metaphor research essay

Metaphor research as a research strategy in social sciences and humanities

• Published: 11 March 2023
• Volume 58 , pages 227–248, ( 2024 )

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• Sepehr Ghazinoory   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6761-4694 1 &
• Parvaneh Aghaei   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5185-3589 1  

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Metaphors have so far inspired many researchers to explain complex concepts or new theorizing. But there is no clear instruction for metaphor-based research and its validation principles. Here, we first locate metaphor research in social sciences and humanities (SSH) and classify different types of its use. Then we describe the basics of metaphor including its concept, types, components and characteristics. Since the methodology is of special importance in SSH, we introduce the metaphor research strategy in the research onion. Then, inspired by the stages of creative thinking, we present a specific process to carry out this strategy. The stages of proposed process include "expression of rationale and research question", "identification of possible metaphors and selection of preferable one", "evidence collection and cross-domain mapping", and "fitting test". We also propose a fitting test consisting of seven essential principles, which ensure that the final design of the metaphor is appropriate and works properly. The results of this research can formalize and validate the metaphor research as an efficient strategy for theorizing, futurology and describing complex concepts.

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Ghazinoory, S., Aghaei, P. Metaphor research as a research strategy in social sciences and humanities. Qual Quant 58 , 227–248 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01641-8

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Research on metaphor processing during the past five decades: a bibliometric analysis

• Zhibin Peng 1 &
• Omid Khatin-Zadeh 2 , 3  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  928 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Metaphor processing has been the subject of extensive research over the past five decades. A systematic review of metaphor processing publications through bibliometric tools can provide a clear overview of research on metaphor processing. In this study, we used the CiteSpace bibliometric tool to conduct a systematic review of publications related to metaphor processing. A total of 3271 works published and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) were gathered. These works had been published between 1970 and 2022. We analyzed the co-citations of these works by CiteSpace to identify the most influential publications in metaphor processing research. A co-occurrence term analysis was done to identify dominant topics in this area of research. The results of this analysis showed that Language, comprehension, metaphor, figurative language , and context were the most frequent keywords. The most prominent clusters were students, figurative language, right hemisphere, embodied cognition, comprehension, N400 , and anger . Based on the results of this analysis, we suggest that task properties such as response format and linguistic features should be carefully taken into account in future studies on metaphor processing.

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Introduction.

How people understand and produce metaphors has long aroused the interest of scholars from various disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. From the 1970s, scholars began to study the processing of metaphors through experiments. Throughout the past five decades, a large body of experimental and theoretical works on metaphor have been produced, and many journals have started to publish papers related to metaphor. During this period, many researchers in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics published their works on metaphor. These works have fundamentally changed the ways that researchers have been studying metaphors. This is particularly the case with research on metaphor processing. According to a study conducted by Han et al. ( 2022 ), research on metaphor processing has been the most active area of research on metaphor.

Metaphor processing research is an interdisciplinary area of study on metaphor that involves linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. A large number of works on metaphor processing have been published in recent years, including reviews directed at selected subtopics. For instance, Rai and Chakraverty ( 2020 ) provided a systematic review of computational models and approaches to metaphor comprehension. This systemic review presented a concise yet representative picture of computational metaphor processing. In a related work, Kertész, Rákosi, and Csatár ( 2012 ) presented a review that was focused on the data, problems, heuristics, and results in cognitive research on metaphor. Some works have presented comprehensive reviews of studies conducted on metaphor comprehension in non-typical populations. For example, Morsanyi et al. ( 2020 ) conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of metaphor processing in autism. Kalandadze et al. ( 2019 ) also presented a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on metaphor comprehension in individuals suffering from autism. This review specifically focused on task properties. However, among these works, except for a review paper published by Holyoak and Stamenković ( 2018 ), no other publication has specifically focused on theories and evidence related to metaphor processing. Furthermore, the past review papers have been primarily based on subjective judgment rather than bibliometric tools. Therefore, a systematic review conducted by bibliometric tools can shed new light on our understanding of metaphor processing research. In the literature of the field, we found just two works on bibliometrics of conceptual metaphor research (Han et al., 2022 ; Zhao et al., 2023 ). These two works have presented bibliometric assessments of published works on conceptual metaphor theory. However, they are only about conceptual metaphors in general. To fill this gap in the literature of the field, we used CiteSpace to present a systematic review of studies on metaphor processing.

CiteSpace is a bibliometric analysis tool that can provide an exhaustive account of research in any area over a certain period of time. In this way, it can suggest some directions for future research. Compared to those reviews relying on subjective judgment, a review conducted by CiteSpace can help us navigate through the key documents, research fields, and dominant topics in metaphor processing. Importantly, the results of such analysis can be presented in the form of easily understandable diagrams. We intended to identify the most productive and influential journals, authors, and institutions in the field of metaphor processing. Also, we intended to identify the most influential documents, active research areas, and dominant topics in metaphor processing research. Specifically, by analyzing the co-occurrence of keywords associated with metaphor processing, we aimed to depict a cluster picture of related keywords and dominant topics in this area of research. In this way, we intended to answer the following research questions:

Q1: What are the active research areas and dominant topics in metaphor processing research?

