serves as a source in a shared metaphor, then the first step is to get people to articulate that schema—that is, to characterize their experiences with source-relevant bodily states. Next we analyze clusters of metaphoric linguistic expressions that are based on that source. To the extent that those expressions parallel people’s profile of the bodily experiential schema, we can be confident that they instantiate the same conceptual mapping. The third step is to ask speakers of another language how they characterize that source, and to compare that profile with their metaphoric expressions for the same target. If a similar configuration of parallels between source profiles and expressions crops up across languages, then there is a good chance the speakers of those different languages rely on the same conceptual metaphor (Gibbs, 2003a, 2003b). One illustrative study analyzed the metaphor anger is a hot fluid in a pressurized container (Gibbs, 1994). Among English speakers, there is a close parallel between

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descriptions of source-relevant bodily experiences and conventionalized metaphoric expressions about anger. Participants said they know that the explosion of a pot on the stove has no intention behind it, and that it happens in an abrupt manner. Their metaphors portray the loss of control over anger analogously as caused by internal stress (simmer down), unintentional (that makes my blood boil), and sudden (he blew his top). The same patterns of correspondences appear in the anger-related expressions in several languages, including Hungarian, Japanese, and Chinese (Kövecses, 2000). If speakers of these languages did not similarly make use of the same basic bodily experiential schema to understand anger, we would not expect that source to preserve its schematic structure in target expressions. This method is useful but it still has us inferring a shared conceptual metaphor indirectly based on its linguistic expression. A third method tests whether, across groups, a metaphor similarly affects information processing online, in real time. We reason that if members of different groups employ the same conceptual metaphor, then activating the same bodily experiences during target processing should have parallel effects, even in contexts in which metaphoric language is not salient. To illustrate, we observe that people across the globe commonly talk about affection (and associated qualities such as helpfulness, kindness, and honesty) metaphorically in terms of physical warmth (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007). The embodiment hypothesis suggests that most of us learned in childhood to correlate the loving embrace of parents or caregivers with a comforting feeling of bodily warmth and, conversely, to associate distance from caregivers with decreased bodily warmth. Scaffolding off these correlations, we come to represent affection in terms of warmth (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). If the same bodily experiential schema constrains metaphoric representations of affection worldwide, then cuing warmth sensations should influence perceptions of affection in the same manner across cultural groups. This is indeed the case: Americans who held a warm (vs. cold) beverage subsequently perceived a target individual as friendlier and more trustworthy (Williams & Bargh, 2008); Dutch participants seated in a warm room (22–4 °C) were more likely than those in a cold room (14–18 °C) to focus on maintaining communal relationships (IJzerman & Semin, 2009); and Canadians who recalled a time when they were socially excluded (vs. accepted) perceived the temperature of the room to be an average of five degrees colder, even though the actual temperature remained constant (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). Summing up, the embodiment hypothesis explains how patterns in our bodily functioning and activity constrain the development and use of a given metaphor, and hence why strikingly similar metaphoric themes emerge in the communication, practices, and artifacts of different groups. This offers a corrective to characterizing a group’s meaning system as the cumulative product of experiences and socialization without due consideration of the specific details of this process. Put another way, the embodiment hypothesis provides a

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non-arbitrary account of why geographically dispersed and historically isolated groups share many of the same systems of beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral scripts. Without it, or something like it, we would have to throw up our hands and say that the content and structure of cultural meanings emerge out of thin air.

Beyond the Body Despite its advantages, the embodiment hypothesis is an incomplete explanation of universality. Many widespread metaphors do not seem to arise out of bodily experiential schemas. Rather, they derive their content and structure from schematic knowledge of other types of things. Personification is a prime example. Everywhere people communicate about intangible things as though they were intentional agents. Political leaders cast unemployment, apathy, and inflation as personified enemies against which to collectively struggle; some groups enact rituals that attribute health maladies to the scheming of ancestral spirits (Turner, 1995); and origin myths—stories about how the world was created—explain cosmological events in terms of the familiar ways that people fall in love, procreate, express emotions, and so forth (Stookey, 2004). This metaphor is as good a candidate as any for universal status, but it’s rooted not as much in the types of bodies we have as in our folk psychology— our common fund of knowledge about mental states (intentions, goals, beliefs) and how they link to action. (Of course, this and other sources are “embodied” in the sense that they are instantiated in the nervous system, but that is not what makes them useful for thinking.) A few other examples of widespread but not-particularly-embodied metaphors: ••

••

••

Many groups represent (e.g., in iconography) the fate of nations and the outcome of political events (e.g., military campaigns) in terms of fertility and regeneration (Stookey, 2004). This metaphor arises from common conceptions of life—where it comes from, what sustains it—rather than representations of sensorimotor experiences. From classic Confucianism right up to modern political rhetoric, conceptions of national identity are couched in terms of parent–child relations and filial piety (Lakoff, 1996; McAdams et  al., 2008). The source here is family bonds—knowledge that is shared across cultures (Pepitone & Triandis, 1987). As alluded to, the concept building is a common source in English, German, French, and Russian (Chilton, 1996). We co-opt ideas like foundation, rooms, collapse, and rebuild to think about theories, relationships, careers, social movements, the cosmos, and a great deal else. Although we have bodily experiences with buildings, this metaphor leverages stereotyped knowledge of how buildings work.

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Still, we retain the core insight that shared schemas constrain metaphor development and use, which gives us a powerful new lens on cross-culturally shared aspects of social cognition. We should hang on to the embodiment hypothesis but broaden its scope to accommodate these observations. Of course, we would have to change its name.

Metaphor Variations Richly detailed, cross-disciplinary studies of language and culture reveal many interesting differences in metaphor use (e.g., Fernandez, 1991; Kövecses, 2005; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). Some variations hold between geographically separated language communities (i.e., speakers of the same language at a given time). Others hold between subcultures or between generations within the same language community. To make matters more complicated, each component of a conceptual metaphor can vary, making for many types of differences. For example, two groups may understand the same target in terms of different sources, or they may draw on the same source but construe it in different ways. Because I’m mainly concerned with integrating metaphor studies with cultural psychology, I examine variations that clearly connect to social-psychological factors. Still, much of what follows is admittedly speculative. I ask the reader to appreciate that my goal is not to summarize conclusive evidence; it is to sketch some outlines for a richer, more empirically generative cultural psychology.

Degree of Metaphor Use To be sure, metaphor is not the only coin in our social-cognitive currency, and it is likely that groups differ in the degree to which they use metaphor, overall, to inform how they think, communicate, and act. Documenting cross-cultural differences is challenging, though, because metaphor can be expressed in many forms of collective meaning making. If we limit our scope to language, we can access sophisticated digital tools that code texts for metaphor’s prevalence (Deignan, 2008; Steen et al., 2010a). But if we broaden out to consider other forms of communication, then it seems exceedingly difficult to reliably estimate a group’s metaphor production and consumption. Should we count corporate logos with figurative imagery? What about extended metaphoric allegories in political texts, or the application of homeopathic magic and folk medicine to reveal the secret kinships of things? My point of entry is a functional approach centering on what metaphor is for. Chapter 4 showed that individuals employ metaphor to satisfy a handful of epistemic motives: to be certain, consistent, accurate, creative, and autonomous. It’s a small step to recognize that groups also pursue these motives to varying degrees. This provides a theoretical framework to explain prior observations and predict group differences a priori.

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Be Certain Certainty motivation is the urge to establish a confident understanding of a concept that is otherwise difficult to grasp. It is possible that groups that grapple with relatively more challenging concepts will be strongly motivated to give them order; hence, metaphor will play a more pronounced role in how they think and generally conduct their lives. Consistent with this possibility is Baugh and Cable’s (1983) analysis of American English, which is particularly abundant in vivid metaphoric imagery: log rolling, have an ax to grind, to be on the fence, face the music, bark up the wrong tree, fly off the handle, go on the war path, saw wood. They attribute this generativity to the frontier experience between 1630 and 1860. American settlers encountered unfamiliar landscapes and engaged in many new activities, and they relied on imaginative metaphoric images to explain and communicate those experiences (with interesting gender differences; Kolodny, 1984).3 As with the physical landscape, the cultural landscape can change in ways that stoke collective uncertainty. Consider how the advent of electronic communications media transformed the way many of us live. Our visual environment shifted from stationary elements (e.g., printed newspapers) to an accelerating flux of signs that pop into view from some unknown holding place and vanish just as mysteriously. Meanwhile, the internet and its uses/ abuses spawned a new breed of ethical and legal conundrums. To get a handle on the situation, we developed a metaphoric vocabulary drawing from more concrete domains of experience, such as webs, networks, viruses, rooms, walls, and clouds. Real or perceived threats to group survival also catalyze metaphor generation: ••

••

••

Groups facing imminent extinction due to drastic ecological degradation have, historically, double-downed on symbol-making activities for propitiating deities and other cosmic forces, leaning hard on personification metaphors (Diamond, 2011). When millions of so-called “new” immigrants (from Eastern and Southern European nations) entered the United States between 1880 and 1920, the “old” immigrants (from Western and Northern European nations) responded with immigration restriction policies couched in metaphors of somatic illness (O’Brien, 2003). These metaphors imply that just as microbes are foreign invaders that inflict symptoms on the physical body, the new immigrants were contaminating the “body” of the country. In the 1950s, the U.S. government’s concerns over Communism as a hostile force of upheaval provoked the “Domino Theory,” comparing foreign nations to collapsible blocks.

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•• ••

The public and medical experts alike create metaphors to make sense of health crises like cancer and AIDS (Mukherjee, 2011; Sontag, 1978, 1989). The September 11th terrorist attacks left Americans with a vague notion that terrorism is a diffuse, unpredictable source of potential lethal hazard. But without a clear idea of what terrorism is, they framed it metaphorically as a virus, a dark cloud, and a disease (Kruglanski, Crenshaw, Post, & Victoroff, 2007).

Granted, these are examples of responses to particular circumstances, and may not be valid markers of total metaphor usage within a community. Still, it is plausible that the more a group struggles to negotiate nebulous threats, the more they will be preoccupied with explaining them, and the larger will be metaphor’s global contribution to their collective understanding of the world. How does this bear on variations within the same language community over time? One possibility is that metaphor plays a proportionately smaller role in a group’s social life over time. Consider the “career” of an instructional metaphor used in the classroom (Low, 2008). It’s meant to provide students with a provisional “ladder” for bootstrapping an understanding of the target concept. Students are expected to “kick the ladder away”—to discard the metaphor once they’ve gained an adequate understanding of the target. Analogously, a culture/ subculture may initially construe abstractions metaphorically, but abandon metaphors as they progressively understand the target in its own terms. That explains why we don’t fear Neptune’s wrath as the ancient Romans did: We know why earthquakes happen. Yesterday’s metaphors seem quaint, even childish. This suggests that as the years tick by, any given group will rely less and less on metaphor. An alternative possibility is that there will always be challenging ideas that resist precise articulation, from elusive sensuous qualities to shadowy threats. In fact, in some cases the more we learn about something, the more it resists attempts at literal description and the more we need to add metaphoric supplements to our folk knowledge (example: increasingly elaborate conceptions of the universe). Also, metaphors that no longer support comprehension may linger because they satisfy other group-level motives, such as lionizing a leader or justifying discrimination. (Oh, and we modern folk still personify meteorological events—our metaphors are simply less flamboyant.)

Be Polite People socialized into relatively individualistic cultures—like North America, Australia, and Europe—are oriented toward independence and self-reliance, view themselves as relatively free from other’s influence, and are less sensitive to social cues. By contrast, people socialized in collectivist cultures—like China, Japan, India, and Mexico—tend to view themselves as interdependent, defined

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primarily in relation to other people. They place greater value on cooperation and maintaining harmonious relationships with others, sensitivity to social cues, and behaving in ways that affirm relatedness to other people (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Oishi & Diener, 2001; Triandis, 1989). These cultural differences in attitudes and behavior are reinforced by institutions, norms, and scripts of action that people learn through socialization processes (Imada, 2010; Lanham, 1979). This developing picture suggests that individuals in collectivistic cultures are motivated to protect face—to ensure that other people on the social stage have the opportunity to successfully present their unique identity and affirm their personal value (Goffman, 1959). One way people protect face is by using indirect forms of communication (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). If you want to criticize, promise, apologize, or make a request, you can get right to the point with a direct speech act—“Give me the salsa”—or you can take a more circuitous path—“Did you see the salsa over there?” Indirect speech acts are inefficient and ambiguous, so why don’t you just say what you mean? Because your interlocutor might interpret a direct speech act as limiting her ability to think and act freely. “Shut the door” leaves her with few options; “Would you like to shut the door?” performs the same act of commanding while conveying the message: “I respect your right to be unburdened.” Metaphor can serve as a means of indirect communication. What makes it special is that it capitalizes on others’ (presumed) source knowledge. Take this bit of lifestyle advice from the Bible (Matthew 6:28): Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin Once readers realize this is not a straightforward description of flowers, they are invited to fill in the blanks and draw out the implications for their own conduct. Using metaphor lets them feel as though they reached that conclusion on their own. The literal paraphrase—“Stop worrying about material things”—might be rejected as an imposition. Combining these ideas, I propose that individuals in collectivistic cultures— again, those averse to limiting other people’s freedom (Jonas et al., 2009)—will communicate metaphorically more than their individualistic counterparts. One piece of supporting evidence comes from Charteris-Black’s (2003) comparison of English and Malay. In both languages the conceptual metaphor manner is taste (e.g., of the mouth, tongue) accounts for conventional expressions such as “honey-tongued.” However, Malay speakers are more likely to use this metaphor when negatively evaluating what another person says. In Malay culture it is very important to protect another’s face when expressing a negative evaluation of his or her action; a direct approach is unacceptable, whereas metaphoric expressions are more covert.

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Be Creative Metaphor makes the strange familiar, but in some cases it casts the familiar in a new light. It captures a hidden order underlying appearances and even destabilizes conventional meanings. Hence, a group’s valuing of creativity should positively predict its degree of metaphor use. We find examples in the subcultures of novelists, artists, intellectuals, and tech engineers. They make their living generating creative ideas with the power to entertain, comfort, and enlighten the rest of us (Steen & Gibbs, in press). Even if they don’t generate “more” metaphors, they elaborate, extend, and combine conventional metaphors in the interest of redefining or enhancing experience (Lakoff & Turner, 1989). Metaphors are also proliferating on the street corner. In certain segments of urban youth culture, a facility for vivid, novel metaphors is emphasized as a marker of social status. This is seen in competitive conversational practices like “playing the dozens” and the “rap battles” dramatized in the movie 8 Mile (2002). Participants attempt to one-up each other in verbal and conceptual skills, producing clever metaphoric imagery to belittle their opponent (Kochman, 1981). We should also mention political activists and leaders aiming to challenge traditional ways of thinking and living entrenched in the public mind. They often deploy metaphoric language and imagery to create a vision that liberates the audience’s imagination from the constraints of mainstream culture and provokes them to question the status quo (Charteris-Black, 2011; Chapter 9).

Preference for Particular Metaphors We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature. (Stephen Jay Gould, 1996, p. 7) ••

•• ••

Speakers of many languages liken life to a journey, struggle, or game, but speakers of Hmong in Laos and Thailand depict life as a string that is cut upon death. Although not unknown to Westerners, this metaphor significantly shapes Hmong speakers’ communication and social behavior (Riddle, 2000). In some dialects of Chinese, love is flying a kite (Yang, 2002). English speakers describe anger as a heated fluid or gas in a pressurized container; in Zulu it is an object lodged in the heart (Taylor & Mbense, 1998).

Why does a group gravitate toward a particular metaphor, and what keeps it in their cultural currency? One answer starts with the notion that metaphor use satisfies consistency motivation: the desire to create and maintain preferred interpretations of the social world. As we saw in Chapter 4, this motivation drives

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the individual to embrace metaphors that buttress preexisting beliefs and attitudes, and jettison those that don’t. Extrapolating, we can characterize a group as invested in upholding its worldview and, from there, examine how this motivation moderates metaphor preference.

Same Target, Different Source The same target can be mapped onto alternate sources, with the consequence that each mapping selectively highlights some target elements while actively downplaying others (Chapter 2). Hence, groups seeking to maintain a preferred interpretation of a target can strategically map it onto some sources and not others. Here’s an example. There is abundant evidence that White Americans are highly motivated to self-enhance—to exaggerate their standing on valued dimensions and avoid anything or anyone that threatens to undermine their positive self-views (Heine, 2005). They score higher on various measures of selfenhancement (e.g., self-serving attributions for successes and failures) than East Asians, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Chileans, and Fijians (Heine & Buchtel, 2009; Heine & Hamamura, 2007) Is this reflected in the metaphors used to think about the self? Köves (2002) asked Americans and Hungarians to write freely about their lives (the instructions didn’t mention metaphor) and coded their responses for spontaneous metaphor usage. Looking at Table 5.1, we see that Americans and Hungarians relied on many of the same sources, describing life as a game, a journey, a compromise, and war. But the frequency ordering of metaphors reveals an interesting difference: Americans most frequently described life as a precious possession—a wonderful, beautiful commodity that needs to be cherished and taken care of, TABLE 5.1  What is life? Americans and Hungarians differ in the sources they frequently

bring to mind. Americans: Life is . . .

Hungarians: Life is . . .

  1. a precious possession.   2. a game.   3. a journey.   4. a container.   5. a gamble.   6. a compromise.   7. an experiment.   8. a test.   9. war. 10. play.

a struggle/war. a compromise. a journey. a gift. a possibility. a puzzle. a labyrinth. a game. freedom. a challenge.

Source: Köves (2002); adapted from Kövecses (2005, p. 84).

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like a prized vase. Hungarians tended instead to frame life as a constant struggle or an exhausting battle. The closest counterpart in Hungarian to the precious possession metaphor—life as a gift—figured only fourth in order.

Same Generic-Level Metaphor, Different Variant The sources used in many metaphors are general categories or domains, and people can “fill them in” with different content. Consequently, groups can share a metaphor at the generic level but adopt variants grounded in differing representations of the source at a specific level (Kövecses, 2005). For example, two groups may conceptualize illegal drug regulation as a war, but one has in mind World War II (casting drug use as a focal enemy whose powers are explicitly known) and the other the War on Terror (drug use is a hidden, diffuse enemy with shadowy powers). A close look at metaphor variants reveals fine-grained differences in groups’ cultural worldviews. For example, the general metaphor life is a journey appears in the Old Testament just as it does in contemporary discourse. Like us, folks in antiquity likened goals to destinations, difficulties in life to obstacles along a path, and so on. But, Jäkel (2002) points out, the biblical variant referred to a type of personal journey unlike the one that nowadays most of us have in mind. It has only one destination, and the path leading up to it is straight, narrow, and predetermined: You must follow exactly the path that the Lord your God has commanded you. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil. To the faithful his ways are straight, but full of pitfalls for the wicked. In the modern variant, expressed in a slew of metaphoric idioms in American English, the journey has many locations and winding roads, and the traveler (the person leading a life) is trying to reach several destinations: “I need to find a new direction in life”; “Am I on the right path?” One interpretation is that each variant reflects and reinforces the groups’ respective conceptions of what a moral life is and should be. Early adherents to the Judeo-Christian worldview wanted to emphasize that there is one true way to a moral life—a single straight path, laid out by God, with one final goal (eternal life), deviations from which amount to sin (the word orthodoxy derives from the Greek orthos, meaning “straight,” as opposed to crooked ways to think). By contrast, the choose-your-own-path variant reflects the prevalence, in our era, of secular and materialist views of human life, accompanied by attitudes toward individual self-discovery and -creation. Many of us view personal agency and self-determination as virtues, not transgressions, and we revere the unapologetic marcher to his or her own drummer, like the daring industrialist or the political

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maverick (Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1990). And that, most likely, is why members of mainstream modern Western culture prefer to think of their journeys as having self-selected destinations (life purposes) and multiple paths (different means of achieving one’s purposes). Another benefit of studying metaphor variants is that it adds important qualifications to the embodiment account of metaphor origin discussed earlier. Across the differences in the cultural experiences that separate ancient from contemporary times, the general structure of goal-directed locomotion has remained essentially constant for us bipeds; that structure has consistently helped people to comprehend life. Score a point for universal embodied cognition. But that doesn’t explain why different groups gravitated toward particular variants of this general metaphor. For that, we have to appreciate how moral values intervened, leading the groups to pluck out different details of their journey schemas to organize their respective conceptions of life. This underscores the fact that metaphor development and use are not mechanically constrained by our physiological constitution and routine bodily experiences.

Rejecting Metaphor There are interesting cases of a cultural group rejecting a metaphor on account of its incompatibility with the worldview. Consider that many cultures from the ancient Greeks onward adopted personification metaphors to represent the invisible spiritual and divine realms. What better way to give palpable shape and causal order to cosmic affairs than to model them after familiar relationship dynamics: lovers’ quarrels, friendship, betrothal, and childbirth? But members of the Gnostic movement in late antiquity shunned this metaphor, viewing it as a monstrous perversion of the truth (Stafford, 2001). The problem, they said, is that people also have sex and experience lustful urges. They could not allow the divine realm to become polluted by carnal desire. Note that they did not reject all metaphoric representations of spiritual elements: They compared sin to blackness and God to an engraver or operator of a cosmic machine. Yet they vehemently rejected any mingling between religion and sex.

Bottom-Up Variations The variations discussed so far are “top down” in the sense that they are motivated by a group’s collective desires to validate and reproduce its worldview. For example, North Americans’ preference for exalting metaphors of the self likely stems from the importance they place on self-esteem. The inverse scenario—the metaphors engendered a cultural obsession with self-esteem—is less likely. To round out the picture, we turn to “bottom-up” variations. Here, in a nutshell, is what I have in mind:

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a) Members of Group X inhabit and routinely interact with distinctive physical and social environments. Every day they navigate a particular ecology, engage with cultural products and civic institutions, participate in group activities, and eke out a living along socially sanctioned routes. b) This immersion equips normally socialized individuals with a distinctive “vocabulary” of concepts (and their associated emotions and behavioral scripts). Group members absorb a vast inventory of ideas about time, space, causality, and matter; about work, technology, commerce, and military activities; about agriculture, food, and recreation. The list goes on. c) Like other groups, Group X reaches for metaphors to understand and communicate about abstractions that matter for social life.This involves borrowing from the local conceptual vocabulary. d) Across cultures, then, metaphor takes as its inputs salient features of the local environment and outputs ideological contents (e.g., beliefs, values) and processes (e.g., reasoning styles, conflict resolution strategies). Yet each group’s local environments provide different raw materials for building shared conceptions of abstractions. To appreciate the value of this account (or one like it), let’s recognize that cultural psychologists are increasingly interested in societal-level factors and how they condition a group’s social-cognitive complexion (Cohen, 2001; Gelfand et  al., 2011; Matsumoto, 2007; Yamagishi, Hashimoto, & Schug, 2008). We want to know how the actual and perceived realities of the material and social ecology—its geography, class structure, depictions of history—shape the psychological tendencies of the people who reside within that context. Pioneering work on the “culture of honor” revealed the interlacing of the pastoral herding lifestyle and ideologies of self and relationships (Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz, 1996). More recently, the study of “relational mobility”—the amount of opportunities available for individuals to select new relationship partners in a given social context—has helped to explain cross-cultural differences in such tendencies as attribution style, friendship patterns, and subjective well-being (Adams, 2005; Anderson, Adams, & Plaut, 2008; Kitayama, Ishii, Imada, Takemura, & Ramaswamy, 2006; Oishi, Lun, & Sherman, 2007). This approach provides a rich study of cultures that is sensitive to the lived experience of people inhabiting a given socio-ecological context. This improves on previous approaches that traced cross-cultural differences to variations in broad trait variables (e.g., dialectical thinking; approach/avoidance) with minimal attention to the origin of those variations. The study of bottom-up metaphor variations advances this approach and provides a springboard for research. That’s because the connection between a socio-ecological factor and a psychological tendency is, in many cases at least, metaphoric rather than literal. That is, a literal meaning assigned to some attribute(s) of a socio-ecological variable is extended to a secondary, metaphoric meaning. For example, a river’s current becomes a symbol of impermanence, or a canopy of trees represents a nurturing embrace. Such connections are hard to spot

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unless we view language and other symbol systems through the lens of metaphor theory. Fortunately, much of that work has been done. Relevant research is plentiful enough that we could fill every page of this book with nothing but examples in this vein. Here are just a few interesting findings that warrant further study.

Climate Boers (1999) analyzed magazine editorials and other news media to track fluctuations in the use of metaphor to compare the economy’s “health” to bodily health (e.g., “symptoms of a corporate disease”; “economic remedy”). Over the 10 years analyzed, health-metaphoric expressions were most frequent in the winter months. A plausible interpretation is that a seasonal increase in the occurrence of illnesses such as colds and influenza heightened concern over bodily health, which was then especially productive of health-metaphoric portrayals of the economy. This analysis illustrates how metaphor studies open up new ways to track ideological change within a given group over time.

Agriculture Among the Fang culture of western Africa, the skill with which a member of the council house hears debates and settles disputes is described using the same language used to describe the ability to carefully slice fibrous plants: A clumsy judge leaves disruptive, “jagged” edges; a wise and eloquent judge ensures “clean” edges (Fernandez, 1986). It is unlikely that members of another culture would conceptualize juridical technique using this metaphor if their everyday livelihood did not depend as critically on particular types of plants and agriculture.

Animals The Ndembu of northwestern Zambia have a recurrent ritual designed to promote female fertility, and it begins at the burrow of a rat or a bear. The anthropologist Victor Turner (1995) explains why: “Both these animals stop up their burrows after excavating them. Each is a symbol for the [evil ancestor] which has hidden away the women’s fertility. The doctor adepts must open the blocked entrance of the burrow, and thus symbolically give her back her fertility” (pp. 20–21). This ritual uses metaphor to apply familiar knowledge of local animal behavior to make intelligible what is invisible and mysterious. More recently, Dirven (1994) coded media outlets for metaphors based on the domain of nature in Dutch and its derivative language Afrikaans. Speakers of Afrikaans Dutch use many metaphorical expressions in which animals of various kinds provide the stereotypical images for human behavior and appearances. In contrast, Dutch nature metaphors are almost never based on animals. This variation likely reflects the differential salience of animals in northern European countries and the parts of South Africa where the dialects are spoken.

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Economy Consider this exchange: A: “Can you spare an hour today? I thought we could put aside some time for coffee.” B: “Sorry but I didn’t budget my time well. I spent 45 minutes at the pet store; I thought it would be worth it but it cost me the afternoon.” The operative metaphor here—time is money—creates an outlook in which time is a valuable, quantifiable resource which can be wasted, saved, borrowed, spent, given, and invested. As transparently obvious as it may seem, this metaphor is not as highly elaborated in other languages as it is in American English. For example, when Kövecses (2005, pp. 132–143) compared a sample of American English linguistic expressions of this metaphor and equivalent expressions in Hungarian, he found that the Hungarian translations did not borrow as explicitly from the money domain, and that their figurative meanings sample from several other source concepts (e.g., a container or solid object). Why does English have a more full-blown version of this metaphor? Some theorists say it’s because English-speaking cultures are obsessed with money (Hall, 1984; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). This line of theorizing invites us to consider how other economic factors (e.g., periods of economic stability vs. fluctuation) percolate up by means of metaphor to shape collective representations of other abstractions (e.g., “investment” in romantic relationships).

Topography A particularly well-entrenched metaphor in American culture is free action and progress are uninhibited, self-propelled movement. The nation’s founding mythos and popular culture emphasize a utopian impulse—an ambition to blaze new trails and move forward—transmitted through beliefs in Manifest Destiny and a preoccupation with progress, financial “expansion,” and innovation. Kövecses (1995) hypothesized that this metaphor derives from a topographical schema provided by the landscape of the United States, which has abundant wide-open expanses affording free movement, especially on the westwardsweeping frontier. “Moving ahead,” we can appreciate other figurative connections between topography and thought. Note that some groups inhabit visually dense, variegated landscapes (jungles, compact cityscapes), while others live in areas with more open land contours affording distant horizons and vast expanses (deserts, grazing flatlands). Via metaphor, this visual topography may manifest in a group’s musical traditions (e.g., expressing soft, curvilinear terrain with “fluid” melodies and “soft” rhythms).

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Technology Local technical innovations provide the sources for such abstractions as: ••

••

••

••

Medicine and pathology: The ancient Greeks’ investment in irrigation launched a revolution in hydraulic science and fluid mechanics. These developments informed Hippocrates’ doctrine that the human body was composed of four fluids held in a precarious balance, the disturbance of which caused illness. Personality: The Pythagoreans regarded the person as a kind of musical instrument—a set of strings that must have the right tension (to this day we refer to a person as “high strung”). Emotions: Today, a large portion of the expressions that English speakers use to talk about anger derive from notions of heat (“After that heated argument, let’s cool off”). So we may be surprised to find that, before 1300, heat-related words account for a tiny fraction of all the words describing anger (Gevaert, 2001). It’s plausible that the intervening surge of industrialization, with all its furnaces and steam engines, encouraged a distinctive metaphoric conception of anger, one that would be foreign to people a few centuries ago. Mind: We already know how important the digital computer is in contemporary understanding of the mind/brain. But it is worth noting that the general metaphor mind is a machine dates back thousands of years, and has co-opted the gadget du jour—lenses, telephone switchboards, hydraulic engines, clocks, electric grids, water-pressure-powered automatons, spotlights, conveyer belts, newsreels, and wax tablets (Bruner & Feldman, 1990).