Q2: Is it possible to use a cluster picture of related keywords and research topics to identify research features that play a critical role in studies on metaphor processing?

We hypothesized that a cluster picture of related keywords and research topics in metaphor processing can be used to identify critical research properties that can be taken into account in future studies on metaphor processing.

Methodology

Data collection.

As the study was focused on metaphor processing, we collected and analyzed the published documents by conducting an advanced search in the Web of Science (WoS), Thomson Reuters Core Collection. This search incorporated Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A and HCI), Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), and Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). We chose WoS as the data source for two reasons. Firstly, WoS has established an independent and comprehensive editing process to ensure the excellent quality of the journals and has formed an unparalleled data structure based on more than 50 years of consistent, accurate, and complete indexing. The indexed journals in the Web of Science Core Collection have been carefully selected. Therefore, the articles indexed in WoS are of high quality. Secondly, WoS is CiteSpace’s primary data source. CiteSpace has been designed to work with WoS data. Datasets from other sources have to be transformed before they can be visualized in CiteSpace.

The following fields were used to retrieve the data:

TS = (metaphor*) AND (process* OR comprehen*)), which means that only articles with both “metaphor” and “process” or comprehen(sion) in the title or abstract, or keywords are retrieved.

Time span=1970–2022

Document Type=article OR review

(“*”is a wildcard in WoS that represents any group of characters, including no character. For example, metaphor*=metaphor, metaphors, and metaphorical, etc. In addition, the review articles in this research do not contain book reviews.)

Totally, 8358 papers were collected from 123 WoS categories, including experimental psychology, neurosciences, business, linguistics, management, music, nursing, and law. In our study, we specifically focused on metaphor-processing research in the fields of linguistics, psychology, and neurosciences. Therefore, we chose the WoS categories related to linguistics, psychology, neurosciences, literature, communication, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, religion, history, and law (i.e. “Linguistics” or “Language Linguistics” or “Psychology Experimental” or “Education Educational Research” or “Neurosciences” or “Psychology Multidisciplinary” or “Psychology Clinical” or “Psychology” or “Psychology Psychoanalysis” or “Psychology Educational” or “Psychology Applied” or “Psychology Social” or “Psychology Developmental” or “literature” or “communication” or “sociology” or “philosophy” or “anthropology” or “religion” or “history” and “law”). After excluding those works that were unrelated to metaphor processing, 3271 publications remained for further analysis.

Descriptive analysis

Before visualization by CiteSpace, we conducted a descriptive analysis of yearly publication trends. Our aim was to identify the most productive journals, authors, and institutions. These descriptive analyses were directly done on the data obtained from the WoS website. The number of works published each year has been given on the WoS website. We used SPSS software to obtain the annual trend of publications (see Fig. 1 ). The numbers of publications for each journal, author, and institution have also been given on the WoS website. We selected the top ten for analysis.

The diagram reveals the publication number for each year and the general trend.

CiteSpace analysis

The descriptive analysis of WoS provides only a basic overview of the research field. It cannot provide an exhaustive account of the research projects over previous decades and directions for future research. Previous reviews without bibliometric tools mainly relied on prior knowledge and subjective judgment. To address this problem, we used CiteSpace to examine the structures of the knowledge of metaphor processing that have been developed over the past years.

In this study, we used CiteSpace, a bibliometric analysis program developed by Chen ( 2004 , 2006 , 2017 ; also see Chen et al., 2010 ; Chen and Song, 2019 ). Bibliometric analysis offers an objective and quantitative method for examining published works in a certain area of research (Mou et al., 2019 , p. 221; Chen, 2020 ). CiteSpace is a Java application for analyzing co-citations and presenting them in the form of visual co-citation networks (Chen, 2004 ). CiteSpace is one of the most well-known bibliometric tools. It offers a variety of analyses, such as keyword analysis and reference analysis, to help academics identify current and upcoming research trends in a field (Mou et al., 2019 ). The bibliographic data files we collected from WoS were in the field-tagged Institute for Scientific Information Export Format. The “full record and cited references” was selected as the content. In this way, CiteSpace could easily identify the files. Once the files were loaded into the CiteSpace, the following procedural operations were performed on them: time slicing, thresholding, modeling, pruning, merging, and mapping (Chen, 2004 ).

In this study, we conducted two separate visualizing analyses of the data. One was a document co-citation analysis, which helped us to identify the important documents in metaphor processing research. A co-cited reference was called a node, and when several nodes were strongly related to one another, they formed a cluster. The other was a keyword co-occurrence analysis. The purpose of this analysis was to identify the most-discussed areas in research on metaphor processing.