Social Spaces Sociologist John Kasson (1990) contends that a spike in urbanization and immigration in mid-nineteenth-century America, and consequent changes in civic interaction (e.g., frequent encounters with strangers/spectators), created the conditions for the rise of the dramaturgical metaphor whereby life is a carefully rehearsed play in which every person plays his or her part (Chapter 6). Turning from the streets to indoors, note that middle-class homes in America and Europe are characteristically divided into zones of public and private space, and the right of personal privacy within one’s room is sacred. Perhaps this arrangement of domestic spaces serves as a template for the metaphoric conception of the self as a bounded container—a component of the independent self-construal associated with individualistic cultures.

Activities An abiding, shared interest in a cultural activity can orient group members to impose a particular order or pattern on ideas and experiences. A case in point is the prominence of the competitive sports metaphor in North America. This metaphor quantifies performance in a given domain (the score), reifies the “rules of the game,”

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and suggests that feelings, moods, and other qualitative factors be pushed aside as irrelevant (Gelfand & McCusker, 2002). Although sports metaphors are conventional for other groups, in America they have broader scope and greater elaboration (Kövecses, 2010). That is, Americans invoke sports vocabulary to represent more targets (e.g., business, politics, education, love and dating, the self, warfare); and, compared to other languages, American English has a fancier sports-metaphoric patois—up to bat, three-pointer, Hail Mary, TKO. It is likely that sports metaphors make up a large part of the way many Americans communicate and think because spectator sports is a central and cherished feature of their popular culture.

Intergroup Conflict Engagement in intergroup and internecine conflict, such as territorial disputes, can penetrate the collective consciousness and encourage particular metaphors. Even if not currently engaged, group members may have a shared memory of historical suffering occasioned by invasion, bombardment, deportation, genocide, or totalitarian oppression. We saw one example a few pages back: When Hungarians expressed their self-concept, they spontaneously reached for the metaphor life is war. This is not an accident, says Kövecses (2005), and can be traced to the salience of warfare in Hungarians’ collective historical awareness. The notion that life is war was virtually absent from American’s self-construal. But was it always that way? Figure 5.1 is a Google-generated plot showing the percentage of a searched word or phrase in written discourse. I’ve compared several “life is a _____” metaphors in written English over the centuries. While the journey metaphor is dominant today, the metaphor life is a battle peaked in the last third of the nineteenth century, presumably because the Civil War catapulted military combat to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness.

Bottom-Up Sum-Up Social cognition is not a software package out of a box. Instead, deeply entrenched habits of believing and valuing are intimately bound up with the particulars of cultural place and historical context. This insight is gaining traction in social psychology. The study of bottom-up metaphor variation contributes to this effort by inviting us to discover figurative connections between local socio-ecological factors and social-psychological tendencies. On the face of it, factors such as urban layout have no obvious relevance to questions about collective representations of abstractions; but via metaphor, these factors provide the specific content and structure of many abstractions that form a group’s worldview and that guide their behavior. The power to illuminate such connections is what gives metaphor studies its explanatory significance as part of a general social psychology of culture. Let me mention two additional payoffs in studying bottom-up metaphor variations. It can explain why groups who inhabit different milieus often strain to appreciate each other’s modes of thinking and communicating. For example, in the context of

The metaphors that English speakers use to talk about life fluctuate over centuries.

Data from Google

FIGURE 5.1 

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an international business negotiation, Chinese partners may be put off by Americans’ feverish urge to “move forward” and “get somewhere”—an orientation potentially rooted in embodied notions of free movement afforded by expansive terrains. Second, and conversely, we can discover hidden commonalities in thought patterns. Imagine that members of a college fraternity subculture are disproportionately geared toward upping their number of sexual exploits. Meanwhile, their professors are forgoing family obligations to add “just one more line” to their curriculum vitae. If we discover that both groups rely on variants of the generic sports metaphor to conceptualize their activities, we can understand why the “score” assumes a great importance whereas relevant qualitative dimensions (e.g., ethics, sensuality) are consigned to the locker room of awareness. Still, we have relied so far on observational studies of language and other cultural symbol systems as a means of identifying underlying patterns in a group’s conceptual system. On the plus side, these studies point to important though often overlooked connections between social cognition and various dimensions of a group’s lived environment, from architecture to leisure activities and historical events. The limitation, though, is that these studies cannot provide conclusive evidence that bottom-up metaphors constitute a group’s socialcognitive complexion, nor can they tell us when (under what conditions) local socio-ecological factors percolate up into cultural models of abstractions. The next wave of research should combine methods across disciplines.

Notes 1 Lurking behind this view is the dubious metaphor likening psychological processes to tangible gizmos crammed inside the person’s skull. 2 Exactly how (and when) this all happens remains a mystery (Landau, Keefer, & Meier, 2011). Consider the possibility that the bodily experiential schema for cleanliness grounds conceptions of moral purity (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000). That requires that, at some point in cognitive development, a literal association between filth and disgust acquires a secondary, symbolic meaning. It becomes partially detached from direct embodied experiences and applied to metaphorically conceive of morality, so that afterward we feel disgusted by moral transgressions that are not physically dirty in any literal sense. But how did that happen? This illustrates the major limitation of the embodiment hypothesis: it is ultimately a post-hoc explanation of patterns in social cognition. It draws a portrait of metaphor origin over extended time—over decades of the individual’s or group’s existence—and so it is vulnerable to “just so” stories: if a given metaphor is widespread, we can cobble together an intuitive embodiment explanation; if not, we ignore it. We need to capture the bodily origin of metaphor in real time—prospectively. That means testing whether recurring bodily experiences have a causal role in constraining the subsequent development of abstract concept representations, and that they do so similarly across individuals in different cultures. Here is one issue on which social, developmental, and cultural psychologists could profitably collaborate (Mandler, 2004, is an excellent example). 3 The sheer quantity of metaphoric expressions is admittedly indirect evidence for cultural differences in thought. Alternatively, two groups can share a conceptual metaphor and differ in their degree of linguistic elaboration—that is, the same metaphor gives rise to a larger or smaller number of linguistic expressions in two languages (Barcelona, 2001).

6 THE SELF

People use metaphor to: represent their ego, or subjective consciousness; guide efforts to regulate their thought and behavior; and build a self-concept that feels coherent, valuable, and flourishing. Humans have the unique ability to focus attention on their own thoughts, feelings, and desires, giving rise to a sense of self. The self is private in that only you know what it’s like from your point of view. At the same time, it is a thoroughly social phenomenon. Social interactions and the culture at large supply the person with the raw materials for constructing a self-image, constraining which identities one can and should pursue. The self, in turn, orients the person toward certain social situations. Little wonder, then, that the self is a central topic in social psychology. A next step is to chart metaphor’s roles in the self’s nature and functioning. We start with a distinction proposed by William James (1890/1983). He noted that, in one sense, the self is the controlling voice in your head that contemplates, makes plans, and monitors your thoughts and actions. James labeled this the I, but we’ll call it the ego. In another sense, the self is all the knowledge you have about your life, including your traits, social identities, and experiences—what James called the Me and we’ll call the self-concept. James noted that these two aspects of the self make it a unique topic to study: it is simultaneously doing the thinking and it is what is being thought about. For convenience, we focus on the ego first.

Comprehending and Communicating the Ego I am a rock, I am an island. (Simon & Garfunkel, 1966)

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Psychologists can give you a pretty good story about mental processes like figureground perception and face recognition, but when it comes to explaining the subjective character of experience—what philosophers call the hard problem— they fumble. In fact, some philosophers suspect that humans lack the intellectual goods to “solve” the problem of consciousness in the same way that dogs are incapable of solving a Sudoku puzzle (McGinn, 1993). To give some form to the inner I, scholars have grasped for metaphors. Ever since James coined the stream of consciousness, we’ve seen a seemingly endless font of gems including spotlights, blackboards, sketchpads, nets, multiple drafts, chief executives, mirrors, and even “leaking” rainbows.1 Outside the ivory tower, people describe their ego as an inner voice; a movie camera panning, recording, and occasionally turning in on itself; an inner author; and the bedrock “I am” that asserts itself before cultural identities (“I am a black woman”) or passing states (“I am bored”). Lakoff and Johnson (1999) organized such expressions into a taxonomy of common self metaphors. Two of them strike me as fundamental to our sense of what the ego is, as well as our sense that it is: The ego is an object (the rock) The ego is a bounded space (the island).

Ego as Object Years of routine functioning teach us a lot about common objects like rocks and phones. By means of metaphor, that knowledge is transferred to comprehend and communicate several aspects of the ego: ••

••

••

Properties. We generally experience solid objects as singular rather than manifold, and as retaining their essential characteristics across different situations and time. Analogously, we view the ego as stable across time and not changed essentially by the shifting demands of the situation. Functioning. Objects increase in strength and influence as they expand— think of a plant growing or an insect bite swelling up. The ego’s enhanced influence is (figurative) expansion: “This book enlarged my sense of things”; “A growing awareness of injustice.” Impairment. Like a common object, the ego is most like itself when in its normal location, not elsewhere: “I’m all over the place, not centered, beside myself, not all there, out of it, in the clouds.” Also, an object in good working order is integral, with all of its parts in place. The well-functioning ego is similarly united—“Thanks for your undivided attention”—whereas conditions that disrupt consciousness fragment it into pieces: “I need to get myself together; I’m falling apart.”

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••

Conflict/harmony. Shakespeare’s Polonius opines “To thine own self be true,” implying that there is one self, unchanging and singular. But sometimes we feel like a composite of several distinct identities. Think about the plight of the transgendered individual, the neither-this-nor-that-ness of the biracial individual, or the immigrant negotiating incompatible cultural worldviews. The object metaphor casts those divisions and contradictions in terms of object fracture: “I’m torn: split between these two worlds.” Minimizing internal conflict means keeping parts in proper relation. This is the logic behind the principle of yin yang that informs classical Chinese science, philosophy, and medicine: The self is a homeostatic system of energy flow between two complementary parts, which must be in balance to maintain subjective harmony (Yu, 1998).

Ego as Bounded Space Another highly conventionalized metaphor casts the ego as a physical space with boundaries, like a field or room, in which mental events take place. Philosopher Julian Jaynes (1976, p. 54) insisted that this “spatialization” of consciousness is its “first and most primitive aspect”—so ingrained into the texture of experience that we are normally oblivious to its significance.2 Some conceptual correspondences: ••

••

Properties. When you see two objects simultaneously, you effortlessly register their spatial relation (Hasher & Zacks, 1979). You also know that, in general, objects influence each other more when they are close or in contact rather than distant or separated by a boundary. This knowledge scaffolds representations of mental “contents.” Ideas, feelings, and other mental states appear as discrete objects. They can be lost and found (“He lost his honor? He’ll get it back”), rearranged into subregions, and passed between people’s heads (“Greg put the idea in Bridgette’s head that she’s a princess; now it’s firmly fixed in there”). Indeed, this metaphor grounds the person’s elemental discrimination between self and not self, such that things inside (outside) the figurative boundary around the ego are me or mine (not me; Burris & Rempel, 2004, 2008). Functioning. Degrees of consciousness correspond to mental objects’ lateral position. You’re more conscious of things that occupy the front of your mind and less aware of those to the back or one side. Awareness also tracks the vertical dimension: deeply buried ideas are less available than those that pop up or arise in attention. English expressions like “fall asleep” and “slip into a coma” portray the transition between conscious and unconscious states as a “drop” from one level to another. A closely related metaphor is cognizing is seeing. We introspect (literally “see inside”) by focusing attention inwards on the mind-space. Correspondingly, ideas cast as large and welllighted objects are that much more visible (Barnden, 1997; Sweetser, 1990).

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••

••

Impairment. Conditions that impair consciousness are likened to such visuospatial experiences as difficulty finding objects (“His name’s in my head somewhere”) and congestion (“I don’t have the room to deal with that”). Aspects of consciousness that are mysterious or threatening are bottled up or buried in the dark recesses of our psyche, requiring Depth Psychology to dig for and dredge up. Why? Because we know that it is difficult to see (figuratively, to know) objects that are beneath a surface or tucked in a compartment. Conflict/harmony. Intrapsychic conflict is likened to two or more objects (e.g., beliefs, impulses, identities) colliding, causing friction, or putting pressure on each other (“That idea hit me hard”). This is reflected in descriptions of cognitive dissonance couched in terms of cognitions fitting together like puzzle pieces: “I can’t put together the part of me that values recycling with the part that uses paper towels.” We also populate our mind-space with personified characters that occasionally quarrel: “The scientist in me doesn’t want to believe that statistic, but the Texan loves it.”3 How to keep the peace? For poet Walt Whitman (1855/2001), the answer was a bigger space: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Self-Regulation: Putting the “I” to Work The ego is not a knowledge structure that sits idly in your head. It is often busy mobilizing and steering your thought and behavior. It’s what’s trying to resist the brownies, stay focused on homework, and avoid painful memories. This insight has prompted social psychologists to study self-regulation—the processes through which the self alters its inner life and outward behavior in a goaldirected manner (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). Metaphor plays several roles here. For one, it informs our choice of which goals to pursue. As we go about our day, we think about abstract goals: “Do I really want to go to law school?”; “I should try to be nicer to people”; “Is marriage right for me?” How we construe those goals determines their value or desirability, as well as our assessment of how likely it is that we will be able to attain them. Those judgments, in turn, determine the amount of our available resources (like time and energy) that we are willing to expend on pursuing a given goal (Brehm & Self, 1989; Feather, 1982). And many of those all-important construals are fashioned out of metaphors: power is up; love is warmth; group identity is fusion; morality is cleanliness, and so forth. In this way, metaphor influences the “content” of self-regulation—the representation of a goal itself. It also conditions the act or process of self-regulation in (at least) three ways: self-control, willpower, and time travel.

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Self-Control The ability to self-regulate is based on the capacity for reflexive self-awareness. We can focus attention inward and carefully consider our current situation, together with both the past and the future, before choosing a course of action. Although we know a lot about the consequences of self-awareness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Higgins, 1989), less work addresses a seemingly more basic question: When a person takes oneself as the object of attention and thought, how does he or she represent the controlling ego? Looking for clues in ordinary language use, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) found that one metaphor—self-control is object control—surfaces in a large number of metaphoric expressions in English, Japanese, Hungarian, and other languages. This metaphor comes in two flavors corresponding to the two aforementioned umbrella metaphors for the ego, as follows.

Ego as a Controlled Object We commonly liken the ego to a physical object that needs to be controlled to keep us on track toward meeting goals. In this representation, causing the self to act is effortful movement of an object: “You’re pushing yourself too hard.” If we stop putting effort into a goal (e.g., maintaining public appearance), we “let ourselves go.” Effective self-control is similarly likened to pulling or keeping the self together (versus fragmenting into pieces).

Ego Controls Objects This variant portrays self-control as a physical force or tool for manipulating mental objects such as goals and feelings. Without it, we let those objects drop, slip through our fingers, or get out of hand. If we abandon them intentionally, we let them go (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1992). Effective self-control is the ability to bring or keep desired mental objects forward while pushing unwanted objects out or down (“I try to keep grandma’s death out of my head”) or subduing them (“I’m fighting the urge to break that guy’s neck”) (this metaphor informs scholarly discourse on thought suppression; Wegner, 1994).

Willpower Effective self-regulation requires the capacity for what psychologists variously call effortful control, impulse control, ego control, or ego strength, and what everyone else typically calls willpower. Willpower is essentially the capacity to overcome the many temptations, distractions, and obstacles that could impede pursuit of one’s long-term goals.

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According to Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998), willpower is highly isomorphic with effortful muscle control (see also Baumeister et al., 2007). We have a limited supply of ego strength that allows us to regulate and control our behavior. Just as our quadriceps ache after we’ve run five miles, our ego strength becomes depleted by extended bouts of self-control. This mental “fatigue,” termed ego depletion, makes it harder to continue to regulate our behavior on subsequent tasks, even those in other domains. In one study, participants watched a film about environment disasters that included graphic scenes of sick and dying animals. Some were instructed to suppress the emotions they felt in response to the movie, whereas others were instructed to deliberately exaggerate their emotional responses. A control group received no special instructions. Afterward, all participants were asked to squeeze a handgrip for as long as they could. Compared with control participants, those who had regulated their emotions—either suppressing or amplifying them—were able to squeeze the handgrip for less time. Even though controlling emotions and squeezing are dissimilar tasks, this research suggests that they both rely on a limited supply of self-regulatory energy. The parallels don’t end there. Just like a muscle, the ego can be exercised and strengthened. Spending just two weeks focusing on improving your posture or monitoring what you eat can strengthen your ability to control your behavior on even unrelated tasks (Muraven et al., 1999). In fact, the biological mechanisms that underlie self-control and muscle control overlap. When we engage in difficult self-control, our prefrontal cortex consumes glucose, the same fuel tapped by muscle exertion. With our blood glucose levels depleted, we literally run out of energy (Gailliot & Baumeister, 2007). In short, there is a striking structural similarity between willpower and muscle control: both are limited resources that can be depleted by extended bouts of activity, rely on similar biological mechanisms, and can be replenished and strengthened over time. Perhaps, then, the metaphor isn’t a metaphor: willpower just is garden-variety energy expenditure. But perhaps not. When Job, Dweck, and Walton (2010) led participants to believe that willpower is an unlimited resource (contrary to the muscle metaphor), they did not show the typical ego depletion effect. If willpower is literally energy use, then we wouldn’t expect a temporary change in construal of willpower to prevent ego depletion (or, just the same, to instantly restore that limited resource). In another study (Hung & Labroo, 2011), contracting and firming one’s muscles improved self-control as indexed by healthier food choices. If willpower just is a limited resource, then a recent session of muscle activity would have zapped energy, impairing self-regulation on a subsequent task. The alternative explanation is that muscle control primed willpower by means of their metaphoric association.

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The provocative, if tentative, conclusion is that the muscle metaphor partly constitutes representations of the willpower required for effective self-regulation. An interesting future direction would be to assess Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) claim that this metaphor has two variants: energy to move the ego itself versus the ego’s energy to manipulate mental objects. People may represent them as tapping, and potentially depleting, separate reservoirs of energy. If so, we would expect that exercising self-control framed as ego movement (“Push yourself on this logic task”) will not impair self-control on a subsequent task framed as object manipulation (“Prevent sexist beliefs from entering your mind”).

Time Travel Self-regulation capitalizes on our capacity for mental time travel. Without getting off the couch, we can mentally “pop out” of the here-and-now and reach back to our past, ponder alternative responses to situations and their potential consequences, and imagine far-off possibilities. One consequence is that we can represent a future goal in the form of a possible identity—an image of the self that one could become, such as “me as successful student” and “me as tobacco free” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Simply bringing to mind a desired possible identity can be sufficient to mobilize action to achieve that goal, but often it’s not, and we slack off or settle for short-term rewards. One problem is that we don’t fully appreciate the connection between our current actions and a possible identity (Oyserman, 2015). Time is abstract, and the person might have difficulty seeing, for example, how an hour of flash cards this afternoon is relevant to her image of the famous scientist she hopes to be in twenty years’ time. A journey metaphor can help (Chapter 1). It represents temporally remote activities and identities as physical locations positioned along a continuous path. This enables us to draw a vivid mental connection between current activities and possible identities, spurring us to take action now. Landau et al. (2014) tested this possibility by asking first-year college students to jot down a few words describing their image of themselves as an academically accomplished college graduate. As they wrote, they saw an image of a path extending forward from their vantage and labeled progressively with the four undergraduate years (Figure 6.1). To test the unique effect of activating a particular possible identity and a journey metaphor in conjunction, the researchers included two comparison conditions priming each component separately. In one, freshmen imagined their academic possible identity but were not presented with the journey image. In the other, the college journey lay ahead of them but they imagined themselves at graduation having achieved their best possible social self—one that’s established many satisfying relationships.

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Next, participants rated the strength of the connection between their current identity and their possible academic identity, responding to statements like “My image of myself as an excellent student in my senior year feels like a natural part of who I am now.” Finally, they indicated how much they intended to hit the books over the next couple days. As predicted, those who framed their academic possible identity as a journey’s destination were more

FIGURE 6.1 

 andau et al. (2014) asked college freshmen to imagine being L an academically accomplished college graduate, but some were additionally primed with a journey metaphor while others were not.

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β = .31*

Current/Possible Identity Connection

β = .46**

Priming Condition (1 = Journey-framed academic PI; 0 = Non-metaphoric academic PI; 0 = Journey-framed social PI)

Academic Intention Total Effect (c): β = .32* Direct Effect (c’): β = .18, n.s.

FIGURE 6.2 

 ollege students led to represent their academic possible identity C metaphorically as a destination on a journey were more intent to achieve their academic goals. This effect was mediated by the perception of a strong connection between that possible identity and their current identity (data from Landau, Oyserman, et al., 2014).

motivated to take action to achieve their long-term academic goals, and this effect was mediated by a strengthened perceived connection between their current and possible identities (Figure 6.2). Summing up this section, conceptual metaphor is centrally implicated in: comprehending self-control; expending and directing energy toward goal pursuit; and motivating goal-directed action in the present by affirming its relevance to distant future outcomes. Let’s turn from the self-as-knower to the self-as-known.

Metaphor and Me: Focus on Self Motives The self-concept is the person’s vast reservoir of knowledge about his or her experiences, relationships, defining traits, goals, and so on. I want to extend the functional approach introduced in earlier chapters to ask: What does metaphor do for the self-concept? Interesting clues come from Rollo May (1953), Ernest Becker (1973), and other theorists who synthesized insights from existential philosophy and ego psychology to get to the core motives that underlie selfhood and that make people act the way they do. Their analyses are unique and nuanced, but they converged on three self-relevant motives that have been particularly important to people crossculturally and historically: •• •• ••

Self-continuity: To fit the separate pieces of one’s life into a coherent, temporally continuous whole. Self-esteem: To feel as though one is a person of worth (and to get other people to view the self in a positive light). Self-growth: To achieve higher levels of self-determination and realize one’s individual potential.

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A large body of experimental research substantiates these analyses, showing that these motives energize and direct social behavior in virtually every domain of life (Greenberg, Koole, & Pyszczynski, 2004; Koole, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2006). Let’s see how they interact with metaphor.

Self-Continuity In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose. (Paul Auster, 1990, p. 256) Auster reminds us that a person’s life, when viewed from one objective angle, amounts to a heap of ephemeral moments devoid of structure and purpose. But that’s not how most people want to see it. They prefer to view their personal history, current roles, and envisioned future as parts of an integrated and purposeful conception of their life as it unfolds in time: This is what I was, how I’ve come to be, who I am, and what I am becoming (Bruner, 1990; Erikson, 1968). Two metaphors we use to satisfy the craving for self-continuity are life is a journey and life is a story.

My Journey “I’ve come a long way,” says Claire, “now I’m on the right path and I’m going places.” Of course, Claire’s life is not a trip or a journey in any literal sense, so why does she talk this way? Because like most of us, she has difficulty grasping abstract causal and thematic relations among past episodes, her current identity, and outcomes that she imagines occurring in the distant future, if at all. Employing the metaphor self/life is a journey enables her to map that self-knowledge onto a coherent, easily visualized schema for goal-directed motion along a path (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). For example, she can represent her career goal as an intended destination, her fears and anxieties as obstacles, her life choices as branching paths, and her friendship with you as moving her in the right direction. The claim is that the self understood metaphorically as a journey feels more coherent, more purposeful, more real than the literal self. Some supporting evidence comes from the research just cited (Landau et al., 2014). There, activating a journey metaphor strengthened the connection between one’s current identity and a possible identity in the future, helping people to visualize the “course” their lives will take “down the road.” Does the metaphor also support the perception of continuity between the present and the past? To find out, Keefer, Landau, Rothschild, and Sullivan (2011) had participants recall events from their past and write a keyword for each event either along an image of a path or sans metaphoric imagery. Afterward, they reported how much their past, in general, has shaped the person they are today. The researchers also tested whether people rely on the

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Self-Continuity

9

8

7

6

5 Identity Uncertainty

Pain Path FIGURE 6.3 

Chronological

 raming events as parts of a personal journey bolstered global selfF continuity, but only if people felt uncertain about their identity (data from Keefer et al., 2011).

journey metaphor especially when feeling uncertain about who they are. Prior to the metaphor salience manipulation, participants were led to contemplate uncertainties about themselves or experiences of intense pain (to control for generally aversive thoughts). Check out Figure 6.3. Looking just at the light-gray bars, we see that when a metaphor was not salient, participants led to feel uncertain about their identity perceived less continuity between past and present, which makes intuitive sense. But more important are the dark-gray bars: When participants had the opportunity to frame past episodes as locations along a path, those feeling uncertain about their identity seized on this structure, perceiving their past as significantly shaping who they are today. These results suggest that people create a continuous sense of self (in part) by mentally fitting experiences and identities over time into a concrete journey schema, especially when they are motivated to reduce uncertainty about themselves. But how, exactly, does a journey metaphor tie together the past, present, and future? Here is one way to unpack the mechanism: Most people know (most likely implicitly) that when they move forward along a path toward a destination, the visible stretch of path designates a clear procedure, or sequence of steps, that they must take to get from “here” to “there.” Walking to my mailbox, for example, I clearly see how each step along the sidewalk, however small, determines whether and how I get there. Using that knowledge as a scaffold, people can visualize how their past and current activities fit into a sequence of actions necessary to “reach” a future self (despite none of those

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FIGURE 6.4 

I magining the self actively moving along a path (top panels) recruits procedural knowledge of how each “step” (separate action/event) matters for reaching the “destination” (goal), thereby bolstering selfcontinuity. Imagining being passively transported along the same path (bottom panels) does not have these effects.

things occupying a spatial position). Let’s call this “procedural knowledge.” My colleagues and I hypothesized that it is by means of reinforcing procedural knowledge that a journey metaphor strengthens self-continuity (Landau et al., 2014). We asked college freshmen to imagine their academic possible identity as a destination on a journey representing their college career—four years “down the road.” Then, one group was guided through a sequence of images to visualize themselves—as the avatar in Figure 6.4 (top)—walking forward through college stages toward that accomplished self. We reasoned that, on that kind of journey—where goal pursuit requires active, self-propelled motion—the traveler has to attend to the path, decide which direction to move in, and exert energy to take the steps necessary to overcome obstacles and reach the destination. This should reinforce procedural knowledge. In the comparison group, participants visualized themselves as passengers in a vehicle (Figure 6.4; bottom). In this kind of journey, the traveler is passively carried along the path following a predetermined route. The implication is that one inevitably reaches the destination without being aware of how current actions fit into a procedure for “getting there”—one simply arrives.

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After visualizing one of these college journeys, participants reported their procedural knowledge (e.g., “At this stage I have a clear idea of how to become an accomplished student”) and connection to their academic possible identity (e.g., “I feel a strong connection between who I am today and my image of myself as a successful senior”). Those who imagined actively (versus passively) moving along a path toward their future self felt more confident that they knew the actions necessary to attain it. They also perceived more continuity between their current and possible identities, and this effect was mediated by their procedural confidence. This suggests that a journey metaphor bolsters selfcontinuity by helping people visualize how current actions fit into a procedure by which the self changes over time.

My Story To create and maintain a continuous sense of identity over time, people often construct a self-narrative, or life story, in which they are the protagonist in an unfolding drama of life, complete with characters, chapters, setting, plot twists, conflicts, and their resolutions (Gergen & Gergen, 1988; McAdams, 2001). The self is likened to a fiction that we write (and rewrite) as we go about the business of life. This is reflected in expressions like “I’m starting a new chapter” (Moser, 2007). This metaphor transfers a conceptual template from the domain of storytelling to excerpt and assemble bits and pieces of self-knowledge into a larger coherent pattern.4 McAdams (2006) has identified two broad templates—or story patterns—that people tend to structure their life stories around. One is the contamination tale in which one first experiences good fortune but then encounters tragedy or failure. But much more common is the uplifting redemption story, wherein one experiences challenges, sometimes even tragedies, but then turns life around and overcomes those difficulties. This raises a question: Why, deep down, are we so motivated to give life narrative structure? One answer is that autobiographical continuity buffers us against fears about death (Becker, 1973). A story has socially sanctioned purposes: it entertains, creates beauty, and establishes a permanent record. The story metaphor transfers these purposes, casting the self as the hero in a unique and unforgettable drama, and portraying the elements of day-to-day experience as having some worthwhile end. In several studies, individuals reminded of their mortality respond with defensive efforts to fit their experiences into causally and thematically coherent patterns (Landau, Greenberg, Sullivan, Routledge, & Arndt, 2009; Landau, Kosloff, & Schmeichel, 2011). Future research could test whether metaphorically “writing” the self assuages the anxiety typically aroused by ruminating on one’s death.

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Self-Esteem Self-esteem is the level of positive feeling you have about yourself; the extent to which you value yourself. Some psychologists treat it as a trait, a general attitude toward the self ranging from very positive to very negative; others view it as a state, a feeling that can temporarily increase or decrease in positivity in response to changing circumstances, achievements, and setbacks. But virtually all of them agree on one thing: People are fundamentally driven to bolster feelings of selfesteem and to defend their positive self-view when it is called into question.

Concretizing Self-Esteem Let’s step back and appreciate that “value” is a highly abstract concept. Maintaining self-esteem requires some intuitive conception of what it is and how it changes. Little wonder, then, that we rely on such concrete ideas as hard/ soft, firm/flakey, solid/fragile, well-balanced, warm/cool/cold, and big/small. We saw in Chapter 3 that one common metaphor—good is clean, bad is dirty—is not just a matter of words: The act of physical cleansing enabled people to “wipe the slate clean,” allaying residual worries about the value of their decisions (Lee & Schwarz, 2011). Another metaphor—good is up, bad is down—is so commonplace that we often mistake it as literal. We talk of being in high spirits, at the top of our game; of climbing the corporate ladder (before hitting the glass ceiling) and shooting up in status like a rising star. Other times we feel down, fall from grace, and sink into a depression until we hit an all-time low (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder customarily couch their self-esteem issues in up/down terms (McMullen & Conway, 2002). This metaphor also features in scholarly discourse: Social psychologists posit that self-esteem hinges on upward/downward social comparisons (viewing others as better/worse off than you are). Beyond its oral and written expression, this metaphor is embodied in nonlinguistic cultural products and practices (Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009). Consider my recent introduction to Alissa, a new hire in the Art History Department: Me: “Art History—that’s in the basement of the university museum, right?” Alissa: [taking offense] “No it’s not ‘in the basement’! I mean, it’s in the museum but I wouldn’t say it’s in the basement.” For the record, dear reader, Art History is most definitely in the basement (I was simply making chit-chat). The real question is why Alissa took offense. Suppose I had said: “Art History—that’s on the top floor of the university museum, right?” It’s possible that Alissa would chafe at the implication that

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few people know or care where Art History is; but I suspect she’d be unfazed: after all, good is up. Anecdotes aside, studies show that vertical position—in a building, no less— affects self-evaluations in line with metaphoric language. Participants in one study (Sun, Wang, & Li, 2011) were brought to a high floor or a low floor in an office building and asked to complete a test of general knowledge. They also estimated the percentage of people who would outperform them on that test. Participants on a higher floor self-enhanced by rating themselves above the majority of other people. There was a twist: If the researchers vertically reoriented the ranking scale, such that indicating the self’s exceptional performance required a downward motion, the “high floor” effect disappeared. It seems that the bodily experience of being on the high floor transferred across the default (i.e., chronically accessible) mapping between up and good, but temporarily framing good as down overrode that metaphoric association. The up/down metaphor also biases which autobiographical memories people bring to mind. Casasanto and Dijkstra (2010) presented participants with open-ended memory prompts, like “recall something that happened yesterday.” Meanwhile, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they moved marbles upward or downward. Simply performing upward motions prompted them to retrieve more positively valenced memories. But does metaphor use in fact help people to gain a firmer grasp on their personal value? If so, we would expect people to cling to metaphor particularly when they feel as though they lack a clear sense of their value and seek to compensate for that deficit. Rothschild, Landau, and Sullivan (2011) tested this possibility in the context of examining people’s occasional desire to quantify personal value. Quantitative representations treat value in terms of a simple “score” along a metric, such as 120 IQ, $30,000 salary, nine volunteer hours last week, zero publications, and fourteen sexual conquests. Qualitative value representations, by contrast, are abstract evaluations of one’s standing within a domain, such as good friend, devout Muslim, creative artist, and sloppy mechanic. Both are familiar, and qualitative representations have the advantage of shifting fluidly in our favor (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001), yet people often gravitate toward quantification.5 One reason is that quantitative information is generally perceived to be certain, precise, and unequivocal (von Winterfeldt & Edwards, 1986). This suggests that people will seize on quantitative representations when they are motivated to maintain certain knowledge of their value, independent of their motivation to increase their self-esteem level. Participants completed a card-matching task purported to assess their “visual intelligence.” In one condition the task had unclear performance contingencies. That means that, based on immediate performance feedback, participants couldn’t tell how much success and failure outcomes reflected their ability or some external factor, such as luck. In an ostensibly unrelated part of the study, they were presented with two indices of their verbal intelligence. The indices

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were equally flattering, but one represented their intelligence as a number, the other in qualitative terms. How did participants feel about them? Participants exposed to unclear (versus clear) performance contingencies experienced a drop in their global self-esteem certainty (but not level), and they compensated by identifying with the quantitative index of their value on the second task. Furthermore, this effect was specific to participants with a high dispositional desire for well-structured knowledge—those known to respond to uncertainty-arousing situations with compensatory efforts to restore certainty (Neuberg, Judice, & West, 1997). Metaphor can help people get some purchase on the notion of personal value, independent of its utility for increasing one’s level of self-esteem.

Enhancing and Defending Self-Esteem As we navigate through our social worlds, we encounter a seemingly limitless cascade of challenges, events, and social feedback that can potentially threaten our sense of ourselves as a person of worth, from losing a job to being dumped by a romantic partner to discovering our fly is unzipped. To cope with it all, people deploy self-serving biases—mental gymnastics by which one enhances personal value and avoids or discounts any information that threatens to undermine it (e.g., Alicke, 1985). Let’s consider a few such biases and see how they are given form and direction by metaphor.

Self-Serving Attributional Bias People are quick to take credit (technically: make “internal attributions”) for good things they do and blame the situation (“external attributions”) for bad things they do (Gollwitzer, Wicklund, & Hilton, 1982; Miller & Ross, 1975; Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenfield, 1976). It can help to marshal exculpatory metaphors. For example, angry outbursts are sometimes represented in terms of the explosion of heated fluid or gas in a pressurized container (Kövecses, 2000). We’ve all learned that a covered pot explodes on the stovetop because the heated fluid builds up pressure and that, critically, there is no intention behind the explosion. Hence, we would expect a person motivated to disown his aggressive behavior to embrace this pressurized container metaphor to play down his accountability for the loss of control over his anger. After all, you can’t blame an overheated pot from blowing its lid.

Defensive Projection According to classic psychoanalytic views of defensive projection, a confrontation with one’s own undesirable qualities (e.g., traits, impulses) triggers an unconscious effort to protect one’s self-image by attributing those qualities

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to others and thereby ridding them from the self (Freud, 1936; Jung, 1968). Studies confirm that people respond to feedback that they have a negative trait by rating other people as possessing that trait (but not other negative traits), and subsequently viewing themselves as free from it (Govorun, Fuegen, & Payne, 2006; Schimel, Greenberg, & Martens, 2003). It’s possible that projection operates on a metaphoric conception of undesirable qualities as physical entities that one can possess—in the form of a visible stain or an object lodged inside the self-as-container. Against the backdrop of this metaphor, the person peels off or extracts an unsightly thing and offloads it onto someone else. Supporting evidence shows that projecting personal immorality onto others is mediated by feelings of physical dirtiness, and washing away dirt eliminates this defensive tendency (Rothschild, Landau, Sullivan, & Keefer, in press).

Compensatory Self-Affirmation When self-esteem is threatened in one domain (e.g., losing a tennis match), people often shore up their overall sense of worth by inflating their value in an unrelated domain (e.g., affirming their cooking skills)—a strategy called compensation or self-affirmation (Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Greenberg & Pyszczynski, 1985; Steele, 1988). In Chapter 7 we’ll discuss evidence that people compensate for experiences that reduce self-esteem by affirming their emotional “relationship” with non-human entities like deities and consumer belongings—a process that operates on personification metaphors.

Reframing Social Reality However handy, these and similar biases are limited because they focus on reframing a particular quality or outcome. Complementing this piecemeal approach is a more sweeping strategy for coping with life’s slings and arrows: reinterpret social reality writ large. To picture this strategy, note that a major theme in social psychology is that a person’s self-concept is a social construction assembled out of the evaluations of others (Cooley, 1902; James, 1890/1983; Mead, 1934). Erving Goffman (1959) embodied this view in the image of everyday social life as a stage play—what is often called the dramaturgical perspective (Sandstrom, Martin, & Fine, 2009). In this extended theatrical metaphor, people are actors who adopt shifting roles when sharing different stages with rotating sets of other characters, and they emerge from backstage in costume to enact their performances in the hope of gaining approval and applause and not getting booed off the stage. But the dramaturgical perspective is not just a lens for social psychologists; it is also a way that actors—the rest of us—can understand and experience daily life. Although the exact content of this perspective differs in various cultural

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instantiations, the premise is always roughly the same: that reality is not what we believe it to be but rather an elaborate farce maintained through a common suspension of disbelief: Sibling A: “Time to get into the role of ‘good son.’” Sibling B: “I hate these family get-togethers, but I put on the mask and follow the script.” Sibling A: “Just put on a good show.” In fact, as a result of modernizing processes of secularization and individualization, people in contemporary societies are increasingly more likely to adopt the dramaturgical perspective as a temporary mode of understanding social reality and their place within it (Cohen & Taylor, 1978; Giddens, 1991; Miller, 2003). Kövecses (2005) proposed that life is a show/play is perhaps the dominant metaphor in contemporary American life and popular culture (see Lakoff & Johnson’s 1999 discussion of the multiple selves metaphor). We see it expressed in the popularity of reality television and films like The Matrix, The Truman Show, and The Game, which question the genuineness of reality and compare it to a simulation or performance. Figure 6.5 shows that, over the centuries, “life is a play” is increasingly prevalent in written discourse. The question arises: In what situations are people motivated to (at least temporarily) embrace this worldview? According to Sullivan et  al. (2014), when people feel that they are somehow failing in their performance, the dramaturgical perspective may be desirable because it allows them to discount all social roles and activities as theatrical constructions. Put another way, people may experience feelings of inadequacy in a variety of different areas—in the workplace, in their knowledge of art and culture, in their

FIGURE 6.5 

The metaphor life is a play is increasingly prominent in Englishspeaking cultures, as reflected in more literary references. This metaphor can protect self-esteem against threats.

Data from Google Books Ngram

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physical appearance, and so on. To defend their sense of personal adequacy in any of these domains, they may adopt the dramaturgical perspective in a global, role-general manner, reassuring themselves that society is just one big theatrical production and one’s performance in a given role does not indicate the ultimate value of the self. Supporting studies show that college students led to feel they were not living up to the college student role endorsed an essay expressing the dramaturgical perspective, but not an essay trivializing the value of the student role, suggesting that viewing life as a big play is distinct from simply trivializing the threatened role. Also, exposure to the dramaturgical perspective effectively buffered self-esteem against threat. By interpreting the social world through a theatrical metaphor, viewing all social roles as essentially artificial dramatic performances, the person can brush off threats to their performance in any given role or domain.6

Future Direction: Self-Esteem Types Research on metaphor’s role in self-esteem motivation is in its infancy, and several interesting questions are ripe for study. One deals with types of selfesteem. Self-esteem is not a unitary construct. If two people both report having high self-esteem, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their feelings of worth are the same. Some people have more secure, authentic feelings of positive self-regard, whereas others hold themselves in high esteem but are actually compensating for feelings of inferiority (Adler, 1930; Horney, 1937). The reader has certainly had the impression that others who are insufferably pretentious, arrogant, or condescending are masking a shortfall of genuine self-esteem. Self-esteem type has a number of consequences even when people are equally high in overall levels of self-esteem. For instance, people whose self-esteem is unstable (fluctuates from day to day) or contingent on others’ feedback tend to react strongly to threats, put other people down, and lash out aggressively (Arndt, Schimel, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2002; Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989; Schimel et al., 2001). Future work could examine metaphors’ involvement in these different types. Observe that secure self-esteem is commonly described as a stable, durable entity, grounded, a firm foundation for a healthy self-concept; conversely, unfounded or exaggerated self-esteem is groundless and, as seen in numerous expressions, gaseous (Miller, 2003):7 A: “I’m sick of how Rachel puts on airs, she has an inflated self-importance.” B: “I agree, she has a bloated ego; but don’t worry, she’s full of hot air and she just likes to puff herself up and trumpet her own virtues.” A: “Someone should burst her bubble!”

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Self-Growth I would argue most seriously that growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the most successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehension of growth. (Norman Mailer, 1914, p. 29) All over the world, and in your own community, you’ll find astounding examples of people exploring new ideas, discovering talents, and developing wisdom and maturity. This attests to the powerful human motives for personal growth, change, and self-expansion. Ideas about optimal fulfillment of one’s potential have a long intellectual history, dating back to the early Greek philosophers and extending to modern times in the humanistic tradition (Maslow, 1970; Rogers, 1961). The most influential contemporary account, called SelfDetermination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), views the person as inherently motivated to cultivate her inner potentialities, seek out optimal challenges, and master and integrate new experiences. Discourse on self-growth is shot through with metaphors, inviting us to look in new ways at the factors that promote and inhibit it. For example, a hallmark of growth is creativity. There seems to be something intrinsically satisfying about discovering hidden connections even when (or especially when) doing so has no immediate practical benefit. And many scholars view metaphor as a—if not the—imaginative capacity that allows us to break free from the confines of convention and broaden our cognitive horizon (Donoghue, 2014; Koestler, 1989). In the words of poet Wallace Stevens (1989), “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor,” adding that “Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal” (p. 195). Backing up these claims is evidence that priming metaphors boosts creativity (Chapter 3). Self-growth also ties to the notion of a “true” or authentic self. In social life people face concerns about when and how to express their true self. For instance, they might struggle to find a career path that balances their genuine interests and talents with other people’s expectations and standards for success, or they might feel pressure to conceal their authentic attitudes when they suspect that others will judge them harshly. From these experiences, people form an intrinsic self-concept—an understanding of who they think they truly are that is not conditioned by or dependent upon social approval.8 This concept is not an extra indulgence: Expressions of the intrinsic self-concept are closely linked to positive psychological functioning. The degree to which people adopt self-determined goals positively predicts feelings of self-actualization (Kasser & Ryan, 1996), and activating the intrinsic self-concept increases meaning in life (Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt, & King, 2009).

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FIGURE 6.6 

 eople commonly represent the person they truly are as an “inner P core” surrounded by the “external shell” of their public personae. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite its implications for well-being, the intrinsic self-concept is one of the less easily definable aspects of the self, as Mailer notes. How do people wrap their head around it? Observe that they conventionally talk about it metaphorically as a core-like physical entity lodged inside of an external casing or shell: “I found who I am deep down, beneath the surface” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, call this the “essential self metaphor”). In essence, they are taking the two metaphors mentioned earlier—self-as-object and self-as-space— and combining them in a configuration resembling an avocado (Figure 6.6). The inner core stands for their “essence,” while the external layer corresponds to the extrinsic self that they assume in society, and which is not always consistent with the true self (note this metaphor’s compatibility with the dramaturgical metaphor discussed above: behind or underneath the public persona lies the inner, “real” self). Speakers of diverse languages extend this entity metaphor to describe the enhanced expression of their intrinsic self in terms of their inner core expanding or emerging. Students in the U.S. and Switzerland describe selfdevelopment, but not other self-aspects, with expressions like: “I am growing inside,” “My true self is really coming out,” and “I want to expand my interests” (Moser, 2007). In Japanese, genuine self-expression is likened to entity emergence (e.g., the expression “Kare-wa mettani hontoono zibun-o dasa-na-i” literally translates as “He rarely puts out (his) real self”; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 286). These expressions reflect a picture in which a person’s private, truthful self—called hone—is situated internally in the stomach area (hara), whereas tatemae is the external face one puts on when the situation demands that one “hide” the innermost self and conform to social standards of conduct (Matsuki, 1995). The same metaphors pervade academic discourse (e.g., Aron & Aron, 1997; Burris & Rempel, 2004). Rogers (1961) characterized the intrinsic self as an “inner core” that expands (under facilitating conditions) to

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FIGURE 6.7 

Stasis

Fragmentation

 articipants in Landau et al. (2009) viewed one of three series of P shapes (reproduced in the columns here).

express its true nature and responds to social threats by seeking shelter behind external “façades.” Of course, these expressions are senseless when interpreted literally. There is no core lodged in your chest or head or belly that bursts forth like the creature in the movie Alien (1979). Are they simply figures of speech? Perhaps, but a more interesting possibility is that they offer a window into how people represent intrinsic self-expression. We know that many physical objects increase in strength and influence as they expand in size. By means of metaphor, we can apply that knowledge to conceptualize the enhanced influence of the intrinsic self in terms of entity expansion. That suggests that priming individuals with the expansion of a physical entity will facilitate expression of the intrinsic self in self-perceptions and behavior. Landau et al. (2011) tested this by asking participants to complete a neutral word task on the computer. In between trials, a sequence of different-sized squares flashed on the screen for about one second (Figure 6.7). In the expansion condition, the squares progressed from small to large; in the stasis condition, the large square reappeared; in the fragmentation condition the squares expanded but fragmented into an array of progressively smaller pieces (the inner core metaphor conventionally refers to an integral entity, not one that “falls apart”). Participants exposed to an expanding entity reported feeling less concerned with others’ approval, disagreeing with statements like “I often get concerned with how others are evaluating me” and “I work hard at things because of the social approval it provides” (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009).

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Another study tested whether priming entity expansion causes people to behave more in line with their true self as opposed to other people’s standards for what to do. After viewing an expanding entity, a static entity, or a contracting entity, participants were asked to evaluate some abstract paintings. Using a subtle ruse, we arranged it so that they could see the evaluations ostensibly made by former participants. It was clear which paintings their peers liked and despised. Would participants give in to popular opinion? Those flashed with images of entity expansion felt more comfortable expressing their genuine preferences rather than conform.

Conclusion Metaphor helps people to comprehend and communicate both parts of the self: the monitoring ego and the self-concept. It also helps the self do the many things it does, from envisioning future goals to restoring pride after falling flat on one’s face. As we situate these discoveries in the self literature, the diversity of effects makes it difficult to isolate a single “take-home” point about metaphor’s significance. Still, one overall conclusion is warranted: The ways in which we understand and experience the self are intimately bound up with our bodies. This idea is not emphasized in the prevailing “information processing” approach. This view portrays the self as a set of interlinked “nodes” of knowledge represented in the format of abstract, language-like propositions, not essentially different from the lines of code that constitute a software program (e.g., Linville & Carlston, 1994). While it generated hundreds of studies, this view leaves little room to consider how the self is connected to the brain’s modal systems for perceiving and interacting with the physical world. As a corrective, metaphor studies emphasize that the self is represented in terms of recurring patterns of sensation, motor activity, and other bodily states. It can be humbling to acknowledge that our innermost conceptions of who we are and what our lives amount to are cobbled together from such prosaic ideas as containers crammed with stuff, stuff breaking, and stuff bumping into other stuff. But an increased awareness of these metaphoric underpinnings empowers us to embrace or reject those embodied conceptions as we see fit.

Notes 1 The literature on metaphors of consciousness and selfhood is enormous and can only scratch the surface. Barnden (1997) reviews detailed analyses by Lakoff (1993; Lakoff, Espenson, & Schwartz, 1991), Gibbs & O’Brien (1990), and Sweetser (1987), among others. See also Gentner & Gruden (1985), Leary (1990), and a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition (1993, vol. 2, no. 2). 2 Even the ubiquitous term “state” is spatial-metaphoric, as are cognate verbs for “to be” in languages like Spanish (“Estoy allegro”) and Italian (“Sto bene”).

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3 Indeed, relations between internal personae run the gamut of real-life relationships: they ignore each other, cajole each other into action (“I’m trying to convince myself to cut carbs”), and so on. Note, too, that personification metaphors feature in images (internal conflict as bickering angel and devil) and scholarly models of consciousness: Plato, in the Phaedrus, has Socrates comparing the ego/soul to a mismatched pair of winged horses (passions and appetites) driven by a charioteer (reason). For Freud, the superego is an internal judge modeled after the same-sex parent. 4 Metaphor’s role in self-continuity prompts us to think deeper about metaphor’s epistemic function. As I’ve reiterated throughout this book, conceptual metaphor theory posits that people reach for metaphor to make the abstract concrete. But when using metaphor to construct a meaningful life story, they seem to do the opposite: plugging the otherwise mundane, concrete actions and events of their workaday life into a grander narrative construed at a higher level of abstraction. Is metaphor making the concrete abstract? Probably not: Here the target concepts are not the quotidian experiences themselves but the causal and thematic relations that hold between them. 5 Consider that every day millions confess their sins to priests who calculate the number of prayers they must recite to atone (as a child, I averaged 6.5 Our Fathers). Or that currently fashionable, bowdlerized conceptions of Karma boil down to a balance sheet of good-deed-points and bad-deed-points stored in the “cloud” (the cosmic one, not the digital one—at least not yet). 6 Of course, conceptualizing life as a play does not render the individual wholly indifferent to self-esteem dynamics. Even as actors on a stage, we want to be recognized as important (perhaps the star) and we don’t want to play our role badly. It has unique downsides, too. Because we are obliged to play various roles that the larger culture has pre-scripted, a heightened awareness of those roles can elicit an unpleasant feeling of “faking it”—a self-consciousness that we are simply wearing masks. This can create anxieties about the existence of an authentic self (Miller, 2003). 7 The ancient Greek word for puffed-up vanity, tuphos, literally means “smoke.” 8 I use the term intrinsic self-concept, not intrinsic self, to remain agnostic about whether there is such a thing as the “true” self. What is important is that many people believe it exists, and that by understanding how that belief guides their thinking, we can predict their self-perceptions and behavior.

7 INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

At several stages of close relationships, our perceptions and feelings scaffold on concrete concepts. In turn, relationship models provide the template for relating to nonhuman things. In the movie I Am Legend (2008), Will Smith’s character comes to terms with being the last living person on the planet. This scenario—with slight variations— has been the plot of numerous science fiction novels and movies. Why are so many people fascinated by the idea of being completely, utterly alone? I suspect that we know, deep down, that complete isolation from others would be a horrible fate, and we wonder how Will Smith or anyone else could survive it. The fact is that we need intimate contact with other people. Our relationships with family members, friends, and romantic partners are central and indispensable parts of our lives. We spend a great deal of time and energy seeking out new relationships and nurturing the ones we have. What’s more, our close relationships can be a source of great joy when they go well, and a source of misery when they don’t. Still, living with relationships means grappling with abstract ideas and elusive feelings. Ask people who they find attractive, for example, and they’ll mutter inarticulately about “chemistry” or “that certain something.” Or consider the feeling of love. It often seems that we cannot put words around it, cannot capture it in a set of beliefs. To make sense of it all, and express ourselves, we reach for metaphors grounded in domains as diverse as magic, militarism, madness, and meat. The big question is whether metaphor has a causal impact on who we’re attracted to, how we establish intimacy, or whether we choose to settle down with a partner. This chapter aims to find out. Along the way we’ll see that metaphor is not just a cognitive device reverberating inside the individual’s skull; it is a shared tool for communicating and

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coordinating actions with one another (Chapter 2; Cameron, 2008; Goatly, 2011). With a shared metaphor as a road map, relationship partners can negotiate answers to basic questions like: What are “we”? What are we doing here? What should we do now? How do we know when we’re doing things right or wrong? Metaphor not only lends meaning to social relationships; it can also borrow meaning from the relationship domain to structure such various domains as politics, religion, and retail shopping. This has repercussions for social behaviors that lie outside the context of person-to-person relationships. Why cover those in a chapter about relationships? Because we’re discovering that people are very flexible in the way they seek and maintain psychological security, both within and outside of their interpersonal relationships, and that flexibility owes largely to metaphor use. By means of metaphor, a person’s relationship models can quietly pull the strings of behavior in even far-off corners of social life.

Attraction and Liking In the early stages, people are initially choosing others with whom to form a relationship, whether it be a friendship or a romantic coupling. Research indicates several determinants of interpersonal attraction, including propinquity and attitude similarity, and my intent is not to consider them in full. It’s to enrich the overall picture by considering some metaphoric influences on who we like and why we like them.

Attractive Qualities Asked why they like (or dislike) someone, people typically cite that person’s attributes. We are drawn to people who have talents, remind us of positive experiences, or who have achieved things that our culture values (Fletcher, 2000). We also like people with certain personality traits, including friendliness, honesty, warmth, intelligence, sense of humor, emotional stability, ambition, openness, and extraversion (Sprecher & Regan, 2002). These and many other intangible qualities are commonly talked about metaphorically—indeed, terms like stability and openness wear their metaphoric meaning on their sleeve. While that’s not news, research suggests that something deeper and more interesting also occurs. It seems that the perception of others’ qualities follows the contour of metaphor, even when linguistic expressions are not salient. The reasoning behind this research is this: If perceptions of traits are grounded in concrete experiences, then enacting or simulating those experiences (via sensation, motor activity, or perceptual imagery) should transfer over to change trait perceptions in metaphor-consistent directions. For example, cuing spatial verticality by presenting information at high positions on a computer screen led participants to perceive others as higher in power

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and status (Chapter 2)—two traits that matter when assessing the value of potential relationship partners. Meier and Dionne (2009) extended these findings to physical attraction. They built on theories positing that (heterosexual) men and women evolved to have different, specialized preferences in their mates that favor the conception and survival of their offspring (Buss, 1994). Women evaluating potential mates prefer men who present themselves as assertive, confident, and dominant (Gangestad, Garver-Apgar, Simpson, & Cousins, 2007; Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002). Men, in contrast, gravitate toward women who are less dominant—for example, those who are younger and shorter than themselves and whose facial features resemble to some extent those of a baby. Meier and Dionne tested whether people use verticality information as an implicit cue to power when rating the attractiveness of opposite-sex individuals. They found that women were more attracted to men when their pictures were presented near the top of a computer screen, whereas men favored women whose pictures appeared in a low position. Hot or not has its ups and downs. What about how nice someone seems? Here we talk in terms of warm and cold: “I received a warm welcome overall, but Jake gave me an icy stare” (Asch, 1946). To probe this metaphoric link, Williams and Bargh (2008) had an experimenter ask participants to momentarily hold either a warm or a cold cup. Afterward, participants gave their impression of a hypothetical person’s friendliness and trustworthiness. Those who had just held the warm cup perceived the other person as “warmer”—friendlier and more trustworthy. Note that the researchers did not prime participants with metaphoric linguistic expressions; instead, a mere sensation changed their perceptions. Nice people are also sweet: “Rachel is sweet but not cloying.” Going beyond language, Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012) found that experiences with and preferences for sweet taste have metaphor-consistent effects on perceptions of strangers’ agreeableness.

Felt Attraction Let’s turn from perceptions of traits to attraction itself: that slippery, sometimes evanescent, often irrational feeling of being drawn to another person. Isn’t it simply a function of perceiving such-and-such attractive qualities in that person? No, it’s something else. Eastwick and colleagues asked men and women what qualities they find attractive in a prospective romantic partner, rotated them through 4-minute speed-dating pairings, and asked whom they would have liked to see again. Surprisingly, the qualities they initially thought they liked failed to predict how attracted they were to others who did or did not have those qualities when they met them face-to-face (Eastwick, Eagly et al., 2011; Eastwick, Finkel et al., 2011). What is that extra ingredient? Conventional language and imagery describe it metaphorically in terms of depth (deep connection vs. superficial liking) or ideas

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about gravitational and magnetic forces borrowed from our folk physics (“I felt drawn to him”; “Gina has a magnetic personality”; cartoons depicting attracted characters propelling toward each other). Recent studies go further to examine metaphoric cognition. We’re learning, for example, that physical temperature informs not only perceptions of others’ friendliness, as we just saw, but also felt attraction: “Our first interaction left me cold, but I’m warming up to her.” Several studies employing a range of empirical paradigms show that constructs linked to attraction (e.g., trust, similarity, perceived emotional support) and warmth sensations and preferences mutually influence each other in metaphor-consistent ways. Indeed, few metaphors have garnered as much empirical attention in social psychology.1 In a clever twist, Leander and colleagues (2012) showed that this metaphoric association is moderated by the social context. Participants who interacted with an affiliative confederate felt physically colder if that person failed to mimic their nonverbal behaviors. In a friendly context, feeling out of sync with your interaction partner leaves you cold. But what happens when the social context calls for a more formal mode of interaction? Here, an interaction partner who violates those standards with an inappropriately high degree of familiarity can give you the chills. Sure enough, participants who interacted with a task-oriented confederate felt colder if they were mimicked than if they were not. A takeaway from the speed-dating studies just cited is that attraction hinges on whether things go smoothly when we meet a person face-to-face and learn more about each other (online daters beware). Notice that word: smoothly. Attraction is represented as smooth sailing or fluid communication. Likewise, to ease communication is to grease the wheels, and we label as slick individuals who are suspiciously gregarious. Conversely, attraction deadens in awkward or offensive interactions described as rough going, halting, forced, and constipated. These meanings fit with the umbrella conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1993) comparing successful communication to a free-flowing exchange of objects between one person’s mind-space and another: “I find it easy to get through to you; you poured out your feelings and they made their way immediately into my heart; with these other guys, I can’t get my ideas across.” These are not just figures of speech. Ackerman, Nocera, and Bargh (2010) had participants handle puzzle pieces that were either covered in rough sandpaper or smooth. Next, they read about a social interaction described ambiguously as adversarial yet friendly, competitive yet cooperative. Those who had just handled rough objects judged the interaction to be less coordinated, even harsh. Follow-up studies showed that haptic experiences with rough textures specifically changed impressions of social coordination quality, consistent with the texture metaphor, but did not change impressions of the interaction partners along other, metaphor-irrelevant dimensions (Schaefer, Denke, Heinze, & Rotte, 2013, also demonstrate modality specificity).

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Attracting With Metaphor Let’s zoom out from the individual to look at how people communicate. Philosopher David Cooper (1986) proposed that metaphor “‘cultivates an intimacy’ among speakers, rather as a joke can, so that its conspicuous place in everyday talk is to be accounted for along the same lines as other practices which serve to draw people close towards one another” (p. 40). How does metaphor “cultivate an intimacy”? First, consider how another cognitive device—the script—facilitates communication by “filling in” missing information (Schank & Abelson, 1977). If I told you that I got a sandwich at the student union, I don’t need to tell you, for example, that I paid for it. You fill that detail in because you share my restaurant script. A shared metaphor does this in spades. Beginning with Aristotle, scholars have remarked that metaphor is a uniquely compact device for communicating lots of information about one thing by conjuring up a familiar schema for something else (Ortony, 1975). That makes it an efficient means of establishing a wide swath of common ground, a deep correspondence in interaction partners’ worldview. Imagine that two graduate students discover that they both conceptualize graduate school metaphorically as war. Instantly they sync up larger systems of knowledge—about academics, each other’s temperament, and so on—founded upon a shared archive of knowledge about military operations. They sense, for example, a shared conviction that achievements require suffering and a suspicion that enemy forces aim to thwart their progress. Conversely, a mismatch in metaphor may be a huge turn off, because it signals—again, in a uniquely compact manner—that there is so much that you and I don’t see eye-to-eye on.