Publication years, journals, productive authors, and institutions on metaphor processing

In the Web of Science core collection, the first article about metaphor processing we obtained was published in 1971 by Laurette ( 1971 ). There was no publication on metaphor processing in the years 1972, 1973, and 1974. From 1995 to 2022, more than 50 works were done each year. The maximum number of annual publications belongs to 2021 with 198 published works. Figure 1 presents the annual publications on metaphor processing. Overall, the results show a steady increase in publications on metaphor processing. Therefore, it can clearly be seen that metaphor processing has caught the attention of more and more researchers worldwide.

The 3271 articles or reviews that were examined in this study were published in a number of journals. Table 1 lists the 10 journals that published the highest number of papers in this area of research. With 116 publications on metaphor processing, Metaphor and Symbol , the only SSCI-indexed journal publishing works on metaphor research, was in first place among journals in terms of the number of publications. Frontiers in Psychology and Journal of Pragmatics were in second and third places, with 98 and 71 publications, respectively. The majority of the top 10 journals, as seen in Table 1 , are in the fields of psychology or neuroscience. When considering a submission, metaphor-processing researchers might use Table 1 to select appropriate journals for their papers.

The 10 authors having the highest number of publications in metaphor processing are listed in Table 2 . The author with the most papers published on metaphor processing was Mashal (36), followed by Faust (28) and Gibbs (26).

Table 3 lists the 10 institutions having the highest number of published works in metaphor processing. The University of California is at the top of this list with 131 publications in total, followed by the University of London with 76 articles and Bar Ilan University with 64 articles (Table 3 ).

Document co-citation analysis

A fundamental measure used by academic communities to assess the impact of a publication is the frequency of citations. The value of a published work and its impact on the field is at least partly dependent on the number of works that have been cited. We can identify the important documents in a knowledge domain by analyzing document co-citations. CiteSpace is an efficient tool that can conduct such analysis.

We analyzed document co-citations of 3271 publications collected from the WoS. We used CiteSpace to visualize the 3271 bibliographic recordings from 1970 to 2022. The top 50 papers having the highest number of citations in each 3-year were chosen using a time slice of three years. In order to include all the references cited in those documents regardless of when they were published, we set the Look Back Years (LBY) parameter to −1. Cutting off long-range citation linkages had a positive impact on the clarity of the results; it could increase the clarity of the network structure because long-distance links frequently go hand in hand with a spaghetti-like network. The results are shown in Fig. 2 . The cited publications and co-citation relationships across the entire data set were represented by 1055 distinct nodes and 5928 linkages, respectively. The top 10 articles in the area of metaphor processing research are shown in Table 4 .

The diagram of document co-citations reveals the top 10 most cited articles among the 3271 publications collected from the WoS.

Totally, between 1970 and 2022, 39 documents were cited more than 50 times. The top three most-cited publications in the world’s publications related to metaphor processing are classic books about Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in general, not about metaphor processing. The work that has received the most citations is “ Metaphors we Live by ” authored by Lakoff and Johnson ( 1980 ). This frequently cited book was a landmark that revolutionized research on metaphor processing. It contends that metaphor is a way of thinking, not just a rhetorical instrument. To put it simply, our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical. In contrast to earlier works that looked at metaphor as a purely linguistic figure of speech, this book emphasizes the conceptual nature of metaphor. It defines metaphor as a conceptual process in which a source domain is mapped into a target domain. For example, the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR, in which “argument” is the target and “war” is the source, can be used to explain a statement like “I defended my argument.” Since its introduction in 1980, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has gained popularity across various disciplines. The second-most quoted work is also written by Lakoff and Johnson ( 1999 ). This book challenged the Western traditional philosophy by proposing Embodied Philosophy based on the premise that our actions and our languages are based on our bodily experiences. Embodied Philosophy contends that abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Embodied Philosophy is thus considered as the philosophical basis of Cognitive Linguistics. The third most cited document is a monograph by Gibbs ( 1994 ). Gibbs illustrates that human cognition is inherently poetic and that figurative imagination is central to how we comprehend ourselves and our surroundings. It challenges the traditional understanding of the mind by demonstrating how figurative characteristics of language reflect the poetic structure of the mind. Psychology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory ideas and research are utilized to demonstrate fundamental ties between the poetic structure of the mind and daily language use. This monograph discusses methods and findings of psycholinguistic and cognitive psychology research to assess current philosophical, linguistic, and literary theories of figurative language. CMT aroused the interest of scholars from different disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Scholars in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics are particularly interested in the cognitive processing of metaphors.