Closeness We all have a sense that close relationships are different from our casual interactions with strangers and acquaintances, but what exactly makes them special? Researchers have broken down the feeling of closeness into several components (Laurenceau, Rivera, Schaffer, & Pietromonaco, 2004; Marston, Hecht, Manke, McDaniel, & Reeder, 1998; Parks & Floyd, 1996). To mention a few: People in close relationships know a lot about each other and they are comfortable sharing intimate, often confidential information that they do not typically share with acquaintances. They feel more care and they trust each other to be fair and responsive to their needs. What I find interesting is that researchers and laypersons alike describe closeness in terms of physical proximity. They’re not the same, of course. You can feel close to people who are physically far away (“I’m closer to my sister in Phoenix since our dad died.”). Indeed, the phenomenon of parasocial relationships shows that people often feel surprisingly close to others whom they’ve never

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met face-to-face, like celebrities and athletes, and even to others who do not exist outside the world of fiction, like characters in novels (Derrick, Gabriel, & Hugenberg, 2009; Giles, 2002). Conversely, you can feel miles apart from someone whose body is pressed against yours (“Are we drifting apart?” “You’re distant lately.” “Are we on different planets?”). It seems that the felt closeness that distinguishes our more satisfying, intimate relationships is based on a bedrock metaphor: intimacy is spatial distance. Why is this metaphor so ubiquitous and emotionally resonant? As discussed in Chapter 5, metaphors don’t spring out of nowhere but build on preexisting cognitive structures. Tracing the origins of the closeness metaphor begins, I believe, with attachment theory. The theory builds on psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s (1969/1992) observation that human infants are born relatively helpless and are unable to survive on their own; hence, they must depend on supportive others, particularly their parents and other caregivers, who can provide care and protection. During our species’ evolution, natural selection favored those who responded to threats to safety and survival by seeking out supportive others. Extending Bowlby’s analysis, theorists propose that people are motivated throughout the lifespan to seek security (comfort, reassurance, relief ) from their close relationships (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Consequently, adult relationship partners (e.g., friends, lovers) can serve as attachment figures, much as caregivers fill this role for children. One reading of attachment theory is that people are endowed with an innate tendency to associate physical proximity to attachment figures with feelings of security. It’s possible that this association “detaches” from bodily experiences as their growing minds develop in abstraction. That enables them to derive security from symbolic proximity to attachment figures, irrespective of their spatial reality.2 This account explains why this metaphor is used crossculturally to convey feelings of love of intimacy (Kövecses, 2000), and why it carries such an emotional punch: Its template is an attachment system designed to keep us alive. Still, is there evidence that people use this metaphor to represent their emotional attachments? Consider this finding: Participants asked to draw two dots far apart (vs. close together) on a two-dimensional grid subsequently felt a weaker emotional bond with their family members (Williams & Bargh, 2008b). How to interpret this? It may reflect the bare-bones association between physical proximity and intimacy—that is, the bodily experiential basis of the closeness metaphor that originates early in life. After all, participants surely had experienced distancing from family members accompanied by feelings of estrangement. Perhaps inducing spatial distance simulated the sensorimotor representations associated with these bodily states, triggering feelings of emotional detachment. No metaphor necessary. Plausible, but unlikely. The simple act of plotting Cartesian coordinates doesn’t resemble the particular bodily states that customarily occurred during participants’

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experiences with family members. Put another way, although people’s concept of familial attachment is certainly rich with perceptual and motor representations, I suspect that drawing dots on graph paper is not likely to be one of them. Thus, although it is difficult to interpret this finding as the simulation of a recurring bodily state, it makes perfect sense if we posit a conceptual metaphor between spatial distance and emotional intimacy.3

We’re So Close, We’re United With increasing closeness come feelings of mutuality or cognitive interdependence. Partners perceive their lives to be intertwined, and they depend on each other to get by (Berscheid, Snyder, & Omoto, 2004). This is reflected in language use. Romantic couples and friends with a high degree of mutuality describe their relationship using a greater number of plural pronouns—like we and us—as opposed to singular pronouns such as I and my (Agnew, Loving, Le, & Goodfriend, 1998; Fitzsimons & Kay, 2004). But what, deep down, are people expressing when they talk this way? It could be a metaphoric conception of oneself and one’s partner as physically merged or fused together. This metaphor lies at the center of Aron and Aron’s self-expansion theory, which posits that people desire to “expand” the self, and loving another person is an important way to do so (Aron, Aron, & Normman, 2001). That’s because the closer you get in a relationship, the more you learn and care about the things your relationship partner cares about. His or her phobias, record collections, and stories become tangled with your own. You are made larger, metaphorically speaking, by incorporating your partner as part of your self-concept and amplifying your sense of what it is to be a person. This merging metaphor is reflected in the widely used measure of mutuality called the “Inclusion of Other in the Self” scale (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992; reproduced in Figure 7.1). It consists of seven pairs of circles that represent varying degrees of overlap between self and partner. Respondents select the pair that best characterizes their relationship. This simple, one-item scale has proven very useful for assessing relationship closeness (Agnew et  al., 2004). People who choose larger self-other overlap have more satisfying relationships, and they are also more likely to “blur the line” between their sense of who they are and who their partner is. When people are asked to quickly decide which personality traits apply to them and which apply to their partner, those who saw larger self-other overlap were more likely to make mistakes, as though they and their partners possessed the traits together (Aron & Fraley, 1999; Mashek, Aron, & Boncimino, 2003). The point is that including another in the self—both as a theoretical construct and a measurement tool—is metaphoric to the core. Speaking of cores . . .

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Self

FIGURE 7.1 

Other

Self

Self

Other

Other

Self

Self

Other

Other

Self

Self

Other

Other

 hat gives the “Inclusion of Other in the Self” scale predictive W validity? It might tap people’s spatial-metaphoric conception of mutuality.

Which “Parts” of the Self are Close? In Chapter 6 I suggested that people commonly represent their “true,” authentic self-concept metaphorically as a core-like entity inside the “container” of their public persona. Here we observe that this core metaphor works in concert with the closeness metaphor, such that people feel profound intimacy when they perceive that their innermost self is spatially near, or merged with, another person’s innermost self. On the other hand, they know that the outer self—the one they present to others’ gaze on the public stage—can give off misleading and potentially deceptive signals concerning one’s genuine beliefs, desires, and intentions. Hence, closeness of outer selves is not a source of security, and may even be seen as an obstacle to true intimacy. We see this metaphor expressed in many expressions that are strikingly similar across diverse languages: “You only know me on the outside, not the true me deep down.” “Well, you’ve never opened up and revealed your inner self!” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Inspired by these observations, my colleagues and I (Landau et  al., 2011) hypothesized that priming the idea of protecting an inner core would decrease people’s willingness to “open up,” or “come out,” and disclose intimate information about themselves to another person, but it wouldn’t inhibit them from sharing more “superficial” aspects of themselves. We presented all participants with a series of four screens depicting an animated action sequence. In the core protection condition, they watched little pellets approaching a sphere being blocked by a surrounding layer. In the control condition, the sphere was unprotected and the pellets moved freely. In a separate task, participants were told that a stranger would ask them personal questions, but they could choose which questions they were comfortable answering. The prime had no effect on their willingness to answer superficial questions (e.g., “Do you prefer warm or cool weather?”). However, when it came to more intimate questions pertaining to their “true” self (e.g., “Do you have a secret you’ve always kept from your parents?”),

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those primed with inner-core protection were reluctant to disclose—unwilling to “reveal” themselves or allow another person to “get inside” their minds. The point is, because people use spatial metaphors to construe selves, they understand closeness as occurring at two levels: first, two people pass from the exterior reality of bodies to the interior reality of selves; then, within that interior space, they penetrate the selves conditioned by society to the innermost selves that are not. At a practical level, this analysis gives us a better handle on the cognitive underpinnings of three phenomena, as follows.

Self-Silencing Self-silencing is the inhibited expression of one’s true beliefs and feelings, and it decreases relationship satisfaction (Gable & Reis, 2006; Harper & Welsh, 2007). Closeness metaphors may be a vehicle to promote self-disclosure and healthy relationships.

Existential Isolation Existential isolation is a persistent sense of emotional and cognitive inaccessibility to what other people are truly thinking and feeling (and the corresponding sense that others do not understand the self). In this state, the person may be surrounded by relationship partners yet unable to satisfy her need for connectedness because she feels marooned in her own skull. Philosophers describe this feeling metaphorically as a gap, chasm, or abyss separating inner selves (Buber, 1923/1958; Laing, 1971; Yalom, 1980).

I-Sharing People “Me-share” with others when they feel that they have compatible personality traits, demographic characteristics, and attitudes—elements of the self that William James called the “Me.” They “I-share” with others when they believe that their subjective experiences of the world are the same, even if their respective Me’s seem very different (Pinel, Long, Landau, & Pyszczynski, 2004). Attesting to the power of I-sharing to bolster liking, one study (Pinel & Long, 2012) showed that heterosexual men normally preferred to interact with another straight man rather than a gay man, but this preference was reversed if they were given a chance to I-share with the gay man. To better assess metaphors’ role in these phenomena, it would be useful to develop a variant of the “Inclusion of Other in the Self” scale, such that respondents separately rate the overlap between inner-core selves and external selves. Even if people see a large overlap between their and their partner’s external selves, they may nevertheless sense a troublesome distance between “who we really are”; conversely, perceiving a large overlap of inner selves may uniquely predict people’s willingness to look past the superficial differences that normally keep them apart.

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Sex Social psychologists have long known that sexual attitudes and behaviors conform to cultural scripts, myths, and stereotypes. Metaphor research adds another piece of the puzzle: People structure aspects of sex around a multitude of superficially unrelated ideas. Sexual desire, for instance, is compared to hunger to capture the notion of internal cravings. It’s looked upon as madness, intoxication, disease, contamination, and the wiles of a malevolent demon, all of which help us grasp the mysterious sensations that sexual desire can sometimes unleash, the loss of control, and the potential dangers (damaged reputations; Pope, 1980). Freud gave us the image of desire as energy generated in the boiler room of the id, building up pressure and occasionally finding release in dreams, fantasies, and quirks of personality. The basic heat metaphor is ubiquitous, giving rise to expressions like: English: “She’s got the hots for him.” Chagga (spoken in Tanzania): “Nékeha.” (trans. “She burns.”). Why? Feelings of sexual desire are typically associated with a physiological experience of increased body temperature. It’s possible that this embodied correlation assumes metaphoric significance, allowing us to think and talk about the intensity of desire in terms of the degree of heat, even when there is nothing literally hot to speak of (Emanatian, 1995; Lakoff, 1987). Sexual courtship, too, is variously metaphorized. It is a journey (“How far did she go?”); commerce (“She drives a hard bargain.”); or a competitive sport (“She went to third base.”). Also pervasive is the military metaphor comparing wooing to invasion and compliance to surrender. In Hamlet, Polonius advises his daughter Ophelia: “Set your entreatments [military negotiations for surrender] at a higher rate than a command to parley [confer with a besieger].” Four centuries later, people routinely frame sexual courtship as an attack or conquest—as the male soldier launching a strategic crossing of boundaries (Goff, 2015). The act of sex from the male standpoint is likewise compared to drilling, stabbing, shooting, busting, splitting, bombing, smashing, and cutting the female body/genitals. Still, the question looms: Do metaphors merely reflect sexual attitudes and behavioral intentions, or do they affect those outcomes as well? To find out, Sakaluk, Keefer, Swanson, and Landau (2016) prompted college students to describe sex metaphorically as a game or in literal terms as a pleasurable activity. They were then asked about casual sexual encounters: Did they think of such “hookups” as fun? Potentially harmful? A normative thing for people their age? They also indicated their interest in pursuing hookups in the near future. As you might expect, thinking about sex as a game increased interest in short-term casual sex, and this was due to viewing hookups as harmless—as games generally are.

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What’s next? Obviously, sex metaphors vary in their connotations and implications—some are innocuous or even playful while others are euphemistic, puritanical, and even outright misogynistic. And, as we saw in Chapter 4, metaphor use can serve to reinforce preferred beliefs and justify one’s actions. Hence, metaphor use should vary as a function of motives to conceive of sex in particular ways. That is, out of the many metaphors that are at any one time available to thought, people may single out those that align with their antecedent beliefs and desires. Here are two potential effects.

I Am NOT an Animal According to terror management theory, people have a deep-seated, largely unconscious motive to deny their mortality (Greenberg et al., 2008). One strategy is to distance from aspects of the human body that imply animal nature (e.g., excrement, lactation), because these stimuli remind us that we are mortal creatures. The same goes for sex: People respond to mortality reminders by disavowing carnal desires and transforming the meaning of sex from an animalistic act to a uniquely human affair (Goldenberg, 2005). This work suggests that mortality reminders will motivate people to adopt metaphors that obscure the animalistic aspects of sex or inject it with transcendent significance. They may prefer to view sex as a sublime union or fusion with the object of their desire. Such metaphors may even help people act sexually without becoming painfully aware of their corporeality.

The Object of Desire Objectification is the tendency to think about and treat an individual more like an object or a commodity than a person. It’s reflected in common metaphors that cast women in terms of wholesale goods: “Did you get a piece of that?” They reduce the other person to an “it,” name-shorn and impersonalized. Why might men embrace these metaphors? Although men’s objectification of women is traditionally attributed to misogyny, it also stems from threatening feelings of incompetence (Landau et al., 2012). When men desire positive relations with women, they can implicitly doubt their ability to successfully relate to women at a subjective level—to negotiate the invisible and shifting mental states taking place in another person’s head. Objectification compensates for these doubts. By reducing women to simple, concrete attributes that seem easier to understand and influence, men avoid thinking about what they cannot control. This work suggests that men induced to feel incompetent to influence women at a subjective level will find solace in objectifying metaphors. The same motive may even drive men to objectify themselves. Cameron (1995) asked male and female college students to list terms for the penis. The overwhelming majority of men’s terms metaphorized the anatomy in question

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as a person of authority (chief), a ravening animal (snake), a tool (jackhammer), or a weapon (spear). Women provided fewer terms overall, but the more striking difference was the near disappearance of the categories that structured the men’s terms. Those categories seem to be all of a piece. They portray the primary locale of male sexual activity as an uncontrollable “Other” with a life of its own. Using objectifying categories to think about one’s sexuality may help men to mask anxieties, but it might also perpetuate the pernicious rape myth that men cannot help but get carried away by sexual urges (Payne, Lonsway, & Fitzgerald, 1999).

Commitment Like closeness, commitment involves a sense of interdependence. Commitment is interesting in its own right, though, because it deals with one’s intent to stay in a relationship for the long haul. More committed individuals make more long-term plans that include their relationship partners, and they invest more resources in their relationship with the expectation that it will continue (Goodfriend & Agnew, 2008; Sternberg, 1997). Here are a few popular metaphors that organize how we talk and think about commitment.

Journey The logistics of commitment involve coordinating our actions with another person to choose life goals, help one another achieve those goals, and overcome difficulties and resolve conflicts along the way. These logistics are commonly structured around schematic knowledge of physical movement along a path toward a destination: “Look how far we’ve come; it’s been a long, bumpy road; we can’t turn back now; we’re at a crossroads” (Lakoff, 1993). A journey metaphor is particularly useful for making sense of commitment’s temporal aspect: like far-off destinations on a hike, shared life goals are seen as taking a long time to reach together.

Container The perception that commitment narrows behavioral options (favorably or not) is metaphorically expressed in terms of being physically contained: “I’m hesitant to jump into a relationship right now; I wonder what I’m getting into, and whether I can get out of it before I move to Oakland.”

Bond/Union Binding metaphors portray relationship partners as parcels tied together: “Family ties are what bind us together”; “Are you going to tie the knot?” Similarly, union metaphors portray partners as objects merged into one, like two drops

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of water: “You guys are an item? We are one, united in matrimony. She’s my better half!” Marriage in particular is conceived as a physical or biological unity (Kövecses, 1991). Indeed, Christian arguments against divorce frequently invoke this metaphor, deferring to the Bible’s dictum: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (New American Standard).

Stability Patterns in communication also reveal a strong metaphoric association between relationship commitment and bodily experiences of physical stability. People talk about their romantic partners as their “rock.” The relationship itself can be solid. The idea is that people are using their physical experiences with durable objects to understand abstract notions of reliability and trust, either consciously or unconsciously. But do people really represent relationship stability in these terms? To find out, Kille, Forest, and Wood (2013) asked romantically unattached participants to report their preference for various traits in a potential romantic partner, and to rate the likelihood that well-known married couples (e.g., the Obamas) would divorce in the next five years. Some participants completed these tasks while sitting in a wobbly chair and writing on a wobbly table; others worked on sturdier furniture. The physically unstable participants preferred traits indicative of relational stability in a potential partner (e.g., trustworthiness over spontaneity), and perceived less stability in other people’s relationships. Notice how these effects move in divergent directions. When it came to their own preferences, participants compensated for physical instability by desiring contrasting or “stable” personality traits; but when it came to perceptions of others’ relationships, they assimilated instability, viewing them as less stable. Still, both effects are compatible with conceptual metaphor theory in its current form. A challenge for future theory development is to predict, a priori, when (and why) an activated metaphor leads to contrast effects vs. assimilation effects (see Landau et al., in press, for discussion and relevant data).

Economic Exchange This metaphor casts relationships in terms of commodities to be negotiated and bartered on the open market. It is formalized in the social exchange model (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959), which assumes that people approach relationships with the underlying motivation of self-interest. Just as two businesses enter into a corporate merger only if the CEOs of both expect a higher return from combining forces than from staying in competition, relationships have value when both people perceive that they have more to gain than to lose from being in a partnership. The benefits of a relationship can be financial, emotional, sexual, and social. But entering into and maintaining a relationship also carry costs.

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Clearly, this is not the most romantic view of love and commitment, but it does make intuitive sense: We all bring certain strengths to the table, look to make a good deal with a partner, and expect a return on our investment. And several studies confirm that people are more satisfied in a relationship to the extent that they see the benefits as outweighing the costs (e.g., Rusbult, 1983; Rusbult, Johnson, & Morrow, 1986). This is now so familiar that it is hard to see that it is a metaphor. Recognizing it as such yields two insights. First, like all metaphors it presents a partial and potentially biased outlook. It is fair to say that self-interested concerns are not the only driving force in how we form and maintain strong bonds. Indeed, several theorists point out that the social exchange model does not explain the sense of fairness that is so important in our relationships (Clark & Mills, 1979; Sprecher, 1992). Second, we can appreciate that this metaphoric conception was not a common notion before our modern era. Qualitative analyses show that economic descriptions of close relationships entered the scene in the twentieth century (Stearns, 1994). Previously, the metaphoric notion of unity, or a merger of two people into a whole entity, was a larger part of the way many Americans expressed commitment (Kövecses, 1991). It is likely that the rise of free enterprise and consumer choice opportunities fed Americans’ obsession with money, making it a more salient source domain to structure their experience with relationships. The point is that conceiving of a relationship as a commercial enterprise exerts an understandably powerful hold on our hearts and minds, but it is rather peculiar to our cultural-historical context. Future work could use this metaphor as a case study to examine how relationship partners create and transmit metaphors interactively. In the course of their everyday exchanges, relationship partners continually negotiate the meaning of their relationship and try to coordinate their plans and goals (Cameron, 2011; Gibbs, 2014). If a couple mutually settles on an economic metaphor, then they’ll likely keep a mental ledger of who contributes what to the relationship, and they’ll always be looking to maximize benefits for themselves. One partner does all the housework? Great, the other thinks, I’m getting the better deal. If they arrive at a different shared metaphor of who we are, they won’t try to maximize their own outcomes at the expense of their partner—at least not if they want the relationship to last. By modeling how such metaphors emerge from the dynamic between partners, researchers can develop new interventions for strengthening commitment.

Conflict Conflict in close relationships takes myriad forms, but for the most part it comes down to a weakened sense of commitment. It’s not surprising, then, that people revise commitment metaphors to describe it:

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------

The journey hits a rough patch, isn’t going anywhere, or hits a dead-end street; partners go their separate ways. The container becomes a suffocating prison, exerting pressure around the couple, stifling free movement. The bond dissolves, pulls apart, splits, or breaks in two; the knot unravels. The once-stable rock gradually erodes over the years; the building shows cracks before collapsing into a mound of rubble. The exchange is unbalanced: costs become too high; the return on investment is unsatisfactory.

Lee and Schwarz (2014) took the first experimental look at metaphor’s impact on conflict attitudes. They hypothesized that if people conceptualize a relationship as a bond/union, as compared to a journey, they’ll judge conflict to be more damaging to a relationship’s health. Why? If a relationship is a unified object, then any “cracks” in it are cause for concern; but if it’s a journey, then “ups and downs” are par for the course. This is exactly what they found. Participants who read linguistic expressions framing love as a unity (vs. a journey), and then recalled a time of conflict with their partner, were less satisfied with that relationship. In another study, participants read about another couple going through conflict. Those exposed to pictorial depictions of unity judged that relationship as in worse shape. Let’s consider how partners negotiate the meaning of their relationship. Earlier I mentioned that a shared metaphor is a marvelously compact means of establishing common ground. But the opposite also holds true. If people come together in a friendship or romantic partnering, and they are using different or incompatible relationship metaphors, then they may not realize that those metaphors are working behind the scenes to structure their thoughts and feelings; as a result, they don’t understand why they keep talking past one another. Imagine that Jake and Jane, new dating partners, have their own respective relationship metaphors, even if they do not bring them explicitly into consciousness. If we carve a little window into Jane’s relationship model, we find that she conceptualizes relationships as a journey, which entails that: •• •• •• ••

Purpose of the relationship à Advance toward our life goals. Success in the relationship requires à Active effort; long-term planning; practical assessment of past actions and future options. Difficulties in the relationship arise when à We revert to old dynamics (backtrack), stall (spin our wheels), or wander from the proper path. Expectation for day-to-day relationship functioning à Help each other make progress toward life goals.

Jake conceives of their relationship as a creative work of art. His conceptual mapping looks like this:

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•• ••

•• ••

Purpose à Experience aesthetic enjoyment. Success requires à Creativity and self-expression; gut-level intuition; occasionally deviating from the direct course, moving about aimlessly in search of something. Difficulties arise when à Dynamic feels dull or formulaic. Expectation for day-to-day functioning à Fun, spontaneity, novelty.

If Jake and Jane discovered their incompatibility on any one of these correspondences, in isolation from the full mapping, their efforts to get in sync would be tantamount to putting out tiny fires without getting to the root cause of their conflict. For example, when Jake criticizes Jane for her lack of spontaneity, Jane will wonder: “Why do you care so much about spontaneity?” In her journey-metaphoric conception, traveling toward a far-off destination requires long stretches of road where nothing much happens (as a drive through Kansas will attest). Routine is acceptable so long as the relationship gradually progresses. That inference reflects a systematic set of correspondences in which travelers are mapped onto lovers, states onto locations, changes onto movements, and purposes onto destinations. Jake doesn’t “get” that because he uses a different template to construct a mental model of a relationship and refer his experiences to. This analysis yields a novel hypothesis: Metaphor incompatibility will stoke conflict more than mismatching beliefs, values, and other cognitive structures. If future research bears this out, then the practical implication is that a useful means of diagnosing relationship conflict, and ultimately optimizing satisfaction and longevity in relationships, is for partners to bring their unspoken metaphors out into the open. That provides the basis for negotiating a shared metaphoric conception of what the relationship is and what partners can, and ought to, do.

Loneliness and Rejection Hurt—Literally? We started this chapter with the claim that people need to be part of stable, healthy bonds with family members, romantic partners, and friends to function normally. But how do we know that the desire to form social relationships qualifies as a true psychological need? On one definition, a need is a mechanism for regulating behavior to acquire the tangible or intangible resources necessary for survival and well-being. A hallmark of a need is that if it goes unsatisfied for a long time, people suffer negative consequences. And hundreds of studies support the conclusion that when people are deprived of human social connections for long periods of time, their mental and physical health deteriorates. Many of these studies look at the experience of loneliness (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). People find it very stressful to be entirely alone for a long period of time (Schachter, 1959), and over time, loneliness contributes to a

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range of mental health complications, including depression and eating disorders (Cacioppo, Hughes, Waite, Hawkley, & Thisted, 2006). The experience of being rejected outright or pushed away by close others similarly causes a great deal of distress and takes a serious toll on mental and physical health (Cohen, 2004; Richman & Leary, 2009; Williams, 2007). How does metaphor figure in all this? Observe that people talk about loneliness and rejection in terms of being in acute somatic pain. Insults sting; breakups cripple. Indeed, this metaphor runs very deep. Our nervous system responds to rejection with a stress response similar to our response to physical pain. Even minor forms of rejection—such as hearing someone spread unkind gossip about oneself—increase stress-related cardiovascular arousal and a flood of the stress hormone cortisol. Similarly, when people experience rejection (for example, when they are playing an interactive computer game with others and they are ignored), they show increased activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that processes physically painful stimuli (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). Plus, people try to numb the pain of loneliness by turning to alcohol or drugs (Rook, 1984), much as they would try to numb the pain of a throbbing calf muscle. And over-the-counter pain relievers do, in fact, ease the pain of rejection (DeWall et al., 2010). According to MacDonald and Leary (2005), this similarity in stress responses makes perfect sense if we think about the need to belong as an evolved tendency. Those individuals who felt horrible pain when they were rejected were presumably more motived to alleviate that pain by repairing their relationships, thereby increase their chances of spawning offspring who would grow to maturity and also reproduce. Here is a case where a metaphor may not be a metaphor.4 Researchers have discovered so many parallels between the need to belong and biologically based needs (e.g., both work on the principle of homeostasis) that the former is now recognized as a bona fide psychological need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). If they continue to find that social pain is indistinguishable from somatic pain at phenomenological and neurobiological levels, then it rings false to say that people represent social pain “in terms” of somatic pain. Expressions like “It hurts to be alone” and “My heart aches for Paul” may be as literal as “My back aches from running.” It’s on this issue that I believe that the burgeoning synthesis of social psychology and metaphor studies is most in need of theoretical refinement. To place the study of metaphoric social cognition on a solid conceptual foundation, researchers should analyze cases like this to establish more precise criteria for determining whether or not the relation between a target and source is properly characterized as metaphoric. Metaphor is a partial mapping of dissimilar concepts—it’s a likeness in unlike things, distinct from identity. That doesn’t prevent the target and source from sharing isomorphic cognitive and even biological underpinnings; but it does mean that the target has additional, salient characteristics that set it apart from the source.

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Relationships as a Source We’ve seen that metaphor is a key mechanism by which people understand and negotiate interpersonal relationships. Now let’s flip the coin around and consider how people apply their knowledge of interpersonal affairs to make sense of things that lie outside the relationship realm.

Political Cognition Attachment research teaches us that childhood experiences result in working models of relationships: global feelings about the nature and worth of close relationships and other people’s trustworthiness and ability to provide security. These working models become our “style” of attachment, creating stable patterns in the way we think about and behave in our adult relationships (Shaver & Hazan, 1993). We’re now learning that these models can bleed over into the political domain. Lakoff (1996) explained that because people construe society as a family, their conception of how families ought to function transfers over to shape their political orientation (McAdams et al., 2008). Weise and colleagues (2008) report experimental evidence linking attachment styles to political preferences. Related studies show that an avoidant style of attachment can interfere with comprehension of abstract political dynamics when they are framed in terms of interpersonal relationships (Keefer & Landau, in press; Chapter 3).

Personification Personification is the process of ascribing human-like mental states and traits to some nonhuman thing, whether an animal, object, idea, event, or force. We’ve seen several manifestations of this tendency throughout this book. Most of them reveal people’s need to impose some comprehensible form or order onto an abstraction (Chapter 4). But personification can also be driven by sociality motivation—the drive for social contact, connection, and approval. Under conditions when individuals feel deprived of social contact, or begin to feel the negative effects of social isolation on their self-image, they become more likely to seek social connection as a means of compensating. One way to do that is by conceptualizing nonhuman things as though they were human. Study participants led to believe that they would not have very many relationships in life and would likely be lonely reported a greater belief in anthropomorphized supernatural agents (ghosts, demons) than those led to believe that they would experience many rewarding relationships (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008).

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Nonhuman Attachment To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847/1992, p. 27) In many parts of the world today, we are observing a major cultural shift from social integration to isolation. Researchers have observed decreased community engagement (Putnam, 2000), avoidance of social intimacy (Turkle, 2012), and an increasing number of adults living alone (Klinenberg, 2013). This may be cause for concern since, as we’ve noted, close interpersonal relationships contribute significantly to well-being. We might worry, then, that the changing cultural landscape threatens to deprive people of the social support they need to thrive. Yet people are surprisingly resourceful. They seek feelings of security and support from things that are not human (e.g., pets; Sable, 2013), not alive (e.g., landmarks; Lewicka, 2011; Scannell & Gifford, 2010), and indeed may not exist at all (e.g., fictional media personae; Cohen, 2004). This nonhuman attachment is made possible by a metaphor that maps engagement with nonhuman targets onto a schema for interpersonal attachments. Thus, even though nonhuman “relationships” may not operate in precisely the same manner as close interpersonal relationships, they may provide the person with many of the same psychological benefits, in particular the comforting assurance that something will support them in times of need. Let’s consider two forms of nonhuman attachment.

Deities Individuals commonly derive feelings of security from prayer, meditation, or other religious rituals intended to connect with a divine figure. Kirkpatrick (2005) has convincingly argued that seeking support in this way serves many of the same roles as interpersonal attachment. Supporting studies show that religious individuals behave in ways that are consistent with having an attachment bond with a deity (Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, 2008). For example, when Christian children were given a storyboard to illustrate a story in which they faced a threatening situation (e.g., physical injury), they placed a figure representing God significantly closer to a figure representing themselves (Granqvist, Ljungdahl, & Dickie, 2007). This increased symbolic proximity is analogous to proximity seeking in response to threat—the attachment function traditionally reserved for human attachment figures. In fact, it’s precisely when interpersonal relationships are absent or unreliable that people compensate by turning to God for support. Individuals with

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more insecure interpersonal attachments report more intimate relationships with God (Granqvist & Hagekull, 1999) and are more likely to experience sudden religious conversion (Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, 2004). Also, the loss of a close human attachment figure often precipitates a boost in religiosity (Brown, Nesse, House, & Utz, 2004).