The other publications in Table 4 are not about metaphor in general but about metaphor processing in particular. In an article entitled “An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the processing of novel metaphoric expressions”, Mashal et al. ( 2007 ) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural networks involved in the processing of related pairs of words that formed literal, novel, and conventional metaphorical expressions. Four different kinds of linguistic expressions were read by the participants, who then determined the relation between the two words (metaphoric, literal, or unrelated). The results showed that the degree of meaning salience of a linguistic expression, rather than literality or nonliterality, modulated the degree of left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) processing of metaphors. This supported the Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH, Giora, 1997 , 2003 ), which predicts a selective RH involvement in the processing of novel and nonsalient meanings. In this study, the salient interpretations were represented by conventional metaphors and literal expressions, whereas the nonsalient interpretations were represented by novel metaphorical expressions. Right posterior superior temporal sulcus, right inferior frontal gyrus, and left middle frontal gyrus showed considerably stronger activity when the novel metaphors were directly compared to the conventional metaphors. These findings back up the GSH and point to a unique function of the RH in the processing of novel metaphors. Additionally, verbal creativity may be selectively influenced by the right PSTS.

In order to look into the neural substrates underlying the processing of three different sentence types, Stringarisa et al. ( 2007 ) combined a novel cognitive paradigm with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI). Participants were required to read sentences that were either metaphorical, literal, or meaningless before deciding whether or not they made sense. The results of this experiment showed that various types of sentences were processed by various neural mechanisms. Both meaningless and metaphorical sentences activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), but not literal sentences. Furthermore, despite the lack of difference between reaction times of literal and metaphoric sentences, the left thalamus is activated only in deriving meaning from metaphoric utterances. The authors attribute this to metaphoric interpretation’s flexibility and ad hoc concept formation. Their findings do not support the idea that the right hemisphere is primarily involved in metaphor comprehension, in contrast to earlier studies.

The two publications mentioned above used new research methods, such as fMRI and ER-fMRI. Additional research methods, such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) by Pobric et al. ( 2008 ) and positron emission tomography (PET) by Bohrn et al. ( 2012 ), were also used in other highly cited papers.

Co-occurring terms analysis

Keywords of any paper present its theme and some kind of summary of the subject that is going to be discussed in it. The occurrence of two keywords in a piece of writing indicates that these words are closely related to one another in the content of the work. The prevailing view is that if two or more terms appear together more frequently, they are more closely related. Betweenness Centrality is one of the functions of CiteSpace that specifies the strength of the relation between two or more terms. This gives us the ability to predict the occurrence of a given term with other terms even in other related topics. If a keyword displays a high Betweenness Centrality value, the keyword may be very significant. In this study, the research areas and dominant topics can be determined utilizing keyword co-occurrence analysis.

We analyzed the keywords to identify the terms and phrases that had co-occurred in at least two separate publications. Highly-frequent terms can show hotspots in a specific field of research (Chen, 2004 ). In this study, we chose the slice length of 3 years, and we set the LBY to 5 years. The results showed language, comprehension, metaphor, figurative language and context were the top 5 key terms having the highest frequencies. The network of related keywords is shown in Fig. 3 , and the terms with a frequency of more than 40 are listed in Table 5 .

The keyword co-occurrence network diagram reveals the most popular keywords of metaphor processing research.

Cluster interpretations

We used CiteSpace to perform a cluster analysis on the basis of keyword co-occurrences. Totally, 528 nodes in the co-citation network with a 3-year time slice were obtained from the analysis. The seven greatest clusters in the research area of metaphor processing are displayed in Fig. 4 . Warmer colors represent more current research subjects, whereas cooler colors represent older research topics in the clusters.

The network diagram of the keyword co-occurrence cluster reveals the most significant clusters of metaphor processing research.

Table 6 shows the top 7 clusters of keywords in metaphor processing research. It is obtained by using index terms as labels for clusters. Also, the clusters were shown by log-likelihood ratio (LLR). The top 7 clusters are named students, figurative language, right hemisphere, embodied cognition, comprehension, N400 , and anger .

Cluster #0, as the largest cluster, is labeled as ‘students’. For native speakers, using and understanding metaphors is simple. However, understanding figurative statements might be challenging for non-native speakers. Littlemore et al. ( 2011 ) found that at a British university, second-language learners had trouble understanding 40% of metaphorical terms that were easily understood by native speakers. Results of another study showed that second-language learners tended to use metaphors incorrectly and in the wrong contexts (Kathpalia and Carmel, 2011 ). It may be challenging for second-language speakers to comprehend and generate metaphors since the metaphorical meaning of a term is developed in the social and cultural context of native speakers. Metaphorical expressions that are easily and automatically understandable for native speakers of a certain language may not be easily interpretable for second-language speakers of that language due to not having enough exposure to that language and culture (Kecskes, 2006 ). Therefore, one of the main concerns for second-language teachers is to enhance second-language learners’ ability in understanding metaphoric language and to use it efficiently in the cultural context of the second language. As a result, there is a lot of discussion in metaphor research about how to improve students’ ability in using metaphors. For instance, Hu et al. ( 2022 ) performed a randomized controlled trial to assess how metaphors affected the symptoms of anxiety in Chinese graduate students.