Objects It’s one thing to turn to an omnipotent deity, but can you derive security from a material object? It seems unlikely since objects lack the capacities for care that typify a flesh-and-blood caregiver from the perspective of traditional attachment theory. Yet theorists propose that objects afford security by virtue of this inertness (Winnicott, 1953/1986). Most people learn as infants that they can exercise total control over objects because objects do not resist influence or act unpredictably. According to Winnicott, this is why security objects, such as blankets and stuffed animals, help children maintain a sense of control as they confront their limited influence over their environment. Object attachment is not just for kids. Adults, too, find security in their stuff, particularly in times when they feel stressed, depressed, or uncertain about their ability to rely on close others for support (Erkolahti & Nyström, 2009). In one study, inducing uncertainty (vs. certainty) about social support increased participants’ interest in seeking security from their material belongings (Keefer et  al., 2012). This effect was mediated by attachment anxiety, suggesting that object relations serve a compensatory function. In another study, participants primed with uncertainty about others felt greater separation anxiety after having their cell phones removed from the cubicle (signaling an attachment bond equivalent to that observed among children and their caregivers; Ainsworth & Bell, 1970); in fact, they rushed through a filler activity to be reunited with their phone. Importantly, this effect was not due to their perceptions that their phone was useful as a way to connect with close others. It was the phone itself that gave them security when people let them down. Research on nonhuman attachment invites us to broaden our conception of attachment processes and support-seeking in general. Attachment theory traditionally holds that the attachment system evolved to promote supportive bonds with close others specifically. When the going gets tough, this system innately orients us to other humans. While this may be true, the intervention of metaphor adds a new measure of flexibility, permitting people to seek (and find) security in a wider range of targets than traditionally acknowledged. Practically speaking, this work helps explain the link between loneliness and materialism (Pieters, 2013). To promote the sale of a product, advertisers represent people behaving toward that product as if it were a close friend or intimate romantic partner, whispering to their cars, caressing their new diamond bracelet,

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or “falling in love” with their Apple Watch. Such messages use metaphor to portray product consumption as satisfying one’s need for security normally afforded by close interpersonal relationships. To sum up, metaphor creates deep and systematic connections between relationship models and social-cognitive phenomena that are, on the surface at least, unrelated. The implication is this: If we continue to study those phenomena as freestanding, we’ll likely end up with a hodgepodge of findings. But if we appreciate metaphor’s role, we see that the relationship domain gives unity to the individual’s cognitive, affective, and behavioral repertoire.

Notes 1 Some representative references: Chen, Poon, & DeWall, 2015; IJzerman et  al., 2012; IJzerman & Semin, 2009, 2010; Inagaki & Eisenberger, 2013; Kang, Williams, Clark, Gray, & Bargh, 2010; LeBel & Campbell, 2013; Vess, 2012; Troisi & Gabriel, 2011; Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008. 2 Being physically close is also correlated with a sensation of bodily warmth, which likely accounts for the centrality of the warmth metaphor in representations of intimacy. 3 In general, this is a useful criterion for empirically distinguishing metaphor from embodied simulation (Chapter 2). By positing that abstractions are understood partly in terms of bodily concepts, we can predict that manipulating sensorimotor experiences will produce metaphor-consistent effects on abstractions even when those experiences don’t resemble the bodily states that are involved in direct encounters with the abstractions. 4 Another case is the relation between effortful self-control and muscle control (Chapter 6).

8 INTERGROUP RELATIONS

Prejudice and intergroup conflict are tied to the metaphors people use to conceptualize group membership, group value, and society as a whole. On the day of writing (June 2015), here is what’s happening in the world: ••

••

••

••

Days after the militant group known as ISIS or ISIL called for aggressive operations, three strikes—possibly coordinated—left a bloody toll on three continents. In France, attackers stormed an American-owned factory and decapitated one person; in Tunisia, they opened fire at a beach resort, killing about thirty people; in Kuwait City, they bombed a Shiite mosque, leaving sixteen dead. Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old White man, opened fire on a Bible study group at a historically Black church in Charleston, S.C. The sudden loss of innocent lives comes amid simmering national debate over racial bias in law enforcement, underscoring America’s deep vein of racial tension. A landmark Supreme Court ruling guarantees the right of same-sex marriage nationwide. The hard-won advance in civil rights comes only after a legacy of intolerance, boycotts, segregation, and violence. In the coming months it will set off bitter legal standoffs when state officials refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and it will galvanize anti-L.G.B.T. hate groups to redouble their efforts (McPhate, 2016). Tim Hunt, a Nobel laureate biochemist, faces an uproar after saying that women are not fit for careers in science because they cry when criticized and create romantic distraction—comments that reflect the larger debate about the sexism affecting women in science.

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Everywhere we look, groups are in crisis. Along with the visible conflicts and scandals that make headlines are more covert, though no less harmful, forms of group discrimination: cold behavior toward an outgroup member at a party; declining an outgroup member’s loan application; and race-segregating city zoning laws. And it’s nothing new. Recorded history is filled with the bloody consequences of an ongoing parade of oppression, persecution, colonization, crusades, wars, and genocides. The violent heritage of our species led a character from James Joyce’s Ulysses to comment, “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce, 1961, p. 28). Social psychologists have explored the many reasons that history has been— and continues to be—such a nightmare of intergroup hatred and violence. They’ve investigated the causes of prejudice, the structure of stereotypes, and how these affect the way people perceive and behave toward others. This chapter explores how the study of metaphor can enrich this understanding. We’ll see that people turn to metaphor to answer three general questions: •• •• ••

What is a group and what does it mean to belong to one? How do I/we feel about a particular group? How do the different groups in our society relate to one another?

The result? The many uses and abuses of metaphors can create, or at least reproduce, cognitive habits that result in prejudice, stereotyping, and intentions to harm members of other groups. The positive side of the same coin is that changing our relationship with metaphor might help us awaken from the “nightmare” of intergroup conflict to an egalitarian reality in which people treat outgroup members fairly. We begin by defining prejudice as a negative attitude toward an individual or individuals based on their presumed membership in a particular group. The target individuals are disliked not because of their personal attributes or actions, but simply because they are perceived to be in some supposedly undesirable category: physically disabled, Italian, African American, Hindu, female, lesbian, fat, old, teenager, communist, and so forth. The person who holds prejudices usually justifies them with stereotypes— overgeneralized beliefs about (usually negative) traits of members of a particular group: “African Americans are violent,” “Jews are cheap,” or “Latinos are lazy” (Crandall, Bahns, Warner, & Schaller, 2011). Stereotypes can bias how we relate to others even when we don’t acknowledge them or want them to influence our behavior. This can result in discrimination—negative behavior toward an individual on the basis of his or her group membership. What causes prejudice? For Gordon Allport (1954), it stems from the combination of two general psychological tendencies that otherwise benefit us. One is to form simplifying categories and then view new stimuli as members of these categories. The other is to feel hostility when one is frustrated, threatened, or confronted with unpleasant or unjust events. Let’s see how each tendency interacts with metaphor use.

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Metaphors of Group Membership The Container Metaphor Underlying Stereotyping Allport argued that people tend to jump from experiences with a single individual or a small sample of individuals to overly broad generalizations about all members of that category. A Midwestern American who has never met a Muslim but reads about an act of Islamic terrorism views all Muslims as violent extremists. An Afghan woman whose niece was killed by an American missile hates Americans. A European American kid hassled by a Mexican American in a middle-school restroom decides “Mexicans” disgust him. In each example, a few observations lead to sweeping negative judgments that are applied to literally millions of people perceived to be members of the salient group. Such generalizations are doomed to be false. Any large group exhibits variability in virtually all attributes. Assuming anything about all group members will necessarily lead to errors. The question then becomes: Why is it so easy for people to generalize characteristics to an entire group, targeting individuals who have nothing to do with the instigating event? One possibility is that these judgments stem from a general tendency to conceive of group membership metaphorically in terms of physical containers.

Unpacking the Container Metaphor This metaphor maps the attributes of groups and group members onto analogous attributes of containers. Its outlines are revealed in the ways people conventionally communicate about groups: A Group à A Container A group is represented as an area of physical space marked off by visible, tangible boundaries. A group’s figurative size is independent of how much physical space, if any, group members occupy (e.g., Citizens of Ancient Rome constitute a “massive” group, but currently take up no space). These representations are reflected in a host of metaphoric expressions (e.g., “Where do we draw the line around our real friends?”; “Our bowling club is expanding”). Social psychologists find it intuitive to visually depict groups as circles that can be “nested,” such that superordinate groups (e.g., priests) encompass groups at lower levels of abstraction (e.g., priests accused of pedophilia). Indeed, the metaphor is at the heart of intergroup scholarship. For instance, Bounded Generalized Reciprocity theory (Yamagishi & Kiyonari, 2000) posits that a group serves as a bordered container within which identity is negotiated and forms the basis of trust.

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Group Membership à Location Relative to a Container Virtually every term used to refer to objects’ position relative to containers is borrowed to communicate about group membership. Individuals are in or out, kicked out, pound at the door, embedded, locked inside, and stuck. In The Godfather, Part III (1990), Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) says about his membership in the mafia, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Individuals’ similarity to a group prototype is likened to their spatial distance to the group’s virtual center. Consider the historian Ron Chernow’s comment that the history of America is “the saga of outsiders becoming insiders—of the marginal and dispossessed being welcomed as citizens” (Rosen, 2015, p. 59). We immediately grasp his reference to individuals (e.g., immigrants, the poor) who live at the margins, edges, or peripheries, even if those individuals reside in the center of town. Group Exclusivity à Boundary Thickness Some groups allow for individuals to exit and enter with ease; others don’t permit such free movement. In the parlance of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), this is variation in permeability. The metaphoric image is one in which some groups are open, like a fence with a wide-open door, or have passable holes in their boundaries, like cheesecloth. Other groups are sealed shut, as difficult to get into or out of as a safety deposit box. These container-metaphoric communications are so conventional that we understandably take them as straightforward, literal descriptions of groups and group membership. Still, even if people habitually represent groups as containers, how does that contribute to overgeneralization? The answer, I would argue, has to do with our habitual, lifelong interactions with containers. We hold water in cupped hands, open jars, place objects in labeled boxes, reach into drawers, exit rooms, and struggle to tear open consumer product packages. From these experiences we build up a giant repertoire of concepts regarding containers— their prototypical properties, functions, and so on. Transferring this knowledge to the social domain supports several stereotypic inferences. Individuals in a Group Derive Their Characteristics From That Group You see a box labeled “Tea” and infer that its contents have the characteristics of tea. Likewise, when perceivers metaphorically place individuals “inside” a group, they are confident they know the targets’ characteristics—their values, interests, concerns, and so on. That perceivers think this way is well known; I add that they find it “natural”—effortless and normal—because they are implicitly accessing commonplace knowledge of containers.

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“Those People Are All Alike” Merely by categorizing people as members of an outgroup category, perceivers tend to view those individuals as more similar to each other than they really are (Quattrone, 1986). This “outgroup homogeneity effect” may rest on the container metaphor. We learn to expect that the contents of a container are functionally equivalent and thus interchangeable. In fact, the purpose of putting things into containers is often to convey their equivalence. You expect that when you reach into a bag of chips you’ll find a bunch of the same chip, not a diverse and fascinating assortment of unique delicacies. The container metaphor’s importance is hinted at in researchers’ descriptions of stereotyping processes. They say that when perceivers view outgroup members as an exception to the stereotype associated with their group, they “re-fence” those individuals so as to sustain the belief that the same characteristics apply to all group members (Richards & Hewstone, 2001). For example, perceivers who believe that Black people are lazy may respond to individuals who disconfirm that stereotype (e.g., Barack Obama) by “placing” them in a separate subcategory (“Politically elite Black people”) rather than rethink the initial stereotype. The term re-fence suggests that perceivers re-draw the figurative perimeter around the outgroup, cordoning off counter-stereotypic individuals from group members who confirm the stereotype. Positing an active container metaphor also sheds light on empirical findings. Maass, Suitner, and Arcuri (2014) had some participants read about members of social categories described using animal metaphors—a lawyer described as a shark; a politician as a fox. For others, the target individuals were described with equivalent literal adjectives, like unscrupulous for the lawyer. Participants were then asked to estimate what percentage of people from the target individual’s group shares his or her traits. Those that categorized target individuals using animal labels were more likely to assume that all members of the outgroup category are alike. Why? One interpretation is that the metaphors were vivid and therefore easier to recall and apply to other group members. But Maass and colleagues offer a more intriguing interpretation: Animal-metaphoric descriptions take the form of nouns. They are either-or statements: A given lawyer either is a shark or he is not. And we know that noun descriptions facilitate stereotypical inferences more than trait descriptions that vary along a continuum (Carnaghi et al., 2008). What’s happening, I would argue, is that metaphor creates a virtual boundary around a group category, which allows perceivers to place individuals inside that space and infer that “they are all alike.” An Individual Can (and Should) Belong to Only One Group People know that an object cannot be inside two containers simultaneously (the quirks of quantum physics notwithstanding). They also take pains to keep

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things in separate containers: pickles are kept out of the whipped cream, muddy boots stay in the garage, and Halloween photos go in the “Holidays” folder, not “Taxes.” When they apply these concepts to conceptualize group membership, it seems natural to infer that an individual can belong to only one group. This helps to explain why people have difficulty processing information about individuals at the “intersection” of conventional group categories. They are slower to categorize racially ambiguous or biracial faces than unambiguous White or Black faces, and they make more categorization errors, especially if they are high in trait prejudice or identification with their ingroup (Blascovich, Wyer, Swart, & Kibler, 1997; Castano, Yzerbyt, Bourguignon, & Seron, 2002; Kang, Plaks, & Remedios, 2015); they perceive and misremember multiracial individuals as monoracial (Chiao, Heck, Nakayama, & Ambady, 2006; Herman, 2010); and they are slower to categorize stereotypically White (Asian) names paired with an Asian (White) face (Locke, Macrae, & Eaton, 2005). The overall pattern? People want to put individuals into one “container” or another, and they don’t “get” people who fit into more than one container. This viewpoint—that the heart of stereotyping is a container metaphor—is admittedly speculative. I believe that it lends order to cross-cultural patterns in communication (linguistic and nonlinguistic), social judgments, cultural symbols, and scholarly discourse. Still, we need more conclusive evidence that people transfer their knowledge and experiences with physical containers to make overgeneralizing inferences.1 The methodological challenge is to manipulate reliance on a metaphor that seems so pervasive as to be a psychological constant.

The Entity Fusion Metaphor Behind Intergroup Conflict It is well known that a sense of group identification is of great importance to the self-concept (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). But how do people represent that identification? How do they answer the question “What does it mean for me, personally, to belong to a group?” They often recruit an entity fusion metaphor grounded in commonplace knowledge of objects’ proximity and cohesion. This metaphor motivates expressions like: “I feel a strong bond with my friends.” “An interest in technology is the glue that binds the Humanities faculty together.” “I’m not tied to any political party.” “Mortality salience caused participants to cling onto their nation.” “Students are attaching themselves to the Black Lives Matter movement.” “Fast-food workers united to demand minimum wage reform.” In this metaphor, a group as an integral physical entity (like a rock) and group members are smaller objects that adhere to it (or, in the last expression, that

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constitute the group). The former aspect connects to social psychology’s concept of entitativity—the degree to which a collection of individuals feels like a solid, stable object (Campbell, 1958). It’s possible that the perception that a group has some fixed “essence”—some defining set of unchanging characteristics—borrows from experiences of solid objects retaining their essential qualities over time.2 Let’s focus on the group membership aspect, whereby people conceive of group identity in terms of being part of a social entity. Why does it matter? According to Swann and colleagues (2012), a strong sense of identity fusion makes people more willing to act for the good of their group even if that means sacrificing their own well-being (e.g., suicide bombings committed by members of extremist groups). They propose that identity fusion is a distinct form of social identity produced by a pronounced feeling of oneness with the group and unusually permeable boundaries between the personal and social selves. Are identity-fused individuals literally “fused” to their group like stones on a decorative brooch? Of course not, but they may see themselves that way. To measure identify fusion, researchers adapted the Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992) originally developed to assess attachment in close relationships. As we saw in Chapter 7, the original scale asks respondents to choose from among a series of pictures depicting varying degrees of overlap between two circles representing the self and one’s partner. In this version, respondents indicate the overlap between themselves and their group (e.g., their nation). It bears repeating that this scale operates on a metaphoric conception of social connection as physical proximity. Another, verbal measure of identity fusion similarly bears the stamp of the entity fusion metaphor with items such as “I am one with my country.” Measured either way, overlap of self and group identities positively predicts people’s willingness to make even extreme sacrifices to promote their group, including fighting and martyrdom (Gómez et  al., 2011). But is this overlap fusion? Swann and colleagues (2009) reasoned that if highly fused individuals blur the distinction between their personal and group identities—that is, if those identities are functionally equivalent—then activating either identity will have the same effect. They asked participants to focus attention on their personal identity, their group identity, or a comparison topic. They measured two outcomes: participants’ confidence in their self-knowledge and their willingness to die for their group (e.g., “I would sacrifice my life if it gave the group status or monetary reward”). Among those low in identity fusion, the identity primes had specific effects: Activating personal identity (group identity) increased selfconcept certainty (endorsement of pro-group sacrifices), but didn’t bleed over to affect the other outcome. But for highly fused participants, activating personal and group identities similarly increased both outcomes. Fused individuals not only see themselves as a composite with their group, they think and react as though their personal identity and social identity with the group are one.

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Metaphors of Intergroup Emotions We’ve seen some ways in which metaphors structure our understanding of group membership, but what about the specific emotions at the heart of prejudice— the contempt, disgust, envy, fear, and anger that people often feel when they encounter outgroup members? These emotions can have their source in a so-called realistic conflict, or perceived competition over scarce resources (Levine & Campbell, 1972). They can also trace back to threatening personal experiences with outgroup members (real or perceived). But social psychologists are more interested in those cases where negative emotions are not linked to, or are out of proportion to, circumstance. To understand these cases it helps to see how perceivers use metaphors to represent and communicate their group attitudes. The next few pages outline some culturally widespread metaphors. Keep in mind that, from the perceiver’s perspective, all of these metaphors confer the same three epistemic benefits: They are compact means of transferring familiar knowledge about a source to characterize a group’s characteristics; they lend concrete form to otherwise vague or unsubstantiated feelings; and they are vivid means of eliciting visceral emotions tied to the source, gripping one’s attention, and leaving a memorable representation of the target group (Maass et al., 2014).

Up/Down Power, status, morality, holiness: Perceivers regularly evaluate groups on these traits even though the traits are abstract and slippery notions. They do so partly by representing these traits in concrete terms as a group’s position along a vertical axis. In this metaphor, how much a group is perceived as possessing these traits corresponds to their vertical position (often relative to other groups), and changes in value correspond to movement up and down the axis. Power is likened to up in expressions like the upper class, the downtrodden, and the highest levels of leadership. Even when such expressions are not salient, though, the underlying metaphor shapes perceptions. People were faster to categorize target groups as powerful (or as less powerful) when the powerful (powerless) groups occupied a spatially higher (lower) position in the visual field (Schubert, 2005). These perceptual facilitation effects were stronger when people made comparative judgments of multiple groups (Lakens, Semin, & Foroni, 2011), suggesting that the vertical metaphor is structured more around spatial contrast than positions in absolute space. This metaphor also shapes perceptions of others’ divinity—their possession of traits like moral righteousness and religious piety. People view strangers as having a stronger belief in God if their images appeared higher versus lower in the visual field (Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldah, 2007). Moral heroism is also up: People judged a target individual as better able to lead their collective cause if that person was gazing up (Frimer & Sinclair, in press).

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The vertical metaphor even biases how people remember information about groups. Participants in a study by Palma, Garrido, and Semin (2011) read about a member of a positively stereotyped group (a child-care worker) or a negatively stereotyped group (a skinhead). They read descriptions of that person’s behaviors, some of which matched the valence of their group membership and some of which were neutral. In addition, some of those behavioral descriptions were presented at the top of a screen and others at the bottom. When participants were later asked to remember the person’s behaviors, they recalled more behaviors that appeared in the metaphor-compatible positions (for the childcare worker, positive behaviors shown in the upper region of space; for the skinhead, negative behaviors in the lower region) than behaviors that appeared in metaphor-incompatible positions.

Light/Dark Humans are diurnal creatures who function effectively in daylight but ineffectively at nighttime (Tolaas, 1991). Early in development, we learn that brightness helps us to navigate our surroundings and connect with supportive relationship partners. It’s not surprising, then, that we apply light/dark concepts to represent positive and negative aspects of the social world. Language is rife with phrases like bright days, dark outlook, and shady business deal. Likewise, the world’s religious traditions commonly associate (in sacred texts, imagery, ritual objects) lightness with goodness and darkness with evil. Popular media portray heroes in white and villains in black (Meier et al., 2014). Looking past its role in communication, we see that the light metaphor causally influences group attitudes. Compared to sports teams in lighter uniforms, teams in darker uniforms are perceived to be more malevolent, and they are more likely to be called by game officials for penalties (Frank & Gilovich, 1988; Webster, Urland, & Correll, 2012). This metaphor also guides behavior: When people were asked to play games in the lab, those randomly assigned to wear darker uniforms or adopt black-cloaked online avatars were more aggressive (Frank & Gilovich, 1988; Peña, Hancock, & Merola, 2009). It comes as no surprise that this metaphor figures in racial prejudice. We know that implicit evaluations of dark-skinned individuals are often negative (Fazio & Olson, 2003), sometimes even among African Americans (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). People are faster to recognize stereotypical Caucasian names and faces when they are paired with positive words and stereotypical African-American names and faces when they are paired with negative words (Greenwald et  al., 1998). Although such evaluations have a host of causes (e.g., exposure to media portrayals; illusory correlations; imposed social roles), they stem in part from a metaphoric association between brightness and valence. In one study, the effect just mentioned was attenuated after controlling for people’s tendency to associate the colors white and black with positive and

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negative valence, respectively (Smith-McLallen, Johnson, Dovidio, & Pearson, 2006). In a related study, Ronquillo et al. (2007) examined activation in the amygdala, an area of the brain that becomes active when people are exposed to a potential threat. Participants had greater amygdala activation when shown pictures of darker versus lighter-skinned Caucasians, suggesting a deeper neurological connection between affect and brightness.

Warm/Cold The most widely used operationalization of prejudice—the “feeling thermometer” (Nelson, 2008)—operates on a metaphor that compares liking to physical warmth and disliking to coldness. Some versions wear the temperature metaphor on their sleeve, presenting respondents with a picture of a thermometer complete with degree markings (e.g., Alwin, 1997). This is no mere abstraction concocted by researchers: most people find it intuitive to report feeling warm or cold toward a group, and their responses predict a wide range of intergroup behaviors (Talaska, Fiske, & Chaiken, 2008). The temperature metaphor informs theory as well as measurement. According to the Stereotype Content Model, people evaluate groups along two primary dimensions (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007). One is status: Is a group perceived as relatively powerful and competent in society? The other is warmth: Groups seen as cooperative and likeable are warm; those seen as competitive and harmful are cold. Relevant scales reproduce the temperature metaphor by asking respondents how “warm” a target group is. These evaluations predict specific emotional responses. For example, groups that are stereotyped as warm but incompetent (e.g., the elderly) elicit pity and sympathy, whereas groups perceived as low in warmth but high in competence (e.g., the rich) elicit envy and jealousy. Further evidence for the temperature metaphor’s significance comes from studies showing that sensations of physical warmth affect intergroup attitudes in a metaphor-consistent manner. Participants holding a warm (vs. cold) object displayed less implicit bias against African Americans (as assessed using a Black/ White, Good/Bad association test mentioned above; Breines, 2012). Warmth sensations also led participants to make more situational attributions for outgroup members’ negative behavior, suggesting that metaphor shapes cognitive outcomes of prejudice as well as implicit evaluations.

Clean/Dirty Morality is an abstract concept, and we struggle to articulate why we believe something is moral or immoral despite our strong feelings that it is (Haidt, 2001). To conceptualize morality and moral emotions, people rely heavily on superficially unrelated concepts of physical dirt, cleanliness, and contamination (Zhong & House, 2014).

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Disgust and avoidance of dirty stimuli have an evolutionary benefit of protecting us from dangerous pathogens. But scholars have long observed that we feel disgust in response to people, actions, and other social stimuli that are not physically dirty or contaminating. That is because we construe cleanliness in broader, more figurative terms than those suggested by the evolutionary perspective. In this construal, something is “dirty” if it is outside of, or otherwise threatens, a system of order (Douglas, 1966). Because norms, values, and other societal constructs act as systems of moral order, we’re disgusted by social stimuli that threaten to undermine those constructs. Supporting this analysis is evidence that feelings of disgust (induced by bitter beverages or foul odors) and moral judgments mutually affect each other in metaphor-consistent ways (e.g., Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011; Eskine, Kacinik, & Webster, 2012; Hutcherson & Gross, 2011; Jones & Fitness, 2008; Lee & Schwarz, 2010; Murray & Schaller, 2012; Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). In one study (Lee & Schwarz, 2010), participants’ desire to cleanse their moral transgressions had very specific effects on their product evaluations: Those induced to perform an unethical act with their mouths (by speaking a lie) preferred a sample of mouthwash over hand sanitizer, whereas those led to transgress with their hands (typing a lie) reached for the hand sanitizer. Many of the prejudices social psychologists study are toward groups perceived to violate social norms, values, and morals (Crandall, Ferguson, & Bahns, 2013). Safe then to say that disgust plays a significant role (e.g., Hodson & Dhont, 2015). Cottrell and Neuberg (2005) demonstrate that specific prejudicial emotions felt toward a group map onto the perceived threat that the group poses. They use metaphoric language of dirt and messiness to argue that people feel disgust toward groups that represent “contamination” to the ingroup, whether it is endangering the physical health or the values of the group. They measured specific emotional reactions (e.g., anger, pity) to various groups (e.g., Mexican Americans, Native Americans) and found that gay men had the highest disgust ratings, the highest perceived threat to health, and second highest perceived threat to values. Other studies of homophobia reveal similar effects. Participants induced to dwell on a disgusting event showed increased implicit bias against gays and lesbians, whereas those induced to feel anger did not show these effects (Dasgupta, DeSteno, Williams, & Hunsinger, 2009); individuals who are chronically sensitive to feeling disgusted hold negative implicit associations with gays and lesbians relative to heterosexuals (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009); people who believed gays and lesbians “directly oppose the values of people like me” and “advocate values that are morally inferior” felt more disgust toward gays and lesbians, which predicted disagreement with gay rights (Cottrell, Richards, & Nichols, 2010). Metaphoric disgust also plays a role in ethnic and racial prejudice. Interpersonal disgust sensitivity (e.g., not wanting to sit in a seat that’s still warm from a stranger)

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predicts prejudice toward immigrants, foreign ethnic groups, and deviant low-status groups (Hodson & Costello, 2007). This was mediated by right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1996), a scale that uses explicitly metaphoric language about pathogens to describe deviant groups—for example: “Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs” (emphasis added). People see these deviant groups in metaphoric terms as dirty pathogens that will contaminate and infect the cleanliness of “our” value systems. Hodson et al. (2013) developed an “intergroup disgust sensitivity scale” that taps into these metaphorical beliefs with items such as: “After interacting with another ethnic group, I typically desire more contact with my own ethnic group to ‘undo’ any ill effects from intergroup contact” (p. 199). Ethnic groups dirty up one’s life space, and interacting with an ethnic ingroup cleanses it. People who score higher on this scale also report more germ aversion, higher sensitivity to feeling disgust, and greater prejudice against a wide variety of social groups (e.g., Muslims, foreigners, homosexuals, immigrants, Blacks, poor people, drug users) that represent deviations from traditional American values and morals (Crandall et al., 2013). In another study on immigration attitudes (Faulkner, Schaller, Park, & Duncan, 2004), participants learned about a (hypothetical) African outgroup (“Krasneeans”) trying to immigrate to the participants’ country. Individual differences in perceived vulnerability to disease (agreement with statements like “I dislike wearing used clothes because you don’t know what the past person who wore it was like”) predicted beliefs that this group should not be allowed to immigrate, and perceptions of Krasneeans as less friendly, likeable, and trustworthy. Those feeling vulnerable to disease were also averse to a novel immigrant group (“Sanzians”), but only if that group was said to hail from Eastern Africa, not Eastern Asia or Eastern Europe. Variations in perceived disease vulnerability also correlate with anti-fat and anti-elderly prejudices (Duncan & Schaller, 2009; Park, Schaller, & Crandall, 2007). Also, the targets of these prejudices rely on the cleanliness metaphor to guide their behavior. Neel and colleagues (2013) had participants rate the importance of different practices for making good impressions. Overweight participants ranked the importance of wearing clean clothes higher when they were reminded that many people feel disgusted toward overweight individuals than when they were not reminded of these feelings. Schaller and colleagues (e.g., Schaller & Duncan, 2007; Schaller & Park, 2011) interpret these relationships through the lens of the behavioral immune system. When people perceive cues that some stimuli in the environment might be pathogenic or harmful to the body, the behavioral immune system is their “first line of defense” (Schaller & Park, 2011, p. 99). It triggers behaviors—such as avoidance—to prevent these pathogens from ever entering the body or needing the immune system to kick into action. On this account, the findings just

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summarized show evidence of false-positives in the system: even though obese people or immigrants may not actually be carrying harmful diseases, people respond to them negatively because they perceive that they are. Conceptual metaphor theory offers a related but distinct interpretation: Early in development people learn schemas for dirt, cleanliness, disease, and related concepts. They apply those schemas as a framework for structuring conceptions of higher-order notions like morality, values, and norms. As a result, they associate groups perceived as violating those notions to dirt and pathogens; and if they are made to feel disgust, or if they are by disposition sensitive to disgust and disease, they feel more prejudice against those groups. These effects are not due to “errors” in the immune system, but rather a systematic mapping of that system to construe intergroup relations. Future research should consider how cleanliness metaphors can be leveraged to reduce prejudice. Getting people to disentangle group stereotypes from cleanliness schemas may be a tall order, but our theorizing suggests a subtler approach: Keep cleanliness metaphors in place but change how people feel about and relate to dirt, per se (Zhong & House, 2014). For example, reminders of state-of-the-art cleaning products could relax the conviction that dirty stains are permanent. This cognitive tweak could, by means of metaphoric transfer, make people more forgiving of an outgroup for stains on its historical record.