Cluster #1 is labeled as ‘figurative language’. This cluster shows that two key components of executive functions (working memory and inhibition) could play significant roles in figurative language processing. Since working memory holds information for a short period of time, it plays an active role in discourse comprehension. Therefore, this component of executive functions helps the individual use discourse clues and contextual information in the process of metaphor interpretation. Contextually relevant information and metaphorically relevant information are put together (Wilson and Sperber, 2012 ), enabling the individual to extract the intended metaphorical meaning from an expression. This is done by the active involvement of working memory. Also, the role of inhibition, as another component of executive functions, has been documented in many studies (e.g., Glucksberg et al., 2001 ). These two components can be in close interaction with one another in the process of metaphor comprehension.

Cluster #2 is labeled as ‘right hemisphere’ by LSI test (Chen et al., 2010 ). This cluster shows that functional magnetic resonance imaging has been a common technique in research on the role of the right hemisphere in metaphor processing. Over the past 20 years, researchers in the fields of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics have intensively studied the role of hemispheres in metaphor processing. Some scholars have hypothesized that the right hemisphere (RH) may have a special role in the processing of metaphorical language. However, many behavioral studies (e.g., Bohrn et al., 2012 ; Faust and Mashal, 2007 ; Mashal et al., 2007 ; Mashal and Faust, 2008 ) have evidence suggesting that the processing of familiar or conventional metaphors requires more left-lateralized processing, compared to the processing of unfamiliar metaphors. Additionally, bilateral processing of traditional metaphors was also supported by the findings of several studies (e.g., Bambini et al., 2011 ; Diaz et al., 2011 ). These results lend credence to the Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH), according to which semantic salience plays a key role in metaphor processing (Giora, 1997 , 2003 ). According to this hypothesis, conventional, frequent, recognizable, and prototypical meanings are simpler to process than less-prominent meanings. Therefore, the meaning of a conventional metaphor is more salient and more accessible than its literal counterpart. On the other hand, in a novel metaphor, the literal meaning is more evident and the figurative meaning is disclosed later with the support of contextual clues. The GSH claims that unlike novel metaphors, whose meanings are acquired through integration and inferential processes, conventional metaphors’ prominent meanings are stored in the mental lexicon. The GSH also predicts that the left hemisphere (LH) is more active in comprehending conventional and salient metaphorical meanings, while the right hemisphere (RH) is more active in comprehending innovative and non-salient metaphorical meanings (Giora, 2003 ).

Cluster #3 is labeled as ‘embodied cognition’. Theories of embodied cognition challenge the traditional theories of cognition that are based on amodal symbols. These theories offer new perspectives on human cognitive processes. These theories hold that simulation, situated action, and bodily states play a crucial role in cognitive processes. Cognitive linguistics gave rise to some of the first set of theories that supported grounded cognition. Theories of embodied language processing emphasized the role of body, situation, and simulation in language as opposed to the amodal theories of grammar that emerged in the Cognitive Revolution (e.g., Chomsky, 1957 ). The study of embodiment has caught the interest of researchers working in traditional cognitive science, who have started to incorporate the ideas of embodiment in their works. The role of embodiment in language processing was developed and promoted by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Rafael Núñez based on advancements in the field of cognitive science (Lakoff, 1987 ; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 ; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999 ; Lakoff and Turner, 1989 ; Lakoff and Núñez, 2000 ). In their studies, they have found evidence suggesting that people draw on their knowledge of everyday physical phenomena to comprehend concepts. According to theories of embodiment and embodied language processing, cognition and cognitive processes are based on the knowledge that comes from the body. There has been an increase in interest in studying the relationship between embodied cognition and language over the last four decades. According to theories of embodied cognition, when people understand words, their sensorimotor systems are engaged in simulating the concepts the words refer to (Jirak et al., 2010 ). Lakoff and Johnson’s ( 1980 , 1999 ) conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is one of the most prominent theories of embodied cognition. This theory holds that situated and embodied knowledge serves as the metaphorical foundation for abstract concepts. Specifically, Lakoff and Johnson ( 1980 ) argued that abstract concepts are metaphorically understood in terms of concrete concepts with the support of sensorimotor systems. Many studies in various languages have demonstrated how individuals frequently use physical metaphors to discuss abstract concepts. Literature also uses a lot of these metaphors (e.g., Turner, 1996 ). A crucial question is whether these metaphors only reflect linguistic convention or whether they genuinely represent how we think (e.g., Murphy, 1997 ). There is mounting evidence that these metaphors are essential to our thought (e.g., Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002 ; Gibbs, 2006 ).

Cluster #4 is labeled as ‘comprehension’. One of the keywords in this cluster is the term context . This supports the key role of context in the process of metaphor comprehension. Context of a conversation can provide some information that contributes to metaphor processing (e.g., Steen et al., 2010 ). It helps the individual disregard non-relevant literal meanings and keeps the metaphorically relevant information to derive the intended metaphorical meaning.

Cluster #5 is labeled as ‘N400’. The N400 is a part of time-locked EEG signals called event-related potentials (ERP). It is a negative-going deflection that normally peaks over centro-parietal electrode sites and occurs 400 ms after the stimulus begins, though it can also last between 250 and 500 ms. The N400 is a typical brain response to words and other meaningful (or potentially meaningful) stimuli, such as visual and auditory words, sign language signs, images, faces, environmental sounds, and odors (Kutas and Federmeier, 2000 , 2011 ). During the past 4 decades, ERP has been one of the techniques most frequently employed in cognitive neuroscience research to examine the physiological correlates of sensory, perceptual, and cognitive activities associated with information processing (Handy, 2005 ). ERP is also widely employed in metaphor processing studies, along with other imaging techniques such as fMRI, PET, and MEG.

Cluster #6 is labeled as ‘anger’. This cluster includes the key terms figurative language and eye tracking . This suggests that the metaphoric conceptualization of some emotional states and emotional terms such as anger can be reflected in eye movements. Interestingly, some works have suggested that this can happen not only for emotion-related concepts but also for other categories of abstract concepts that are metaphorically described in terms of movement (e.g., Singh and Mishra, 2010 ).

This clustering of keywords offers an organized and clear picture of key concepts that have been involved in various lines of research on metaphor processing. This clustering shows which lines of investigation have had a strong relationship with one another in research on metaphor processing. Therefore, the suggested clustering of keywords in metaphor comprehension offers a map for research on metaphor processing. This can be a guiding tool for researchers to have a clearer idea and organized map of how various lines of research on metaphor processing intersect with one another.

Discussion and implication for future studies

Over the past 50 years, metaphor processing has been a widely discussed topic among scholars in various disciplines, particularly researchers in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Through the aforementioned document co-citation analysis, co-occurring word analysis, and cluster visualization which were done by CiteSpace, this study showed that research on metaphor processing has mainly focused on hemispheric processing of metaphors, metaphor comprehension, the embodied cognition basis of metaphor processing, behavioral-experiments study, ERP method and other techniques (fMRI, PET, and MEG, etc.), and the comparision of metaphor processing of adults with children.

Results of this study showed that research projects on metaphor processing are mainly conducted by experiments, including behavioral experiments, ERPs, and other imaging techniques such as fMRI, PET, and MEG. However, there is some conflicting evidence in the research findings. For instance, many studies have shown no statistically significant difference between ASD and TD groups in the understanding of metaphors and figurative language (Hermann et al., 2013 ; Kasirer and Mashal, 2014 ; Mashal and Kasirer, 2011 ; Norbury, 2005 ). These results suggest that factors other than disease-specific traits may account for the differences in results between studies. In the past, it has been discovered that group matching strategy and general language proficiency can account for part of the between-study variability in figurative language comprehension (Kalandadze, et al., 2018 ). However, further pertinent variables need to be examined in order to fully explain the observed variabilities. One reason for these different results may be due to the different theories the researchers adhere to. Another reason for mixed results may be due to the task properties of those experiments.

As for the theories on metaphor processing, there are two models that are widely used to study the processing of metaphors, namely, the Direct Access View (Gibbs, 1984 , 1994 ; Gibbs and Gerrig, 1989 ) and the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 1997 , 2003 ). According to the Direct Access View, in metaphor processing, the non-literal meaning of the metaphor can be directly processed, without inferring and discarding the literal meaning in an initial stage. Based on the Direct Access View, the Parallel Hypothesis was proposed, which holds that understanding figurative language is not different from that of literal language. Therefore, it is not necessary to assume any special cognitive mechanisms to process figurative language such as metaphors (Glucksberg et al., 1982 ). However, the Parallel Hypothesis can only hold if the literal and figurative meanings are fully understood. When the literal and figurative meanings are inconsistent, the coexistence of literal and figurative meanings cannot be explained by the Parallel Hypothesis. This does not mean that the literal meaning is abandoned before it is processed. Rather, the context facilitates the understanding of the inconsistent literal meanings. Therefore, the Direct Access View also supports the Context-dependent Hypothesis, which holds that we have a direct understanding of the figurative meanings with the help of sufficient contextual information.

Another theory on metaphor processing that is widely used to support metaphor research findings is the GSH (Giora, 1997 , 2003 ). As mentioned, the GSH holds that metaphor processing is influenced by the degree of semantic prominence. That is, conventional, frequent, recognizable, and prototypical meanings are easier to assimilate than less-salient meanings. One prediction of GSH is that the right hemisphere (RH) is more active in perceiving creative and non-salient metaphorical meanings, while the left hemisphere (LH) is more active in comprehending conventional and salient metaphorical meanings (Giora, 2003 ).