Human/Not Human Prejudice is often paired with dehumanization—viewing outgroup members as less than fully human, and therefore not eligible for the care and respect normally accorded to fellow humans. This perception comes in two flavors: comparing outgroup members directly to non-human animals (hereafter: animals) and viewing them as inanimate objects. Let’s examine each.

They’re All Animals We have an impressive ability to imagine blends of human and animal features. Different blends, Koestler (1989) observed, express various intentions or affective tones. Some blends are meant to titillate, like wisecracking cartoon bugs; others aim to intimidate, like a wild beast team logo. Others still aim to derogate by reducing outgroup members to lowly animals not worthy of respect or protection. Blatant examples of this can be seen in the way that people portray outgroups they intend to harm (see Figure 8.1). To mention just a few examples: During World War II, Nazi propaganda portrayed European Jews as disease-carrying rats, Americans portrayed the Japanese as vermin, and the Japanese portrayed Americans as bloodthirsty eagles mauling innocent Japanese civilians; during the 1970s and 1980s, The Black Panther newspaper depicted police and other

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FIGURE 8.1 

U.S. war propaganda posters (public domain).

authority figures as anthropomorphic swine; during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, American soldiers circulated flyers characterizing Iraqi citizens as bugs. Worldwide, animal metaphors pervade ordinary discourse and political rhetoric (Haslam, Loughnan, & Sun, 2011; Maass et al., 2014). On the day of writing, Ben Carson, a leading presidential candidate, compared refugees seeking entrance to the U.S. to “a rabid dog running around your neighborhood” (McCaskill, 2015). Across cultures men talk about women using a vocabulary borrowed from ornithology: as chicks, birds, geese, and hens who can be flighty, broody, or feather-brained (not to mention other critters including bunnies, kittens, and so forth; Kövecses, 2005). Why do animal metaphors exert such a hold on people’s imagination? We’ve already mentioned one answer: Compared to equivalent literal portrayals, equating a social category to an animal species makes it easier to view that category as homogenous (e.g., “all lawyers are sharks” lends a noun-based sameness not achieved by “all lawyers are unscrupulous”; Maass et al., 2014). Another foreshadowed answer is that animal metaphors provide vivid labels that communicate, in stark and memorable terms, negative feelings that may be otherwise unarticulated. The mere mention of certain critters elicits visceral aversion. When perceivers apply animal schemas to characterize a group, they transfer that emotionally charged knowledge, intensifying group attitudes. Maass et al. (2014) showed that exposure to an animal metaphor (versus a literal description) led perceivers to attribute more stereotypic traits to a category member. The metaphor, they suspect, vividly transferred traits from stereotypes of animals to impressions of people.

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Animal metaphors not only facilitate stereotyping, they can also enable discrimination. Once outgroup members have been reduced to animals who do not deserve moral consideration, the perpetrators feel less inhibited about harming them (Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1989). After all, it is easier to hurt or kill rats, bugs, and monkeys than to hurt and kill fellow human beings. Historical analyses indeed show that animal metaphors in media representations and political rhetoric—such as comparisons of Tutsi to cockroaches infesting Rwandan society—played a role in fomenting violence and exclusion of the targeted group from society (Capozza & Volpato, 2004; Kellow & Steeves, 1998; Steuter & Wills, 2010). Converging experimental evidence reveals that people were more likely to administer a higher intensity of shock to punish people described in animal terms (e.g., “They are an animalistic, rotten bunch”) than people described in distinctively human or neutral terms (Bandura, Underwood, & Fromson, 1975). In addition to making it easier to discriminate against an outgroup, animal metaphors assuage people’s worry over the harm that they’ve done. After all, people do not want to see themselves as prejudiced and feel guilt for causing an outgroup undeserved harm. To justify past discrimination, they regard the victims as subhuman and therefore less deserving of moral consideration. After all, our aversive reactions to animals are rarely questioned (consider: If you whack an icky spider with a newspaper, you probably won’t second-guess whether you did the right thing). Consistent with this notion is evidence that people made to feel collectively responsible for their ingroup’s mass killing of an outgroup viewed members of that outgroup as less human (Castano & Giner-Sorolla, 2006). War enemies are not the only outgroups that are dehumanized for the purposes of justifying past discrimination. According to Goff and colleagues (2008), White Americans have for many years equated Black Americans to monkeys and apes. In Figure 8.2, the image to the left is a propaganda poster used to recruit American soldiers during World War I by portraying Germans as savage apes ruled by animal instincts for sex and aggression. The image on the right is of LeBron James, the first African-American male to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine. Notice any similarities? Goff et al. (2008) proposed that even if White Americans are not consciously aware that they associate African Americans with aggressive apes, they have learned this stereotype from their surrounding culture: White Americans were more likely to hold the opinion that violence against a Black target was justified if they had been primed with ape-related words beneath their conscious awareness. The two consequences of animal metaphors just discussed can combine to create a vicious cycle of intergroup conflict: Dehumanization facilitates negative treatment of outgroup members that is justified by further dehumanizing the victims.

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FIGURE 8.2 

U.S. war propaganda poster and U.S. Vogue cover (public domain).

They’re All Things Other dehumanizing metaphors portray outgroup members as inanimate objects or commodities. As such, they manifest a broader tendency to objectify—to think about and treat an individual more like an object or a commodity than a person. In the sexual realm, objectification occurs whenever people (typically women) are reduced to or treated as a body, body parts, or sexual functions, independent of the characteristics of their personality and experience (Bartky, 1990). Metaphor may feed into this. Equating women with bodies is a way of denying that they possess the psychological characteristics that make them fully human, such as a unique point of view, a complex mental life, and the capacity to make decisions. When participants in one study were asked to focus on women’s appearance (vs. personality), they perceived female targets, but not male targets, more like objects—cold, incompetent, and without morality (Heflick & Goldenberg, 2011). Also, sexualized images of women—but not men—are cognitively processed in the same way that people process pictures of objects (Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Campomizzi, & Klein, 2012). Neuroscientific evidence shows that men higher in hostile sexism (viewing gender relations as adversarial and competitive) showed decreased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex when viewing scantily clad and provocatively posed female targets, but not fully clothed female targets (Cikara, Eberhardt, & Fiske, 2010). Because this brain area is strongly associated with the capacity to see other people as active agents, this study shows

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that sexist men are less likely to recognize sexualized females as people with their own autonomy and subjectivity. Sexual objectification isn’t just about sex, however. Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) propose that it stems from a broader sexist ideology that entitles men to view women as objects that they can use for their personal gain—that is, as things to which actions are done, rather than “doers” themselves. This broader picture helps us to understand why women are objectified in terms of objects besides their bodies and body parts. For instance, many chauvinistic metaphoric expressions refer to women as sweet foods—cookie, dish, cherry pie—which are objects designed to satisfy one’s individual goals. Language also reveals that women are likened to commodities that can be bought and sold. Hiraga (1991) observes how, in the Japanese language and in traditional Japanese society in general, it is customary to describe women as commodities. For example, it is customary to say that a woman is a “flawed article” but not to apply the same term to a man. The “flaw” in question? A lack of virginity. Women are also compared to dangerous substances, like nuclear energy, the implication being that men are responsible for regulating them (particularly their sexuality) so as to avoid calamity (Lakoff, 1987). People represent gender categories metaphorically using the concepts hard/ tough and soft/tender derived from their embodied interactions with objects. Slepian, Weisbuch, Rule, and Ambady (2011) showed that manipulating bodily experiences of toughness and tenderness led participants to categorize sexambiguous faces as male or female in metaphorically consistent ways. Objectification manifests in ways that lie outside of the realm of sex and gender relations. At a fundamental level, to objectify is to evaluate others in terms of their instrumentality—how much they serve as tools for one’s own purposes—which downplays subjective attributes of targets that are irrelevant to those purposes. In the workplace, objectifying metaphors equate workers with cogs or automata (robots or machines; Haslam, 2006). (Employees occasionally self-objectify: in an investigation of Amazon’s workplace culture, an employee boasted, “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot”; Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015.) It’s likely that these metaphors contribute to a valuing of workers solely in terms of attributes that contribute to workplace goals without regard for their subjectivity. Other objectifying metaphors compare outgroups with impersonal, threatening forces of nature or natural events. For example, political rhetoric is packed with metaphors comparing immigrants and immigration to the movement of water, like a flood or a tide. We see this in widely publicized images (Figure 8.3) and linguistic expressions such as “Britain was in danger of being swamped by immigrants” (Charteris-Black, 2011, p. 24). These insights point to the broader possibility that metaphors not only amplify group-based emotions (like disgust); they can also dampen emotions, like compassion, by reducing outgroup members to monkeys, meat, or money.3

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FIGURE 8.3 

Cartoon (public domain).

Metaphors of Society: What Is and What Could Be “How is society put together? How do all the various groups relate to one another?” These are difficult questions to answer, but people nevertheless crave a societal ideology: a shared conception of the nature of society that tells us how we ought to function within it. Researchers have identified several processes that feed into these ideologies, including beliefs in meritocracy and system justification motives (Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2013). To round out that picture, we need to consider the role of metaphor. People apply schematic knowledge of an entity or system to construct an understanding of what society is and should be. These metaphor-based ideologies are reflected in linguistic and nonlinguistic communication, rituals, and other cultural symbol systems. Here are some that have and continue to dominate our thought: ••

••

Society is a body, complete with a head, heart, and arms to reach out. It has growth spurts, gets hungry, and scrambles to keep up. Herbert Spencer was just one influential theorist who portrayed society in functional terms as an organism, such that social institutions are organs that work together for the well-being of the societal body. Thomas Hobbes went even further, characterizing that great Leviathan of the State as having its own joints, nerves, memory, reason, and will. Society is a hierarchy. This pervasive ideology, grounded in experiences with being physically up and down, casts society as a well-ordered system of vertically arranged levels, like the rungs on a ladder. Some groups are set

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••

••

above those who are less prosperous, clean, evolved, educated, pious, and so forth. Some variants of this metaphor allow groups to move up or down, whereas tough-minded variants assign groups to fixed positions. This metaphor lies at the heart of social dominance orientation, an individual difference factor implicated in prejudice (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Society is evolution. The late nineteenth century saw the rise of Social Darwinism, a highly adulterated version of Darwin’s ideas about biological evolution that portrays society as a remorseless competition for scarce resources. It’s epitomized in Spencer’s (ultimately misguided) expression “Survival of the fittest.” This commonly abused ideology—which has persisted and even flourished in American culture well into the twentieth century and beyond—casts some groups (e.g., nations, ethnic categories) as inherently more “evolved” than others—cognitively, culturally, morally, technologically—and therefore “naturally” superior. Society is a ledger, or balance sheet, of rewards and suffering, of prosperity and persecution, of humiliation and vengeance. Different groups accrue and lose points (e.g., honor) over time. In this quantitative-metaphoric ideology, the balance must be even and scores must be settled, even if that means demanding groups to pay for past ills (see Miller, 1995, for an excellent discussion of how this metaphor contributes to a norm of retributive justice).

Other conventional metaphors model society on a machine, a fabric, a plant that needs care to survive, a fruit bowl and many other concrete source concepts (Kövecses, 2005). Regrettably, we don’t have the space to analyze them in full. Although these metaphors give comprehensible form to society, they have historically perpetuated prejudice and discrimination. Specifically, they can lead perceivers to single out particular groups as threatening the larger societal order, and they can establish certain efforts to “improve” society as legitimate even if they disadvantage certain groups. For example, if society is a body, it is a short leap to the idea that the nation can get sick. We know that the immune system defends the body against foreign intruders, such as microbes. Transferring this knowledge encourages people to view their country as susceptible to contamination and disease caused by foreign invaders (read: immigrants). Citizens value the leaders and policies promising to erect strong defenses around the country’s borders and detect invaders before they can infect the body (O’Brien, 2003). When study participants were induced to think of their country as a physical body, they transferred salient fears about their own bodily health to make harsher judgments of immigrants (Landau, Sullivan, & Greenberg, 2009). The problem with the metaphor is obvious: Unlike microbes, most immigrants are not “foreign”; they are an integral part of the nation. Unfortunately, these highly politicized metaphors normally go unchallenged because people assume that they are literal descriptions of society. The implication is that if researchers don’t recognize the metaphoric basis of societal

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ideologies, they may not have a full picture of why people’s intergroup attitudes are so emotionally resonant and resistant to change. The question arises: Can we use societal metaphors for good? We started with the idea that thinking metaphorically benefits the perceiver: it’s a compact means of representing and communicating a concrete representation of an abstraction, often in a manner that vividly captures salient emotions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. From there we dwelled on how, because they aid comprehension, metaphors fuel stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. The more optimistic side of the same coin is that metaphor’s benefits can be harnessed to promote intergroup harmony and egalitarianism, or at least counter feelings of competition, animosity, and alienation. In particular, metaphors stand to: ••

••

••

Serve as a common ground, modeling resemblance and participation in shared goals. The prevailing metaphors emphasize otherness. They seem to reflect an obsession with defining who “we” are as distinct from “them.” We need metaphors that fit seemingly incommensurate social entities together and offer compelling ways of grasping the benefits of diversity. Offer avenues of reconciliation, guiding groups on their way to resolving old grudges. We don’t lack for metaphors of conflict, but now we need metaphors that help us visualize concretely the elusive concept peace. Help unacquainted groups to connect, highlighting the advantages of learning about outgroup members and reaching out to form positive relationships.

All of these ideas—diversity, reconciliation, connectedness—are difficult to grasp, and we should not shy from leveraging metaphors to envision them and organize our collective action. Changing our relationship with societal metaphors can take a few routes. One is to advocate pro-social versions of the prevailing metaphors that have historically fed into prejudice. For example, let’s continue to conceive of society as a body but focus on other features of bodily functioning in a way that causes us to rethink the implications of that comparison. We can highlight the fact that the organs that make up the body are unique but, at the same time, work together to keep the whole body healthy and strong. A second, perhaps counterintuitive way to co-opt well-worn metaphors is to encourage people to commit to them even stronger. To illustrate, recall the entity fusion metaphor from earlier in this chapter. We all know that it takes intense physical force to un-fuse a brick cemented into a wall and then re-fuse it into another wall. Individuals at risk for radicalization could be reminded of this physical reality while encouraged to view themselves as already fused to a larger social entity. This might stiffen their resolve to stay “stuck” rather than glom onto an extremist group.

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A third route is to teach people new, catchy metaphors that embody the value of diversity, peace, and connection. To see how this might work, take a moment and reflect on the concepts where you can most vividly imagine separate elements of a system depending on each other. Some people bring to mind a mosaic where each piece of decorative glass retains its distinctive character, but their configuration produces an emergent, aesthetically pleasing gestalt. Others think of an intricate dance in which, as urban theorist Jane Jacobs (1992) eloquently put it, “the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole” (p. 50). Others think of a family of individuals with their own quirks and needs.4 Can we leverage these visualizations of interdependence to convey the value of diversity? We conducted an initial correlational study to find out (Hakim, Landau, White, & Swanson, 2016). We asked participants to look over relatively novel metaphors for diversity and rate how much each one matched their views, captured the reality of diversity, and deserved to be publicized. We also measured their general attitude toward diversity (e.g., “Our country should foster environments where differences are valued”) and their perception that ethnic groups are different from each other (e.g., “Different ethnic groups often have very different approaches to life”). Some of the metaphors highlighted intergroup competition by comparing groups to elements of a system vying for finite resources, such as “America is a traffic jam: While traveling between places in our day-to-day lives, we sometimes get stuck because there are too many people on the road trying to get ahead.” Other metaphors highlighted complementary relations between groups such as “America is a tapestry: Threads of different textures and colors are woven together into an artistic design.” The more people endorsed the complementary metaphors, the more they valued diversity in general, and the less they saw differences between ethnic groups—even though those metaphors highlighted group distinctiveness. Correspondingly, those who were attracted to the adversarial metaphors were less keen on diversity and saw large differences between ethnic groups. The next step is to experimentally test whether exposure to the complementary metaphors increases endorsement of diversity. We should also look closer at pro-diversity metaphors, comparing those that highlight each group’s distinctive character (e.g., a mosaic) to those where groups give up their distinctiveness by assimilating into a homogenous whole (e.g., the well-worn melting pot). More work along these lines will determine whether, and when, metaphors help people to appreciate their significance not just as distinctive members of a specific nation, class, gender, and so on, but as belonging to a vast, interconnected unit.

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Notes 1 An alternative possibility is that our mental models of both containers and groups stem from an even more general conceptual framework, and do not causally influence each other (Murphy, 1996). 2 Another common variant of the entity metaphor portrays the individual as a container and a fixed group identity (again, a set of presumably essential qualities) as a solid object that resides inside that person (“You have a lot of Irish in you”; “You can take a Black man out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of him”). This may contribute to the ultimate attribution error of viewing outgroup members’ (bad) behaviors as stemming from some fixed “essence” of their group (Pettigrew, 1979). 3 It’s worth noting that not all figurative depictions of outgroups are metaphoric, strictly speaking. Calling a German a kraut is a metonym, not a metaphor (Maass et al., 2014). Some goals for future research are to create a clear taxonomy of these figurative representations, distinguish their implications, and test whether people differentially employ them as a function of their cognitive and affective goals: Do they want to distinguish groups, refer to them conveniently, derogate them, explain their behavior, justify aggression? 4 Indeed, Confucianism draws an analogy between the child’s relation to a parent and the adult’s relation to the societal order. Similarly, in North America, different political ideologies are modeled in part on different schematic conceptions of a nuclear family (Lakoff, 1996).

9 POLITICAL AND HEALTH DISCOURSE

People routinely encounter metaphors for political and health-relevant ideas. These metaphors can guide cognition, with practical consequences for political attitudes and health outcomes. The next time you’re out and about, take a close look at the messages you encounter. You’ll likely observe what virtually everyone who has ever cared to investigate the nature of persuasion has observed for two millennia: that metaphors are everywhere. They appear in political speeches, product marketing, scientific writing, news reports, social campaigns, visual art, and educational materials. Here are a few I noticed around town just this morning: appeals to move forward, let go, and climb aboard; stories about individuals breaking through, exploding, and plummeting from grace; groups strengthening their base or failing to ride the economy’s “up” escalator; policies striking back, shutting the door; debates heating up and legislation hitting a wall. Any time we turn on the television, listen to a streaming music station, watch a movie, surf the Net, or browse a magazine, we risk setting off a cascading avalanche of metaphors. So what? In other chapters we’ve treated metaphoric language and imagery primarily as a symptom—as the steam rising off of a conceptual mapping buried deep in our conceptual system. But the causal arrow works in both directions: Exposure to metaphoric messages can activate metaphors in people’s minds, with real-world consequences for their judgment, decision making, and behavior. This chapter focuses squarely on metaphor’s persuasive power. What for? A recurring theme of this book is that metaphor use is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, it can satisfy our needs to reduce uncertainty, maintain preexisting beliefs, and be accurate. It can even spark the creative imagination and protect freedom of thought (Chapter 4). The corollary is

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that the metaphors served up in popular discourse can improve our lives both individually and collectively. On the other hand, metaphoric thinking can mislead and beguile. When it’s built upon an inappropriate transfer of knowledge, it manipulates, misstates, or simply omits facts to present a false narrative. In this way, it perpetuates ineffective social policies, fuels unproductive debates, and encourages people to pursue goals that, though initially attractive, are not ultimately in their best personal or collective interest. The implication is that the more we learn about rhetorical metaphor’s influence, for good and for ill, on the way we think and act, the more we might reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This being a vast topic, I narrow my scope to people’s responses to communications in the realms of politics and health.

Political Discourse Imagine that you pick up a newspaper and read that the U.S. economy is “struggling against stiff headwinds” but it has not yet “fallen off a cliff” (Mutikani, 2011). You interpret these phrases effortlessly despite the fact that they don’t make sense in literal terms: The economy does not struggle against headwinds, like a sailboat, nor can it fall off a cliff, like a lemming. These are examples of metaphoric framings: messages comparing an abstract concept to a superficially unrelated concept that is relatively more concrete. Political discourse is saturated with metaphoric framings. They’re used in magazine editorials, political speeches, and other outlets to communicate about such controversial issues as terrorism (Kruglanski, Crenshaw, Post, & Victoroff, 2007), negotiation (Gelfand & MCusker, 2002), immigration (O’Brien, 2003), gender in business (Koller, 2004), abortion (Coulson, 2006), and war (Lakoff, 1992; for detailed qualitative analyses, see Charteris-Black, 2011; Hanne, Crano, & Mio, 2014; Musolff, 2004; Musolff & Zinken, 2009). Many metaphoric framings use words to compare dissimilar concepts. For example, leaders such as Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, and Barack Obama have attempted to rally civic action by describing a physical journey toward a state of the nation as egalitarian, prosperous, or victorious over evil (Charteris-Black, 2011). The examples are legion: Think of all those cliffs, falling dominoes, points of light, Cities upon Hills, bridges crossed, underground economies, and so on. Other metaphoric framings are expressed nonlinguistically in images, cultural symbols, and artifacts. Take a look at the logo for Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2015 presidential campaign (Figure 9.1). That rightward arrow reflects the conceptual metaphor political progress is forward motion. Another example: Facebook redesigned its “group friends” icon (Figure 9.2). The old version (on the left) had the male glyph in front, with the female glyph in his shadow; the new version

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FIGURE 9.1 

 he logo for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign uses imagery to T frame progress as forward (rightward) motion. With permission

FIGURE 9.2 

 acebook’s new “group friends” icon brings the female forward, F framing status as spatial prominence. With permission

(right) brings the woman to the fore, reflecting the metaphor socio-political status is prominent spatial position. Metaphor is used to frame not only particular issues and events but politics more generally. Policy negotiations, for instance, are often structured around

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the concepts war and business, while the political liberal-conservative dimension seems rooted in some version of the metaphor society is a family (Deason & Gonzales, 2012; Lakoff, 1996; McAdams et al., 2008; Weise et al., 2008). Questions arise: What function(s) does metaphoric framing serve in political communication? Do recipients (readers, listeners, spectators) interpret these messages simply as colorful figures of speech and visual tropes, or does exposure to metaphoric framings affect their beliefs and attitudes?

Metaphor’s Rhetorical Functions In the Rhetoric, Aristotle aimed to help aspiring public speakers produce (and take away) certain emotions in an audience. He knew that they couldn’t manipulate people’s physiology or give them mind-altering drugs, so they had to rely on discourse and argument. And he proposed that of all the rhetorical devices in one’s arsenal, metaphor is particularly potent. This is because metaphor serves three rhetorical functions (summarized in Ortony, 1975), as follows.

Compact Explanation of How Something Works Do you know how, exactly, the U.S. Federal Reserve managed its controversial stimulus program in the years following the 2008 financial crisis? Me neither (the opacity may be intended; Davidson, 2015). But it helped when former Chair Ben Bernanke said, “If the economy is able to sustain a reasonable cruising speed, we will ease the pressure on the accelerator by gradually reducing the pace of purchases” (Hargreaves, 2013). Most of us have a good working understanding of vehicle operation stored in long-term memory, and we can swiftly transfer that schematic knowledge to conceptualize the Federal Reserve’s decision-making process. This brings us back to the central insight of conceptual metaphor theory: Metaphor organizes thought and experience by creating an active conceptual mapping—a systematic set of correspondences between elements of the target concept and another, dissimilar source concept. Hence, a rhetorical metaphor can do much more than tweak this or that discrete belief. It can trigger a system of associations entailed by that metaphor’s mapping. This nudges recipients to apply their source knowledge as a framework for conceptualizing the target, even though the two concepts are unrelated at a surface level. That means that if recipients know a lot about the source, they’ll transfer lots of knowledge—not only features and properties but also a sort of “logic” that conveys the relations between those elements. In these cases, the communicator does not need to hit the audience over the head with explicit arguments. Recipients connect the dots on their own, making their conclusions easier to remember and embrace (Jacoby, 1978; Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990). In short, metaphor is compact or economical, able to communicate large chunks of information about a target with just a few words or images.1

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Concrete Representation of What Something Is For the most part, political ideas are not things that we can easily perceive: You cannot touch the economy, smell gun control, taste a group’s cultural background, or see evil (although Justin Bieber comes pretty close). Rhetorical metaphors invite us to represent such abstractions in terms of things that are relatively more concrete and familiar. They express the inexpressible (Ortony, 1975). To illustrate, when Jeb Bush gave an address in his bid for the presidency, he used the word “rise” at least a dozen times to describe his plans for economic reform for the middle class (Martin, 2015; Bush’s super-pac was called Right to Rise). Listeners can easily bring to mind an image of the middle class “rising” in space. If Bush had instead framed his message in strictly literal terms, listeners would have strained to visualize the nuances and vagaries of economic reform. Backing up these intuitions is evidence that people understand and remember messages far better when they are expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images (Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis, 2006).

Vivid Transfer of Emotion Sometimes we’re unsure how to feel about a target issue, person, or event. Rhetorical metaphors can map that target to an emotionally charged concept, which directs and amplifies our affective responses. This is well known by politicians and pundits, who frame the issues in terms of select source domains (e.g., agriculture, family, sports, magic, religion) to excite and appall, arouse anger and fear, and tug our sympathetic heartstrings (Blanchette & Dunbar, 2001; Read, Cesa, Jones, & Collins, 1990; Voss et al., 1992). Consider: In 2011 the Texas motor vehicles department rejected specialty license plates bearing the Confederate flag. A challenge to that decision went to the Supreme Court. One side—the Sons of Confederate Veterans—sought to exercise its First Amendment rights and celebrate Southern heritage; the other claimed that the flag is an offensive symbol of secession and slavery. Safe then to say that many citizens had mixed feelings about this case. So what happens when they hear Governor Rick Perry’s catchy metaphor: “We don’t need to be scraping old wounds” (Oppel, 2011)? They imagine America’s legacy of institutional racism as a festering wound on the skin, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans as scraping away at it. Gross. By evoking a concept charged with visceral feeling, this metaphor creates an emotional jolt in the listener and a memorable representation of the target issue.

Metaphor’s Persuasive Power Rhetorical metaphor may be a compact, concrete, and vivid tool for communicating, but does it in fact prompt recipients to think metaphorically about the issue at hand? Here is one empirical strategy for testing this possibility: Expose people

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to a metaphoric framing comparing one (or some) target element to a source element, and measure whether that “spreads out” to activate other associations between analogous elements of the two concepts (Chapter 2 and Figure 2.4 therein). In other words, test whether recipients implicitly apply their source knowledge to interpret unspoken aspects of the target issue. To illustrate, the hypothetical headline “Labor Unions Hit a Home Run in Arkansas” compares one element of union activities—a recent achievement—to a corresponding element of sports. If the message activates a conceptual metaphor in recipients’ minds, then it will trigger a larger system of associative links between the two concepts’ parts and relations. This will bring select elements of union activities into attention and obscure elements that could be seen as relevant but that don’t find an analog in the sports domain. This yields novel predictions: ••

••

••

In most sports, players work individually or in teams in competitions governed by formal rules fixed by convention. Transferring that knowledge, recipients will infer that union members followed proper procedure to achieve whatever it is they achieved. Sports teams win or lose based on objective performance, which is represented unambiguously in the score. Players’ subjective feelings and other qualitative considerations (e.g., how hard they try) are immaterial. Hence, recipients will dismiss the possibility that union members are ambivalent about their achievement. After all, a home run = a point = good. Because recipients know that sports have well-defined winners and losers, they will infer that the union’s achievement came at a cost to some other individual or group.

If the headline had framed the union’s achievement literally, or in terms of another source (e.g., evicting an annoying houseguest), then recipients’ beliefs and feelings about the issue would be less likely to follow the well-learned contours of sports knowledge. Studies using this empirical strategy consistently show that even brief exposure to a metaphoric framing—a simple sentence or flash of logo—causes recipients to bring their thinking about the target issue in line with their knowledge of the source to which it is compared (Landau & Keefer, 2015; Ottati, Renstrom, & Price, 2014). This effect has consequences for several outcomes, as follows.

Inferences When stock market trends were framed as living agents (e.g., “the NASDAQ starting climbing upward”) rather than inanimate objects (“the NASDAQ was swept upward”), recipients inferred that they would continue along their current trajectory the following day (Morris et al., 2007). Although price trends and living agents share few superficial similarities, recipients transferred their knowledge that agents move toward things to interpret “movements” in the stock market.

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Problem Solving After reading an article framing a city’s crime problem as a beast, recipients generated solutions based on increased enforcement (e.g., impose harsher penalties). But if the article framed crime as a disease, recipients generated more diagnostic and reformoriented solutions (e.g., find the root cause of the crime wave; Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011). Each group gravitated toward solutions that fit their source knowledge: If crime is a beast, it must be “fought,” if it is a disease, it must be “treated.”