While the Direct Access View holds that metaphorical meaning is directly accessible, the Graded Salience Hypothesis assumes that metaphorical meaning is activated after the activation of the salient literal meaning. Depending on which theoretical framework is taken for certain research, different and conflicting results may be obtained. However, it should be noted that metaphor processing is a complex phenomenon and a large number of factors may be involved in it. Therefore, a single theory may not be able to describe all aspects of metaphor processing for all types of metaphors. The Direct Access View can describe the processing of highly conventional metaphors and idiomatic expressions. In daily conversations, people can easily produce and understand conventional metaphors and idiomatic expressions automatically. But, in some cases, this theory fails to describe the processing of novel metaphors. On the other hand, the Graded Salience Hypothesis may provide a better picture of how novel metaphors are processed. Therefore, in order to explain the discrepancies in research findings, we may need to take broader frameworks. When a single theoretical framework cannot explain discrepancies, two complementary frameworks can be taken and combined to explain and reconcile the conflicting results. Furthermore, a given theoretical framework may be more applicable to certain groups of people. For example, the GSH may be more applicable to ASD than the AD group, while the Direct Access View may be more applicable to TD than the ASD group. In other words, types of metaphors (e.g., conventional vs. novel metaphor), features of comprehenders (ASD vs. TD group), and possibly many other factors determine which theory of metaphor processing is most applicable. Putting various theoretical frameworks together and trying to make broader theoretical frameworks is a potential solution for responding to some questions that have not been answered yet.

Another reason for the differences in results between studies on metaphor processing may be the task properties of those experiments. There is a consensus in the literature of behavioral and neuroimaging studies that factors such as clinical populations, task characteristics, response format (i.e., multiple-choice vs. verbal explanation task), and lack of linguistic context can affect participants’ capacity to interpret metaphors (Pouscoulous, 2011 , 2014 , Rossetti et al., 2018 ). For instance, when assessed with an act-out rather than a verbal explanation task, children with TD demonstrate earlier proficiency in metaphor understanding. This may be because verbal and other types of tasks place different demands on a child’s linguistic and cognitive abilities (Pouscoulous, 2011 ). A similar explanation for how people with ASD perform metaphor tasks is based on response format. For instance, people with ASD may grasp metaphors similarly to people with TD, but they may have more trouble conveying them orally because of problems with expressive language (Kwok et al., 2015 ). Other aspects of the metaphors may also play a role, such as the amount and type of contextual information that is available to interpret the expression, or the degree of familiarity with the expression (Pouscoulous, 2011 , 2014 ). By combining the preceding studies utilizing the techniques of systematic review and a meta-analysis, Kalandadze et al. ( 2019 ) collated the knowledge that is currently available concerning task properties. Their aim was to find out how task properties affect metaphor comprehension ability in people with ASD compared to people with TD. They discovered that previous studies had used various kinds of materials and tasks that were either created by the researchers who designed the studies or were adapted from earlier research. The possible impact of the task properties was rarely taken into account in the previous studies, despite the fact that the task properties varied widely. Degree of individual’s familiarity with the metaphor (conventionality/novelty), degree of complexity of syntactic structure, linguistic and non-linguistic context (physical context) of the metaphoric expression, modality of stimulus (e.g., audio, visual), response format (verbal or non-verbal), and timing of the task are important task properties that can affect results of studies and their interpretations. Therefore, in order to obtain more accurate results, these factors need to be taken into account.

Implication for future studies

Based on the discussion in the section “Discussion”, we suggest that two issues deserve more consideration in future studies on metaphor processing. The first one is the theories that are employed to support the findings of metaphor processing studies. As different theories on metaphor processing may generate different conclusions, it is suggested that researchers discuss the results from different theoretical perspectives, rather than a single theory.

The second issue that merits more consideration is task properties. Task properties are important but have been neglected. The existing research on metaphor processing has paid little attention to the relevance of task properties in performance on metaphor comprehension tasks. Therefore, we contend that task properties including response format and linguistic features (i.e., metaphor familiarity, the syntactic structure of the metaphor, linguistic context, and stimulus modality) should be carefully considered in future investigations on metaphor processing. The systematic review and meta-analysis by Kalandadze et al. ( 2019 ) revealed that some task properties, including metaphor familiarity, are more frequently taken into account than others when determining the impact of a task. The least studied property in previous research is syntactic structure. Also, research on metaphor processing has not done a good job to examine the influence of contextual information on different groups of people. In future metaphor processing studies, these task properties merit additional consideration. When creating and reporting task properties in metaphor studies, researchers need to be extremely careful.