Attitudes When a news report framed a large system failure (e.g., a corporate bankruptcy) as a vehicle accident, recipients blamed the system’s single, highest-ranking individual, but let other relevant parties off the hook. Although the report said nothing about who or what was responsible, people know that a vehicle accident is, in general, the fault of the individual behind the wheel, not the passengers.

Dangerous Leaps Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe with science; you are not safe in history. (Robert Frost, 1931/2007, p. 106) Widespread metaphoric messages convey to the public what is important, how to interpret it, and, ultimately, how to feel about the issues that affect people’s lives. The core problem, though, is that every metaphor, regardless of its intuitive appeal, is essentially false. It says “this is that” when, in fact, this and that refer to different categories of stimuli that have nothing literally to do with each other. The consequence is that exposure to a metaphoric framing can lead people to unthinkingly base their conception of a target issue on knowledge of an irrelevant source, without due consideration of the target issue’s distinctive nature. This can lead them to make bad decisions and poor judgments (Charteris-Black, 2011; Frank, Matsumoto, & Hwang, 2015; Hanne et al., 2014; Ottati et al., 2014; Pizarro & Inbar, 2014). A useful way to unpack this is to see how metaphor’s three rhetorical functions backfire.

Compact, but Inappropriate Transfer We’ve seen that exposure to metaphoric framing results in unintended transfer of knowledge. It invites bits and pieces of source knowledge to sneak in through

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the back door to inform target understanding. Recipients rarely bring these associations into full consciousness or, when they do, they rarely question them. They are likewise unaware that an activated metaphor has swept potentially relevant thoughts under the carpet. This is problematic, of course, when the target simply doesn’t work in the same way as the source. Taking Landau et al.’s (2014) findings as an example, people may know that a vehicle driver is usually responsible for causing an accident, but that doesn’t mean that the highest-ranking member of an economic or corporate system is at fault when that system fails. Placing all the blame for, say, the 2008 financial crisis on whoever was in the “driver’s seat” is unduly harsh because it is based on a conceptual template provided by an altogether different type of activity. Exposure to a metaphoric framing can also lead to an inappropriate transfer of motives. After reading an article framing the United States in terms of a physical body, Americans feared immigrants if they previously thought about how their own bodies are vulnerable to contaminating airborne bacteria (Landau et  al., 2009). They didn’t simply alter their conception of immigration; they brought to bear on it an irrelevant motive to protect their bodies from contaminating foreign agents. Participants who read an equivalent literal message were free to interpret immigration for what it is without hauling in their motivational baggage from another domain. Metaphor can even transfer a “style” of filtering information. Take the case of messages framing abstract political dynamics in terms of close interpersonal relationships. For example, journalist David Carr (2014) described the relation between print and television divisions of major media companies as “one big, long episode of ‘Divorce Court,’ with various petitioners showing up and citing irreconcilable differences with their print partners.” We know that people have preferred strategies for processing information about close relationships. Individuals high in attachment avoidance, for example, prefer to avoid relationship information and, not surprisingly, they have difficulty remembering it (Fraley, Garner, & Shaver, 2000). Building on this work, Keefer and Landau (in press) hypothesized that a relationship-metaphoric framing would transfer that defensive thinking style. Accordingly, individuals with high or experimentally increased avoidance recalled very few details from a news article featuring relationship metaphors, whereas they had no difficulty processing a parallel article that used different metaphors or equivalent literal language (see details in Chapter 3). Findings like these suggest that metaphor is a hidden source of conflict in political debate and policy decision making. When individuals and groups come together to debate the issues, they may not realize that they are relying on different metaphoric conceptions with divergent implications. This is particularly relevant to understanding why the political left and right often become mired in an ideological gridlock (Lakoff, 1996). For example, while

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more liberal groups may see programs like unemployment and healthcare as a safety net, counter messages from conservatives often frame such programs as hand-outs. These metaphors obviously support different inferences suited to each side’s ideological purposes: a safety net is necessary to prevent serious harm, whereas a hand-out is not.2

Concrete, but Undue Certainty Let’s consider a more subtle but no less interesting ingredient in metaphor’s persuasive power: It transfers not only content—what one knows about the source—but also certainty. Often, our knowledge about a metaphor’s source is self-evident—obvious to anyone with eyes in their head. When we co-opt that knowledge to give concrete form to a complicated issue, we may be exceedingly confident that our attitudes toward that issue are correct. To illustrate, recall the brouhaha surrounding the Boy Scouts of America’s policy of prohibiting homosexual boys from membership in its Scouting program. One Boy Scout parent defended the policy, saying, “I really don’t like someone coming in and trying to change the core values that have been in place. You wouldn’t want someone to come into your house and rearrange your house; this is the way I want it” (Hodge, 2013; italics added). Here the source is etiquette norms for private homes, which bear no relation to the topic he was originally aiming at. What happens when recipients assimilate this metaphor? We’ve already considered the possibility that they’ll transfer their positive feelings about home privacy to favor the anti-gay membership policy. Here I’m suggesting a distinct outcome: The resulting attitude will feel just as self-evident as their commonplace knowledge about how a home operates. This is because the metaphor takes a complex stew of ambiguous ideas—including gay rights and the American value of equal opportunity for all—and boils it down to a different scenario with obvious norms: You don’t traipse into a stranger’s home and tell them how to redecorate, so—duh—you don’t “come in” to another group and tell people how to run it. In a series of clever studies, Zarkadi and Schnall (2013) showed that metaphor can exaggerate confidence in a judgment independent of its direction. They were inspired by the observation that people who are convinced that something is right or wrong are often said to be thinking in black-and-white terms, ignoring the gray areas of ambiguity and qualification. They had participants read moral dilemmas (e.g., a man stole a loaf of bread to save his starving family) and rate the actors’ behavior on a scale from right to wrong. For some participants, the moral dilemmas were presented against a black-and-white checkered background; for others, the background was either blue-and-yellow checkered or uniformly gray. Those exposed to the black-white visual contrast gave ratings that were significantly further from the response scale’s mid-point. Importantly, the black/white

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metaphor did not shift participants toward positive or negative judgments overall; instead, it hardened their moral views in either direction. One implication is that metaphor use affects not only how political ideologies are formed, but also how they are negotiated and defended in the face of contradictory evidence and opposing viewpoints. Political debates over many policies are bitterly polarized and dominated by extreme voices. This owes, at least in part, to fixation on metaphors that leave little room for discussion and that seem to offer the communicator immunity from argument and refutation. Another implication is that we should be cautious of political clichés rooted in metaphor. Take the highly politicized notion of a “glass ceiling” in discussions of women’s career success and discrimination. When you imagine someone on a ladder butting up against a glass ceiling, what does that tell you about, for instance, women’s planning, persistence, reliance on smarts vs. pure effort, and doing it alone vs. with others? It turns out that surprisingly few of these implications hold up under critical scrutiny (Bruckmüller, Ryan, Haslam, & Peters, 2013; Eagly & Carli, 2007). Plenty of other apparent truisms should come in for questioning. Is a corporation, like a chain, only as strong as its “weakest link”? Has our group really come to a “crossroads” where we must choose one path or another? These and many other platitudes borrow their logic from remote ideas that seem cut-and-dried.

Vivid, but Exaggerated Strength Vivid metaphors give the target an emotional punch that it wouldn’t otherwise have. In one illustrative study, Maass and colleagues (2014) had some participants read about individuals vividly described as animals (e.g., a lawyer framed as a shark), while others read equivalent descriptions using non-metaphoric adjectives (the lawyer is unscrupulous). The animal-primed participants were more likely to attribute negative stereotypic traits to the individuals. With a vivid label like “Shark,” “Fox,” or “Rat” stuck in their head, it was all too easy for participants to transfer their feelings about animals to judge individuals. With strong emotional reactions come urgent action. Several researchers have argued that vivid metaphors helped to convince the American public of the acceptability of military interventions, particularly the 1991 Persian Gulf War (Pancake, 1993; Rohrer, 1995; Voss et al., 1992; Sandikcioglu, 2000) and the U.S.–Iraq conflict in 2003 (Lule, 2004). These metaphors invoked emotions associated with concrete source concepts. For example, when Iraq attacked and occupied Kuwait in 1990, U.S. politicians interpreted it as a “rape” of Kuwait, and this interpretation may have provided moral justification for the United States to go to war against Iraq (Lakoff, 1992). Here, metaphor was deployed strategically to present a biased, politically expedient perspective. Future research could investigate individual differences in receptivity to rhetorical metaphors as a function of emotional reactions to their sources. For example,

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consider that a conservative political orientation predicts sensitivity to disgusting stimuli like urine and rotten food (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2008). It stands to reason that disgust-arousing metaphors will be particularly persuasive among conservatives compared to liberals.

Health Discourse Risk; prevention; illness; recovery; addiction: These and many other concepts in the health realm are notoriously hard to grasp. That’s because they refer to entities, conditions, and processes that we cannot directly observe with our senses or that we imagine occurring in the distant future, if at all. What exactly are the biochemical processes by which ultraviolet radiation triggers malignant melanoma? How do antidepressants affect brain functioning, and how does that translate into mood changes? It comes as no surprise, then, that people rely heavily on concrete metaphors to communicate about health concepts. In one illustrative study, Akers and colleagues (2014) analyzed over two thousand online forum posts in a Web-based cessation program for smokeless tobacco. They found that respondents frequently used metaphors to talk about tobacco, nicotine addiction, and substance cessation. For example, they described cessation as a journey to be completed, a battle to be won, and an escape from being physically restrained against their will. Of course, cessation is none of these things in any literal sense, but people find it helpful to talk about it in terms of easily visualized schemas for other things. Other work calls attention to the dominant metaphors used by health practitioners and society at large. Susan Sontag’s (1978) seminal book Illness as Metaphor documented how, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medical experts personified cancer as an agent with malevolent motives, such as a consuming parasite or a demonic pregnancy. More recently, Mukherjee (2011) observed that a popular metaphor during the earlier part of the twentieth century characterized cancer as a “modern” illness caused by civilization and the rush and whirl of modern life. Doctors metaphorically linked rapid urban growth and overproduction to exuberant, pathological cell growth. Why should we care if health discourse is rife with metaphors? One answer is that metaphors can facilitate communication between medical professionals and the lay public by providing a common stock of familiar ideas for talking about health concepts. Studies show, in fact, that talking with metaphors helps cancer patients and their doctors get on the same page about their condition and treatment options (Krieger, Parrott, & Nussbaum, 2011; Penson, Schapira, Daniels, Chabner, & Lynch, 2004; Reisfeld & Wilson, 2004). Particularly common is a military metaphor, whereby people discuss cancer in terms that might just as well be applied to physical battle: combatants, weapons, battles, soldiers, the wounded, warriors, survivors, and victories.

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This has implications for the emerging controversy over “patient-based decision making,” a practice that puts patients in the driver’s seat and makes them more active in the decision-making process (Mazur, 2015). This is a doubleedged sword that potentially empowers patients but also compels them to make important decisions without sufficient background information. Concrete metaphors may help patients think through the relevant factors in a way that does not leave their head spinning. But the larger question looms: Do metaphoric health messages change mental models of health concepts, or do they simply express the literal models that we think with? Much is at stake in this question. Although health complications are partly determined by factors that are difficult to anticipate or control, ultimately our choices make a big difference. For example, it is estimated that 43 percent of all cancers could be prevented by changing high-risk behaviors and reducing exposure to environmental risk factors (Parkin, Boyd, & Walker, 2011). That is why health communicators have for many years publicized messages about health risks through various media outlets like public service announcements and consumer product labels. These messages are designed to motivate recipients to adopt and maintain lifestyle behaviors that reduce their risk of disease. Yet, despite the current health messages in the media, people continue to engage in unhealthy practices, indicating that there is considerable potential to improve the power of these messages. Inasmuch as metaphoric health messages prompt recipients to think metaphorically, they can be used to positively influence online health cognition and decision making. Here are some specific outcomes that metaphors might affect.

Affective Responses to Risks When a health risk seems abstract or removed from the practicalities of daily life, people may not feel particularly worried about the threat it poses or motivated to change their lifestyle. Studies show that framing a risk metaphorically in terms of a more concrete, easily visualized hazard can elicit the worry necessary to energize preventative behavior. In one demonstration, Scherer and colleagues (2015) exposed participants to metaphoric framings comparing the flu to various concrete hazards (a beast, riot, or army) or equivalent literal framings. The metaphor-primed participants transferred feelings of worry, viewing the flu as posing a more serious threat to their well-being. Consequently, they were more intent to get the flu shot. Comparing the elusive and invisible flu virus to something that visibly attacks one’s body raised recipients’ worry to energizing levels, motivating them to take action to protect themselves. We can derive a more specific hypothesis from conceptual metaphor theory. If metaphor exposure leads recipients to call up their own knowledge of the source hazard to interpret the target risk, then it should motivate preventative action

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FIGURE 9.3 

 etaphorically framing ultraviolet radiation as punches dealt by an M angry sun (top; vs. without metaphors; bottom) motivates recipients to apply sunscreen, but only if they’re particularly fearful of aggressive enemies (Landau, Arndt, & Cameron, 2016).

particularly among those individuals who are highly fearful of that particular hazard. For those recipients who are not especially disturbed by that hazard, the same metaphoric message will not transfer the worry necessary to take action. Landau, Arndt, and Cameron (2016) put this idea to the test. They extended Scherer et al.’s procedure to the case of skin cancer, exposing some participants to metaphoric phrases and imagery comparing invisible ultraviolet radiation to an aggressive person pummeling their skin (Figure 9.3). They added an individual difference moderator: How much do recipients fear physical confrontations with aggressive enemies? Among those who were very afraid of such confrontations, exposure to the combat-metaphoric message increased worry about skin cancer risk and strengthened intentions to apply sunscreen when going outside. But for individuals who weren’t worried about aggressive enemies, this metaphor had no effect on their worry or motivation to protect themselves. These studies provide initial experimental evidence that metaphoric health messages can arouse an energizing level of worry about health risks that might

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otherwise seem remote and unthreatening. And, at least in the contexts studied thus far, this effect is beneficial in helping people to respond adaptively to risk. Here, though, we should employ metaphors with caution. Inducing a moderate level of fear is the most effective way to motivate health behavior change. Messages that arouse high levels of fear can backfire because people just shut down and repress awareness of the problem (Glanz, Rimer, & Lewis, 2002). Therefore, if metaphors transfer emotional worry from concrete hazards to evaluations of the target health risk, and that fear is very high, it may paralyze recipients from taking action.

Treatment Evaluation The term response efficacy refers to people’s confidence that a recommended treatment behavior is effective at reducing their risk. Assessments of response efficacy are critical, of course, because they affect people’s decisions about which course of action to take to address health concerns. Lacking an intuitive understanding of how a recommended treatment works, they may not be sufficiently motivated to use it. If they use a metaphor to compare the treatment’s effect to a familiar cause-and-effect relationship in another domain, they may feel more confident that the treatment works. In one study testing this possibility, Hauser and Schwarz (2015) examined responses to military metaphors in cancer discourse. The researchers reasoned that, in an actual state of war or physical combat, more active, aggressive actions (e.g., throwing punches) are generally seen as more appropriate than passive responses. Hence, they predicted that exposure to a war-metaphoric framing of cancer (vs. a non-metaphoric framing) would reduce people’s intentions to engage in so-called “self-limiting” cancer prevention treatments—that is, those focused on restricting one’s own behavior (e.g., reducing consumption of red meat and alcohol)—especially when compared with more active prevention treatments (selecting high-fiber foods). This is exactly what they found. Put another way, self-limiting behaviors are not typically associated with an aggressive battle setting, so the war metaphor portrays them as ill-suited to fight the “war on cancer.” Of course, in reality these behaviors might be quite effective. Metaphor use may support understanding, but it does not guarantee accurate or healthy decisions about which course of action to take. Going one step further, we can examine the interaction between metaphors for a health risk itself and metaphors for candidate treatments. Take the case in which clients diagnosed with depression frequently compare their condition to being spatially down, low, and sinking (McMullen & Conway, 2002). Keefer et al. (2014) hypothesized that if people understand depression as being spatially low, they will infer that a medicine or therapeutic technique designed to treat depression needs to lift one up to be effective. Objectively speaking, depression is an abstract cognitive-affective condition, not a drop in vertical position,

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meaning that a treatment’s associations with upward movement have no bearing on its efficacy. Nevertheless, if people conceptualize depression by analogy to their experience of upward and downward movement, they may rely on that embodied knowledge to interpret a treatment’s efficacy. Consistent with this reasoning, participants who read a medical article subtly comparing depression to being down had high hopes for a new anti-depressant medication called “Liftix,” which was advertised as an “uplifting” treatment for people experiencing depression. They seem to have reasoned that the medication works because it “solves” the problem of being low in space. Among participants who read a parallel article that described depression without a provided metaphor, Liftix held no particular promise. For them, the medicine’s advertised up-ness was irrelevant. In fact, people devalue a candidate treatment described as solving a different concrete problem than the one used to frame the health risk. After reading an article framing depression as a problem of being darkened, participants assumed that Liftix would be less effective than Effectrix, an equivalent medicine framed in non-metaphoric terms. If you’re trapped in the dark, a treatment that “lifts” your mood seems like a dud. Hauser and Schwarz (2015) reported a similar finding. Recall that participants led to construe cancer as an enemy to be “fought” devalued self-limiting treatments (e.g., restricting one’s diet). But this effect held only when the treatments were framed without a metaphor. “Restricting one’s diet” in and of itself may seem like a rather ineffective weapon for “fighting the war on cancer,” but when told that this technique was apt for fighting enemies, participants viewed it as a useful and desirable treatment. Let’s zoom out from the individual to consider how metaphors shape assessments of response efficacy among medical professionals and the general public. We’ve already seen how the military metaphor for cancer transfers the belief that forceful action is preferable to behavioral restriction, which fails to give sufficient weight to the realities of cancer prevention. But what else do people know about war, and how might that bring select elements of cancer into the spotlight of attention while obscuring others? Most people know that war calls for a clear definition of an enemy—that is, a party that declares war trains its attention on a single adversary. According to cancer historian Mukherjee (2011), oncologists in the 1960s ran with this metaphor to portray cancer as a single common disease. And it was an unshakeable faith in the underlying singularity of cancer that led them to narrowly tailor their efforts to find a “universal cure” for all forms of cancer. They evaluated medical treatments in terms of their power to vanquish the enemy combatant altogether (note how Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who heralded chemotherapy, dubbed his drugs “magic bullets” for their capacity to “kill” cancer). In the decades that followed, the “war on cancer” metaphor lost its footing in part because oncologists learned that cancer is a shape-shifting disease of

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immense diversity, and the same treatment cannot indiscriminately be applied to all forms. This discovery led Samuel Broder, former director of the National Cancer Institute, to remark that: War has truly a unique status, “war” has a special meaning. It means putting young men and women in situations where they might get killed or grievously wounded. It’s inappropriate to retain that metaphor for a scholarly activity in these times of actual war. The NIH is a community of scholars focused on generating knowledge to improve the public health. That’s a great activity. That’s not a war. (Vastag, 2001, p. 2930) Although the metaphor is “off target” in important ways, we shouldn’t “destroy” it just yet. It has the benefit of motivating (at least some) prevention behaviors, as we’ve seen in the studies just cited. It may have also mobilized medical professionals to battle cancer with all the strategy and force of a military campaign. In Mukherjee’s words, “That assumption—that a monolithic hammer would eventually demolish a monolithic disease—surcharged physicians, scientists, and cancer lobbyists with vitality and energy” (p. 155). Even if a metaphor is misleading in some respects, it can give us hope for a better future.

Self-Efficacy This brings us to another important outcome: self-efficacy, or confidence that one is capable of obtaining desired outcomes, avoiding undesired outcomes, and achieving goals (Ajzen, 2002; Cameron & Chan, 2008). People may fail to comply with recommended health behaviors because they lack confidence that, through their own action, they can reduce their risk for health complications (Rogers, 1983). It is possible that metaphors can boost self-efficacy by likening an abstract treatment or prevention behavior (e.g., “control your anxiety”) to something that is more concrete (e.g., “When that inner ball of anxiety starts growing, turn your mind’s gaze away to something pleasant”). Several health researchers have noted that metaphors help patients to feel in control of their illness and carry out the prescribed treatment plan (Arroliga, Newman, Longworth, & Stoller, 2002; Carter, 1989). Of course, metaphor use is not guaranteed to boost self-efficacy. In fact, the relationship can be negative. Psychotherapy clients who embraced metaphoric images of themselves as passive objects (e.g. “I’m a doormat”) showed worse therapeutic outcomes (McMullen & Conway, 1994). Also, metaphor can compare a health outcome to a chronic moral shortcoming that people do not typically feel in control of. This can lead them to feel unduly responsible for their illness, with attendant feelings of shame, guilt, and hopelessness. To this point, Sontag (1978) suggested that as long as cancer is

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viewed as an evil enemy rather than a biological disease, cancer patients will feel demoralized. Related evidence shows that many cancer patients view the war metaphor as creating an expectation that they be fearless warriors, preventing them from expressing their full range of emotions about their condition (Byrne, Ellershaw, Holcombe, & Salmon, 2002). Metaphor can also squelch self-efficacy by framing a prevention or treatment behavior in terms of an unfamiliar or difficult activity. Indirect support for this possibility comes from a study of metaphor use in thinking about negotiation (Landau, Gelfand, & Jackson, 2016). Participants read a description that framed negotiation metaphorically as a sport or literally as a competitive activity before reporting their feelings about an upcoming face-to-face negotiation. An ostensibly unrelated survey assessed their general knowledge of sports. Among participants who were relatively knowledgeable about sports, the sport-metaphoric framing (vs. the literal competition framing) increased confidence that they could control the upcoming negotiation and synchronize with the other party with minimal stress. In contrast, participants who knew relatively little about sports did not get a self-efficacy boost from framing negotiation as a sport. Extrapolating this finding to the health realm, we can imagine someone reading a health brochure that frames smoking cessation metaphorically in terms of sport performance (e.g., “Cigarette cravings have dominated the game for too long; it’s time to even the score”). Now consider a reader who believes that, within the domain of sports competition, she lacks the resources (e.g., skills, knowledge) necessary to perform the behaviors required to produce certain outcomes or achieve certain ends. If the metaphor transfers those self-perceptions, it may lead her to conclude that she lacks the resources that would enable her to initiate steps to quit smoking, expend the necessary effort, and persist in the face of cravings.

Social Judgment Metaphors can also perpetuate negative stereotypes of individuals affected by disease. In her essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Sontag argues that widely promulgated metaphors portray AIDS as pollution or decay, implying that afflicted individuals possess tainted moral values (reflecting the more general metaphor immorality is dirt; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Metaphors comparing AIDS to a “plague” highlight not only the infectiousness of the physical virus itself, but also the transmission of immorality. The diagnosed patient is perceived to be responsible for indulging in delinquency, and the illness is viewed as a punishment for social deviancy. This perception contributes to patients viewing themselves as socially devalued members of society, and it prevents them from seeking necessary treatment. Furthermore, it may disincline public policy officials from supporting funding for research and interventions.

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What to Do? We’ve seen that metaphors transmitted in the public sphere can obscure and distract, oversimplify the big issues, and generally bias people’s thought and behavior in counterproductive ways. What should we do about it?

Get Rid of ’Em Some scholars insist that we should eradicate metaphor altogether. Philosophers like Hobbes and Locke held that metaphor, however aesthetically pleasing, is an essentially useless embellishment to proper language—that is, language with clearly demarcated categories that calls things precisely what they are. So if we want to get to the bottom of things, to penetrate into their true nature, we should strip away metaphor from public discourse (see the discussion of accuracy motivation in Chapter 4). But there are reasons why a metaphor moratorium is neither practicable nor desirable. As to practicable, it is worth noting that the more strident calls to block metaphors were voiced before contemporary research in cognitive semantics revealed just how much they pervade ordinary discourse (Steen et al., 2010a, 2010b). The traditional premise that metaphor is superfluous no longer seems tenable. Furthermore, we’ve seen evidence that people rely on metaphor at a cognitive level to answer three basic questions: What is this thing? How does it work? How should we feel about it? People need answers to these questions to participate in a democracy and make informed decisions. If we abandon metaphor as a prime means of public expression, the old questions still need answers. What are the substitutes? Literal equivalents can be vague, convoluted, and sterile. And there is no doubt that they are also ripe for exploitation—through, for instance, hyperbole, passive voice (“mistakes were made”), and dehumanizing abstraction (e.g., robbing peasants of their farms is labeled transfer of population) (Charteris-Black, 2011; Orwell, 1946/1968; Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992).3 Even if it were practicable to ban all metaphors, we may not be willing to. For one, metaphor is a powerful aid to discovery and problem solving. Once one has in a general way understood that a problematic (e.g., vague, unstable) scenario is like a different, more familiar kind of scenario, one can figure out, more concretely and in greater detail, how to proceed in a variety of circumstances. Not surprisingly we turn to our artists, philosophers, scientists, tech gurus, and politicians for fresh metaphors that throw new light on life’s persistent realities (e.g., war, corruption, attachments, habits) and the shifting cultural landscape. Metaphor can also open up possibilities for identity expression and social equality that are frequently obscured by the status quo. Martin Luther King Jr. was just one inspirational figure who knew the power of metaphor to stir emotions and compel a community to confront issues of equality. He exhorted

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Americans to “rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood” (2003, p. 179). Had he instead packaged his message in literal terms—something like “Challenge unjust laws and improve living conditions”—I suspect he would have been less influential. In the same vein, metaphor can help to organize constructive collective action. Collective action requires that people have cognitively structured the social situation in similar ways (Weick, 1979). Metaphor helps by providing a framework for defining and communicating about norms, roles, desires, and impediments to goal progress (Gelfand & McCusker, 2002). For instance, when Dr. King framed racial equality as a reachable destination on a journey, he leveraged familiar knowledge about journeys to affirm the value of even incremental “steps” toward shared goals (Charteris-Black, 2011).

Identify and Refine A more promising intervention to promote clear and sincere communication— and ultimately reduce ideological bias—is to pay particular attention to which metaphors individuals and groups use to frame discourse. This can be challenging because some metaphors are so familiar (e.g., due to repeated media exposure) that we do not recognize them as what they are. We interpret them instead as simply the conventional way of characterizing the issue in question. For example, at least since U.S. president Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, discourse surrounding illegal drug regulation, pollution, cancer, and other societal problems has regularly drawn on elements of military combat. Individuals fed a steady diet of these metaphors may fail to fully appreciate that such messages are, in fact, metaphoric, and as such may offer a partial or skewed picture of the relevant issues. To clear the fog of metaphor we have to first appreciate that it’s there. That likely begins with educating the public on what a conceptual metaphor is, and how it differs from the poetic metaphors from their school days. Then what? William James (1890/1983) noted that, in the conduct of science, employing a single metaphor limits what can be learned about a phenomenon. His recommendation was not to abandon metaphor but to generate more of them—to produce a mosaic of metaphors, each of which illuminates different truths about the phenomenon, with each truth adding in some way to a complete understanding (Allison, Beggan, & Midgley, 1996). Extending this strategy to politics and health, we can focus on a single issue and generate numerous metaphors that give insights into unique or previously unnoticed aspects of that issue. Here’s another strategy to land as close to the truth as possible while giving life to ideas: Encourage the purveyors of metaphor to clarify what their metaphors mean and what they don’t. To illustrate, suppose a journalist punched up a story on Acme Co.’s bankruptcy, writing “Acme drove straight into a wall,

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ignoring the road signs to slow down.” If she is made aware that this sentence can activate in the reader’s mind a broader, systematic mapping between corporate bankruptcy and vehicle operation, she could take the extra step of specifying which links in that mapping she intends: “The bankruptcy was a wreck in that it was abrupt and destructive, but that’s not to say there was a single driver behind the wheel.” Specifying entailments in this deliberate manner could prevent unintended metaphoric transfer (although this possibility remains to be tested). Without this added step, the audience will remain oblivious, at least consciously, that a conceptual metaphor has been activated, and the metaphor will exert a disproportionate influence on their attitudes.

Counteract via “Extension” A few pages back I mentioned how someone used a house metaphor to defend a group’s anti-gay membership policy. Suppose you decide that this metaphor compares things that shouldn’t be compared, and therefore has a counterproductive influence on public attitudes and policy. What if you wanted to counteract or “undo” this metaphor in public discourse? How would you design your rebuttal message? One strategy is to simply ignore the metaphor—to dismiss it as a quirky figure of speech and attempt to sway the audience with strong, logical arguments in favor of admitting gay scouts. Another familiar strategy is to argue that the metaphor is an unsuitable simplification. This may work in theory, but if the audience has already begun to rely on the metaphor to scaffold their understanding, they may take offense at the implication that they really don’t understand the issue at all, and the metaphor serves as a crutch. Mio (1996) proposed a third rebuttal strategy: extend the metaphor. Here, you endorse the metaphor in broad outlines but argue that it has been applied incorrectly. More precisely, you argue that the wrong bits of source knowledge have been transferred. In our example, you might tell the audience, “Yes, let’s keep that metaphor in mind: the Boy Scouts is a house. But houses work differently than they have been portrayed. Don’t we welcome visitors to our houses?” Why might this rebuttal strategy be effective? Because the initial metaphor may already have gone to work, helping recipients to understand an otherwise puzzling topic by analogy to their day-to-day experience. If so, they won’t give it up easily. The metaphor extension strategy allows them to hang on to an intuitive metaphor, but nudges them to draw on other familiar knowledge about the source and apply that knowledge to interpret the target issue. We (Landau et al., 2016) tested this idea by examining the metaphor comparing the federal budget to a household budget. You’re likely familiar with this metaphor. You hear it, for example, in campaign attack ads that say “we balance our budget at home; why won’t so-and-so in Washington do the same?” The implication is that, just as families have to live within their means, the government must

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do the same by cutting back on spending for federal programs (an implication that contrasts sharply with the recommendations of many influential economists who urge stimulus spending; Krugman, 2012; Stiglitz, 2010). We had all participants first read an op-ed piece arguing in favor of cuts to the federal budget. The article included a visual cue to suggest that the federal budget operates in essentially the same way as a household budget. The text reiterated this household metaphor with statements such as: “If a family doesn’t have the money to pay for stuff, it cuts back on its spending. Likewise, the government cannot afford all the federal programs we have, and so it should cut spending.” Participants read one of two articles rebutting the initial pro-spending cut article in what appeared to be an ongoing debate. Half the participants read a rebuttal that ignored the initial household metaphor. It encouraged observers to carefully reconsider the issue on its own terms with strong, logical arguments. The other half read a rebuttal that extended the household metaphor—endorsing it in broad outlines but adjusting its implications. For example, it pointed out that households commonly take on short-term debt for things like college loans and mortgages to improve their lives in the present. Analogously, governments sometimes need to take on deficits to pay for programs for which there is a current need. Finally, participants were asked how much the government should cut spending for federal agencies like the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. They were less in favor of cutting program funding—that is, more persuaded by the rebuttal—if the rebutter extended the initial metaphor by highlighting other familiar features of a household budget that legitimize spending at the federal level. These findings suggest that if you want to counteract a metaphor that’s been used to frame political discourse, it is worth remembering that metaphor use can serve an epistemic function. The metaphor you seek to undo may have already gone to work to help the audience confidently grasp the issue at hand. A good rebuttal strategy, then, is to preserve the original metaphor but draw the audience’s attention to different features of the source that they can use to reinterpret the target issue.

Conclusion The previews for the 1984 blockbuster Gremlins teased the movie-going audience with a snapshot of Gremlins’ nature: “Cute. Clever. Mischievous. Intelligent. Dangerous.” The same can be said of the rhetorical metaphors that we encounter on a daily basis. Summing up the chapter, analyses of communication (linguistic and non) reveal that metaphors pervade political and health discourse surrounding concepts that might otherwise be perceived as abstract or complex. These metaphoric framings

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are often cute and clever, but they don’t stop there. A stream of laboratory studies shows that even incidental exposure to metaphoric framings leads people to process target concepts in ways that parallel their schematic knowledge of the source concepts to which they are compared. This metaphoric transfer effect has practically far-reaching consequences for reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and behavior intentions. I hope to have shown that these lines of research are rich with practical implications both for individual behavior and for society. The promise of metaphor is that it is an instrument that people can use to understand and effectively cope with a problematic situation. Hence, developing communication strategies that guide the design of metaphoric messages is a low-cost, theoretically grounded, and potentially powerful means of promoting positive change. With this promise, however, come potential pitfalls. Metaphor usage is not guaranteed to help people accurately construe a concept or motivate them along the path to lifestyle behavior change. That’s why it is important to consider when metaphors mislead or squelch motivation in undesirable ways.

Notes 1 “Implicit” literally means “folded in.” As listeners we “unfold” a metaphor to register its unspoken meanings. 2 Further complicating matters, two parties may share the same conceptual metaphor in broad outlines but hold differing representations of its source. Lakoff (1996) examines the case of the metaphor society is a family. People on both ends of the political spectrum may share this metaphor at a general level, but for some, families function by a strict authority figure meting out rewards and punishments on the basis of moral principles; for others, families function on the basis of mutual help, care, and empathy.The specific version of the family metaphor people embrace predicts their attitudes toward a variety of social issues, such as college loans and abortion. 3 Metaphor’s indispensability was recognized centuries ago by religious scholars. They agonized over metaphors in sacred texts, as when the Bible refers to the Virgin Mary as a “Tower of Ivory” or the “Gate of Heaven.” Is this a respectable way to convey spiritual and divine ideas? Some theorists argued that metaphor compensates for our meager powers of comprehension. St. Thomas Aquinas said that theology, like poetry, is “about things which because of their deficiency of truth cannot be laid hold of by reason. Hence reason has to be drawn off to the side by means of certain similitudes” (quoted in Ong, 1947, p. 324). Pascal remarked that metaphors are necessary because “the things of God are inexpressible, they cannot be said in any other way” (1670/1995, p. 84). Gimabattista Vico (1725/1999) similarly recommended inventive metaphors as a means of understanding cultural phenomena (early political institutions) that seem almost beyond our understanding.

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INDEX

abortion 8 abstraction 1–2, 4–5, 9, 32, 66; bodily experiential schema 85–86; culture 101, 103; metaphoric transfer strategy 24; psychological distance 62–64; sensorimotor experiences 148n3; shared concepts 97 academic identity 6–7, 110–112, 116 accuracy motivation 29, 60, 69–72, 79 Ackerman, J. 131 activation 51–53, 176 activities 100–101 affection 87 African Americans 150, 157, 158, 163 Afrikaans Dutch 98 agency 35, 68–69, 80n6, 95 agriculture 98 AIDS 91, 187 Akers, L. 181 Allison, S. 34 Allport, Gordon 150, 151 Ambady, N. 165 ambiguity 29, 59, 65; see also uncertainty American English 90, 99, 101 anger 86–87, 93, 100, 119 animals 98, 153, 161–163, 180 anthropology 13, 32 Aquinas, St Thomas 192n3 Arcuri, L. 153 Arendt, Hannah 15 Aristotle 14, 61, 70, 132, 174 Arndt, J. 183

Aron, A. & E. 134 arousal 30, 36n4 art 4, 33, 81 artistic discovery 10, 33, 74–75 Asch, Solomon 40–41 Asian cultures 4, 80n6, 91–92 attachment 49, 133–134, 145, 178; nonhuman 146–148 attitudes 10, 12, 27–28, 44–46, 177, 190; consistency motivation 60, 93–94; cultural differences 92; embodiment hypothesis 87–88; spatial metaphors 35 attraction 129–132 attributional bias 119 Auster, Paul 30–31, 113 Aymara 4 Bargh, J. 130, 131 Barsalou, L. 30 Barthes, Roland 21 Baugh, A. 90 Baumeister, R. F. 109 Becker, Ernest 112 behavioral immune system 160–161 beliefs 39, 171; consistency motivation 29, 60, 65, 66, 69, 93–94; embodiment hypothesis 87–88 Benton, J. 45 Bernanke, Ben 174 Bible 92, 95, 140, 192n3 binding metaphors 139–140, 142, 154 black-and-white thinking 179–180

226 Index

bodies 4, 12, 55–56, 126, 167, 168, 178; see also embodiment bodily experiential schema 85–87, 103n2 bodily states 30–31, 52, 57n1, 126, 133–134, 148n3; see also embodiment Boehner, John 27 Boers, F. 98 Boroditsky, Lera 5, 43, 56 Bounded Generalized Reciprocity Theory 151 bounded space 106–107 Bowlby, John 133 brain 126, 158, 164–165 Brehm, S. & J. 75–76 Broder, Samuel 186 Bronowski, J. 75 Brontë, Charlotte 146 Bruner, J. 39, 81, 82 buildings 52, 84, 88 Bush, George H. W. 77–78 Bush, Jeb 175 business 68, 172, 173–174 Cable, T. 90 Cameron, D. 138–139 Cameron, L. 183 cancer 8, 91, 181–182, 183, 184, 185–187 Carr, David 178 Carson, Ben 162 Casasanto, D. 118 Cassirer, Ernst 15 caste system 66, 67 categorization 38, 153 certainty motivation 29, 59–65, 78–79, 90–91 change 35 character 40–41, 70–71 Charteris-Black, J. 77, 92 Chernow, Ron 152 Chinese 4, 83–84, 87, 93 choice 18, 42–43, 46–48 Churchill, Winston 77, 172 civil rights 20–21 cleanliness 29, 45–46, 84–85, 103n2, 158–161 climate 98 Clinton, Hillary 172, 173 Clore, G. 44 closeness 84, 132–139, 148n2 cognition 9, 10, 15, 23; changes in 58; closure and openness 33; embodied 70, 96; see also social cognition cognitive interdependence 134

cognitive linguistics 12–13, 32 cognitive psychology 13 cognitive revolution 30 cognitive styles 50 Cole, S. 82 collective action 18–19, 21, 22, 189 collectivist cultures 32, 80n6, 91–92 commitment 139–141 communication: cultural differences 89; indirect forms of 92; interpersonal attraction 132; persuasive 27–28; universality in metaphor use 84–85 compensatory self-affirmation 120 conceptual metaphor theory 9, 11, 15–16, 23–24, 58, 127n4; cultural universality 32; dirt and cleanliness 161; embodiment 12; health risks 182–183; mapping 66–68, 86, 174; metaphorical thinking 39–40; spreading activation 52, 53 conceptual vocabulary 97 concretization 65, 66 conduit metaphor 5, 57n1, 131 confirmation bias 39, 60 conflict: intergroup 101, 150; interpersonal 141–143; intrapsychic 107; political 22, 178; self 106; spatial metaphors 35 connectedness 168, 169 consciousness 1, 105, 106–107, 126n1, 127n3 consistency motivation 29, 60, 65–69, 78–79, 93–94 Construal Level Theory 62–63 container metaphor 7, 42; commitment 139; conflict 142; intergroup relations 151–154 contamination 45, 55–56, 90, 137, 158–160, 167, 178 context 10, 11; cultural 31–32, 81–103; decision making 46 Cooper, David 132 Cottrell, C. 159 Coulson, S. 19, 78 Crawford, L. 48 creativity 10, 33, 37, 50–51, 93; motivation 72–75, 79; romantic relationships 142–143; self-growth 123 Crick, Francis 30 crime 43–44, 56, 177 cultural differences 10, 32, 78, 89–103; bottom-up 96–103; conceptions of time and space 4; degree of metaphor

Index  227

use 89–93; preferences for particular metaphors 93–96 culture 11, 12, 15, 29, 81–103; embodiment hypothesis 85–88; freedom and 80n6; source concepts 16; universality in metaphor use 31–32, 82, 83–89 Damasio, A. 30 death 18, 66, 68, 93; fears about 116; universality in metaphor use 83, 85 decision making 12, 46–48, 182, 192 defensive projection 119–120 dehumanization 10, 161–165, 188 deities 146–147 depression 117, 143–144, 184–185 Descartes, René 69–70 desire 137, 138–139 developmental psychology 13 Dijkstra, K. 118 Dionne, S. 130 dirt and cleanliness 29, 45–46, 84–85, 103n2, 120, 158–161, 187 Dirven, R. 98 discourse 4, 8, 23–24 discrimination 150, 163, 167 disgust 45, 159–161, 181 distance: psychological 62–64; spatial 132–134 diversity 168, 169 “domino theory” 69, 90 dramaturgical perspective 120–122, 124 Dutch 98 Dweck, C. 109 Eastern cultures 4, 80n6, 91–92 Eastwick, P. 130 economic exchange 140–141, 142 economic policy 8 education 8, 71 effectance motivation 64, 79n2 ego 104–107, 108, 110, 126 ego psychology 29, 112 Ehrlich, Paul 185 Eliot, T. S. 33 embodiment 4, 12, 30–31; creative cognition 51; embodiment hypothesis 85–88, 89, 96, 103n2; memory 48; moral judgment 45; see also bodies; bodily states emotions 8, 30, 36n4, 100; intergroup 156–161, 165; regulation of 109; rhetoric 174, 175; vivid metaphors 180

English language 4, 15, 90, 92, 93, 99, 101, 108 Enlightenment philosophy 14 entity fusion metaphor 154–155, 168 entity metaphor 124, 125–126, 170n2 entity theorists 42 epistemic motives 59–79, 89 epistemology 29, 30, 59–60, 61, 70 Epley, N. 64 event structure metaphor 83–84 existential isolation 136 existential philosophy 29, 112 experiential gestalts 85 extension of metaphor 190–191 face 92 Facebook 172–173 family metaphors 88, 145, 169, 174, 192n2 Fang culture 98 fear 183–184 “feeling thermometer” 158 felt attraction 130–131 figures of speech 8 flexibility 129 fluency 56 fluidity 51 folk psychology 64, 88 Forest, A. 140 Fraley, R. 49 framing 25–26, 42, 191–192; certainty motivation 62–63; persuasion 175–176; political discourse 172, 178; problem solving 43; source knowledge 53–55, 56; spreading activation 52, 53 Fredrickson, B. 165 freedom 18, 75–76, 80n6 Freud, Sigmund 72–73, 127n3, 137 Frost, Robert 177 Garrido, M. 157 gay men 159; see also homosexuality gender 8, 68, 164–165, 172–173; see also men; women generalization 151 Gnostics 96 goals 6, 28–29; romantic relationships 142; self-control 108; self-determined 123; self-regulation 107, 110–112 Goff, P. 163 Goffman, Erving 120 Goodman, C. 81, 82 Gould, Stephen Jay 93

228 Index

groups 11, 12, 21, 68, 150; consistency motivation 94; cultural differences 32; identification 154–155; metaphors as barriers to collective action 22; metaphors of group membership 151–155; threats to group survival 90–91; see also intergroup relations guilt 37, 46, 68–69, 186 hand washing 46, 47–48 haptic experience 131 Harkin, Tom 77–78 Harvey, S. 45 Hauser, D. 184, 185 Hausmann, Raoul 74, 75 health 10, 11, 29, 91, 171, 181–187, 189; affective responses to risk 182–184; medical technology 100; seasonal variations 98; self-efficacy 186–187; social judgment 187; treatment evaluation 184–186 heat see temperature Hegel, G. W. F. 75 Hiraga, M. 165 Hmong 93 Hobbes, Thomas 14, 70, 166, 188 Hodson, G. 160 homophobia 159 homosexuality 149, 159, 160, 179, 190 household budgets 27, 190–191 humor 33, 73–74 Hungarian 4, 84, 87, 94–95, 99, 101, 108 I-sharing 136 identity 6–7, 110–112, 188; group 154–155, 170n2; identity fusion 155; self-continuity 113, 114, 115–116; Social Identity Theory 152; see also self ideology: consistency motivation 29; cultural variation in metaphor use 81; political 170n4, 178–179, 180; schemas 39; Social Darwinism 167; societal 166, 167–168 illumination 51 image schemata 85 immigration 8, 44, 100, 160–161; contamination metaphors 55–56, 90, 167, 178; political discourse 165, 172 “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale 134–135, 155 incremental theorists 42 individual differences 59, 65 individualistic cultures 32, 80n6, 91, 100

inferences 176 influence 27–28, 190; see also persuasion information processing 11, 28, 30, 126, 178; bodily experiential schema 87; embodied social cognition 31; social 40 inner core 124–125, 135–136 institutions 8, 92 intensity 19–20, 84 interdisciplinarity 12–13 intergroup relations 11, 12, 21, 33, 149–170; clean/dirty metaphors 158–161; conflict 101; dehumanization of outgroups 161–165; emotions 156, 165; light/dark metaphors 157–158; metaphors of group membership 151–155; society metaphors 166–169; up/down metaphors 156–157; warm/ cold metaphors 158; see also groups internet 90 interpersonal relationships 11, 128–148; attachment avoidance 49; attraction and liking 129–132; closeness 132–139; commitment 139–141; conflict 141–143; information processing and relationship metaphors 178; loneliness and rejection 143–144; nonhuman attachment 146–148; personification 145; political cognition 49–50, 145; relational mobility 32, 97; schemas 39 intimacy 34, 84, 132, 133, 148n2 Jacobs, Jane 169 Jäkel, O. 95 James, LeBron 163, 164 James, William 61, 104, 105, 136, 189 Japanese 84, 87, 108, 124, 165 Jaynes, Julian 1, 15, 58, 106 Jia, L. 62–63 Job, V. 109 Johnson, Mark 15–16, 105, 108, 110 Jones, E. 11 journey metaphor 6–7, 20–21, 110–112; commitment 139; conflict 142; cultural differences 94, 95–96; health discourse 181; life as a journey 101, 102; political discourse 172; romantic relationships 142, 143; self-continuity 113–116; sexual courtship 137 Joyce, James 150 Kant, Immanuel 45 Kasson, J. 100

Index  229

Keefer, L. 49, 53–55, 61, 62, 113–114, 137, 178 Kille, D. 140 King, Martin Luther 172, 188–189 Kirkpatrick, L. 146 knowledge: consistency motivation 60; influence on attitudes 44; mapping 9, 174; metaphoric transfer strategy 24; procedural 114–115, 116; reasoning 42; schemas 23, 38–39; source 16, 53–56, 176–177, 179, 182, 190, 192; spatial 3–4; unintended transfer of 177–178 Koestler, A. 73, 74, 161 Kohlberg, L. 45 Kövecses, Z. 19–20, 85, 99, 101, 121 Köves, N. 94 Kruglanski, A. 29, 59 Lakoff, George 15–16, 68, 105, 108, 110, 145, 192n2 Landau, Mark J.: entity expansion 125; extension of metaphor 190–191; framing 25; health discourse 183; immigration attitudes 55–56; inner core 135–136; journey metaphor 6–7, 110, 113–116; personal value 118–119; relationship metaphors 49, 178; sex 137; vehicle accident metaphor 53–55, 62, 69, 71–72, 178 Langer, Susanne 15 language 4, 61, 188; cognitive linguistics 12–13; linguistic elaboration 103n3 leadership 41 Leander, N. 131 Leary, M. R. 144 Lee, S. W. S. 47, 142 legal concepts 8 lesbians 159; see also homosexuality Leung, A. 51 Lewin, Kurt 58–59, 79 lifespace 58, 79 light and darkness 44, 51, 84, 157–158 literal meaning 35n2, 97 Locke, John 14, 35n1, 188 logos 14, 15 loneliness 143–144, 145, 147–148 love 19, 34, 93, 128, 133, 141, 142 Maass, A. 153, 162, 180 MacDonald, G. 144 Mailer, Norman 123, 124 Malay 92 manipulation of source knowledge 55–56

mapping 9, 15–22, 23, 86; cultural differences 94; event structure metaphor 83–84; partial 52–53, 66–68, 144; problem solving 43; rhetorical metaphors 174 Maslow, Abraham 73 mate selection 130 materialism 147–148 May, Rollo 112 McAdams, D. 116 Me-sharing 136 meaning making 22–24, 37–57 Meier, B. 44, 130 memory 9, 48–50, 61; autobiographical 12, 118; spreading activation 51–52 men 68, 130, 138–139, 164–165 mental leaps 23 metaphor 10–12, 14–15, 188–192; closure and openness 32–34; cultural context 10, 81–103; ego 105–107; embodied social cognition 30–31; extension of 190–191; importance of 10; interdisciplinary research 12–13; interpersonal relationships 128–148; journal studies 9; meaning making 22–24, 37–57; as mental mapping 15–22; metaphoric transfer strategy 24, 52, 53; motivated social cognition 28–30; motivation 58–80; political discourse 172–181; self motives 112–126; self-regulation 107–112; social influence 27–28; space and time 1–7; theory development 34–35; ubiquity of 7–8 metaphoricity 35n2 mind 100 Mio, J. 190 Moeller, S. 130 money 99, 141 morality 12, 71, 156; AIDS metaphors 187; black-and-white thinking 179–180; consistency motivation 60; dirt and cleanliness 29, 45–46, 103n2, 158, 159, 161; moral judgment 9, 10, 44–46; moral values 8, 96; schemas 23 motivation 6, 7, 28–30, 58–80, 89, 192; accuracy 29, 60, 69–72, 79; certainty 29, 59–65, 78–79, 90–91; consistency 29, 60, 65–69, 78–79, 93–94; creativity 72–75, 79; reactance 75–78, 79; self motives 112–126; sociality 145 Mukherjee, S. 181, 185, 186 Muraven, M. 109 muscle control 109, 148n4

230 Index

mutuality 134 myths 82, 88, 137 naïve realism 38 narratives 116 Ndembu culture 98 Neel, R. 160 negotiation 187 Neuberg, S. 159 Nietzsche, F. 15, 28, 80n4 Nisbett, R. 11 Nixon, Richard 189 Nocera, C. 131 nonhuman attachment 146–148 nonspecific closure, need for 59 norms 81, 179, 189; consistency motivation 66; cultural differences 92; dirt and cleanliness 159, 161; “rules of the game” 19 Obama, Barack 49, 77, 172 obesity 160–161 objectification 138, 164–165 objects: attachment to 147–148; dehumanization of outgroups 164–165; ego as object 105–106, 108; entity fusion metaphor 154–155 Ottati, V. 25, 72 outgroups 10, 153, 161–165, 168, 170n2; see also intergroup relations Oyserman, D. 6 pain 144 Palma, T. 157 Pascal, B. 192n3 peace, metaphors for 168, 169 perception: personality traits 129; temporal 5; visual 9, 61 perceptual symbols systems model 30 peripheral cues 27–28 Perry, Rick 175 person perception 12, 40–42 personality 8, 29; “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale 134; interpersonal attraction 129; musical instrument metaphor 100; person perception 40–42; schemas 38–39; stability metaphor 140 personification 79n2, 88, 90, 91, 96; certainty motivation 64, 65; internal personae 107, 127n3; sociality motivation 145 persuasion 27–28, 34–35, 71, 76, 171, 175–177

philosophy 14, 69–70, 105, 112 physical proximity 132–133, 148n2, 155 Plato 70, 127n3 play 73 political discourse 11, 171, 172–181, 189; certainty 179–180; conflict 22; “domino theory” 69, 90; household budget metaphor 27, 190–191; immigration 165; inappropriate transfer 177–179; interpersonal relationship metaphors 49–50, 145; persuasion 27, 175–177; Republican anti-Obama campaign 77; rhetoric 174–175; ubiquity of metaphor 7–8; vivid metaphors 180–181 power 41, 66, 129–130, 156 prejudice 21, 33, 150, 189; disgust 159, 161; emotions at the heart of 156; “feeling thermometer” 158; racial 154, 157–158, 159–160; social dominance orientation 167 priming 24, 41, 44; affective 55; attachment 50; spreading activation 51–52 problem solving 9, 42–44, 177, 188, 192 procedural knowledge 114–115, 116 projection 119–120 psychological distance 62–64 race 150, 154, 189; animal metaphors 161–162, 163; dirt and contamination metaphors 159–160; diversity metaphors 169; light and darkness metaphors 157–158 reactance motivation 75–78, 79 reality: reframing 120–122; schemas 39; subjective construction of 22–23 reason 8, 14 reasoning 42, 192 reconciliation 168 rejection 144 relational mobility 32, 97 relationships see interpersonal relationships religion 33, 96, 146–147, 156, 192n3 response efficacy 184–186 rhetoric 14, 174–175 Riemer-Peltz, M. 130 risk, health 182–184 rituals 3, 82, 84–85, 88 Roberts, T-A. 165 Robinson, M. 44, 130 rock metaphor 104, 105, 140, 142 Rogers, Carl 73, 124–125

Index  231

romantic relationships 139–141, 142–143; see also attraction; sex Ronquillo, J. 158 Rothschild, Z. 53–55, 62, 113–114, 118–119 Rule, N. 165 “rules of the game” 19, 100–101 Ryan, Paul 27 sadness 39 Sakaluk, J. 137 salience 39, 55, 60, 68 Sanskrit 15 scaffolds 2, 6, 85, 114 Schaller, M. 160 schemas 16, 18, 23, 38–40; attitudes 44; bodily experiential 85–87, 103n2; dirt and cleanliness 161; education 71; interpersonal relationships 132; reasoning 42; shared 19, 89; theories are buildings metaphor 52 Scherer, A. 182, 183 Schnall, S. 45, 179 Schubert, T. 57n1 Schwarz, N. 47, 142, 184, 185 scientific discovery 10, 33, 74–75 scripts: cultural differences 92; embodiment hypothesis 87–88; sexual attitudes and behaviors 137; source concepts 16 security objects 147 self 6, 8, 11, 12, 29, 104–127; as bounded container 100; ego 104–107; “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale 134–135, 155; intrinsic 127n8; motives 112–126; schemas 39; see also identity self-affirmation 120 self-concept 82, 104, 112, 120, 126; expansion of 34; identity fusion 155; intergroup conflict 101; intrinsic 123–124 self-consciousness 18, 127n6 self-continuity 112, 113–116, 127n4 self-control 84, 108, 109, 148n4 Self-Determination Theory 123 self-disclosure 135–136 self-efficacy 186–187 self-enhancement 94 self-esteem 29, 96, 112, 117–122 self-expansion theory 134 self-growth 29, 112, 123–126 self-narratives 116 self-regulation 18, 107–112

self-serving biases 119 self-silencing 136 Semin, G. 157 senses 41, 57n1 sensorimotor experiences 16, 31, 35, 41, 57n1, 58, 148n3 sex 21, 40, 137–139 sexism 164–165 sexual objectification 164–165 Shakespeare, William 9, 106, 137 Shelley, Percy 51 size 21, 81–82 Slepian, M. 165 Smith, E. 62–63 smoothness 131 social action 10, 18–19, 21 social cognition 9, 11, 40, 56, 144; context 83; culture 101, 103; embodied 12, 30–31, 103n2; motivated 28–30; schemas 39; variance in 59 social context 10, 46, 131 Social Darwinism 167 social dominance orientation 167 social-ecological variables 97, 101, 103 social exchange model 140–141 Social Identity Theory 152 social influence 27–28 social judgment 187 social psychology 10–11, 12–13, 14, 22–35; closure and openness of metaphor 32–34; culture 31–32, 82–83, 101; embodied social cognition 30–31; meaning making 22–24, 38; metaphoric framing strategy 25–26; metaphoric transfer strategy 24; motivated social cognition 28–30; social influence 27–28; theory development 34–35 social roles 8, 120, 121–122, 127n6 social spaces 100 sociality motivation 145 socialization 66, 91–92 society 145, 166–169, 174, 192n2 Socrates 70, 127n3 Sontag, Susan 181, 186–187 source concepts 16–18, 19–20, 24, 40; accuracy motivation 71; bodily experiential schema 86; cultural differences 94; embodied social cognition 31; emotions 36n4; extension of metaphor 190–191; framing 25–26, 192; manipulation of source knowledge 55–56; measurement of

232 Index

source knowledge 53–55; motivation transfer 29; partial mapping 52–53, 144; persuasion 175–176; reasoning 42; rhetorical metaphors 174; social influence 27–28 space: depression as spatially low 184–185; ego as bounded space 106–107; perception of power and status 129–130; persuasion 34–35; sadness 39; spatial distance 132–134; time and spatial metaphors 1–7, 58, 84; see also up/down metaphors specific closure, need for 60 Spencer, Herbert 166, 167 sports metaphors 40, 68, 72, 100–101, 103, 176, 187 spreading activation 51–53, 176 “spreading of alternatives” effect 47–48 stability 140 status 129–130, 156, 158, 173 stereotypes 10, 38, 150; animal metaphors 162, 163, 180; container metaphor 153, 154; dirt and cleanliness 161; sexual attitudes and behaviors 137; Stereotype Content Model 158; vertical metaphor and information recall 157 Stevens, Wallace 123 story metaphor 116 subjective construction of reality 22–23 Suitner, C. 153 Sullivan, D. 113–114, 118–119, 121 Swann, W. 155 Swanson, T. 137 symbols 3, 8, 30, 81–82 target concepts 16–18, 19–20, 24, 79; accuracy motivation 71; bodily experiential schema 86; certainty motivation 61, 64, 65; cultural differences 89, 94; embodied social cognition 31; emotions 36n4; extension of metaphor 190–191; framing 25–26, 192; motivation transfer 29; partial mapping 52–53, 66–68, 144; persuasion 175–176; reactance motivation 77; reasoning 42; rhetorical metaphors 174; social influence 27–28; source knowledge 56 technology 100 temperature 130, 131, 137, 158; see also warmth terror management theory 138 terrorism 8, 91, 149, 151, 172

theatrical metaphor 34, 120–122 theory development 34–35 theory of lay epistemology 29, 59–60, 61, 70 Thibodeau, P. 43, 56 thinking 39–40 Tice, D. 109 time: as money 99; self-regulation and mental time travel 110–112; spatial metaphors 1–7, 58, 84 topography 99 tree of life models 66, 67 trust 46–47, 130, 131, 132, 151 truth 69–70, 80n4 Turner, Victor 98 uncertainty 61–62, 64, 65, 114, 147, 171 union metaphor 139–140, 142 universality 31–32, 82, 83–89 up/down metaphors: attitudes 44; certainty motivation 61–62; depression 184–185; intergroup relations 156–157; memory 48–49; power 41, 156; self-esteem 117–118; universality across cultures 32, 84 value 117, 118–119 values: consistency motivation 29, 60, 65; dirt and cleanliness 159, 161; moral 8, 96 vehicle accident metaphor 53–55, 62, 69, 71–72, 177, 178 Vico, Giambattista 192n3 violence 149, 150, 163 visualization 6–7, 115–116 vivid metaphors 180–181 vocabulary, conceptual 97 Vygotsky, L. 73 Walton, G. 109 war 8, 21, 68, 78–79, 95, 189; cancer 181, 184, 185–186, 187; framing 25–26, 43; life as a battle 94, 101, 102; political discourse 172, 173–174; sexual courtship 137; vivid metaphors 180 warmth: embodiment hypothesis 87; intergroup relations 158; intimacy 148n2; person perception 40, 41; personal attraction 130, 131; transfer effects 52; trust 47; see also temperature weight 43 Weisbuch, M. 165

Index  233

Weise, D. 145 Western cultures 4, 80n6, 91, 96 Whitman, Walt 107 Williams, L. 130 willpower 108–110 Winnicott, D. 147 women 68, 130, 138–139, 149, 162, 164–165, 172–173, 180

Wood, J. 140 Woolf, Virginia 69 workers 165 working models 145 worldviews 39, 65–66, 68, 82, 94, 95–96, 101 Zarkadi, T. 179