It should be noted that metaphor processing is a complex and multidimensional process. Therefore, in order to obtain a clear picture of various aspects of metaphor processing, researchers of various fields need to collaborate in interdisciplinary research projects. Neuroimaging data collected by neurolinguistics experts, behavioral data collected by researchers in psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and even corpus-based data can be combined to offer a broader picture of metaphor processing. Various types of evidence can complement each other and fill the gaps. This is a crucial point that should be considered in future research on metaphor processing.

As noted by Han et al. ( 2022 ), metaphor processing has been the most studied research area in metaphor research. Since the 1970s, how metaphors are processed in the brain has been extensively investigated by scholars in linguistics, neurolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. However, up to now, bibliometric tools like CiteSpace have not been used to systematically review literature on metaphor processing. In our study, a total of 3271 bibliometric recordings were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection. These documents had been published between 1970 and 2022. The descriptive analysis revealed a yearly increase in the number of publications, indicating that metaphor processing has caught the interest of academics from a variety of disciplines. Metaphor and Symbol , the sole SSCI-indexed journal devoted to metaphor research, took the first position among journals in terms of publishing yield with 116 publications on metaphor processing. Mashal, Faust, and Gibbs are the three most prolific authors in terms of publications on metaphor processing.

These bibliometric analyses through the CiteSpace software showed that language, comprehension, metaphor, figurative language , and context were the five most frequent keywords. Also, the most prominent clusters were students, figurative language, right hemisphere, embodied cognition, comprehension, N400 , and anger . These findings showed that research on metaphor processing has largely focused on the hemispheric processing of metaphors, metaphor comprehension, and embodiment in metaphor processing. Behavioral experiments, ERP and other techniques, such as fMRI, PET, and MEG were the common techniques in metaphor processing research. The current review through CiteSpace indicates that putting various theoretical frameworks together and trying to make broader theoretical frameworks is a potential solution for responding to some questions that have not been answered yet. This review also suggests that in future studies on metaphor processing, task properties such as response format and linguistic features should be carefully taken into account.

Although the current study aimed to be comprehensive within its defined scope, it was subject to some inevitable limitations. Firstly, being limited to WoS documents was one of the limitations of this study. Other databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, Index Medicus, and Microsoft Academic Search were not included in this study. Secondly, publishers’ labeling of document types was not always correct. Some articles presented as reviews by WoS, for example, were not review papers at all (Yeung, 2021 ). Thirdly, we used only one scientometric instrument. Fourthly, while several prospective papers have recently been published, these studies were not acknowledged. Furthermore, because of obliteration, the citation count for some earlier published works was low.

Nonetheless, this study comprises a ground-breaking bibliometric assessment of global research on metaphor processing and provides a clear overview of global publications related to metaphor processing. Hence, it can be a helpful source for researchers interested in metaphor and metaphor processing. The results of this review have both theoretical and practical implications for the study of metaphor processing and metaphor in general.

Data availability

All data analyzed during this study can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JFRP5W .

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Using Metaphors in Academic Writing

Have you ever wanted to translate formidable, and sometimes tedious, academic content into one that is easily comprehensible and captivating? Academics are often told that the language of science is formal, precise and descriptive with no space for the abstract. However, using metaphors in your academic writing could be helpful if used to explain complex scientific concepts. Just remember not to be cautious and exercise restraint when using different types of metaphors or it could make your academic writing seem unprofessional.

What is a metaphor?

A metaphor is defined as a figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. (Merriam-Webster, 2022). Derived from the Greek word ‘metapherein,’ which means ‘to transfer,’ metaphors transfer the meaning of one word to another to encourage a feeling. For example, by writing ‘ All the world’s a stage,’ Shakespeare creates a powerful imagery of ideas through transference. By bringing life to words, metaphors add value to writing and are a great addition to a writer’s toolkit.

Difference between similes and metaphors and analogies

When you’re writing in English, you should know the difference between similes and metaphors and analogies. While these are similar in terms of purpose, i.e., comparing two things, they are different in how they are used. A simile is explicit about the comparison, while a metaphor simply points to the similarities between two things, and an analogy seeks to use comparisons to explain a concept.

This could be confusing, however, there are simple ways to detect the differences between similes and metaphors and analogies. You can identify a simile by looking for the use of words ‘like’ , ‘as’, for example, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates.’ On the other hand, metaphors are more rhetorical and not so literal, for example, ‘The news was music to her ears.’ An analogy is more complex and seeks to point out the similarity in two things to explain a point, for example, ‘Finding the right dress is like finding a needle in a haystack.’

Types of metaphors

There are several different types of metaphors in the English language, here are some of the most common variations.

• Standard metaphor: A standard metaphor directly compares two unrelated items. For instance, by drawing a link between things and feelings, we’ve been able to convey the importance of laughter in this example of a metaphor: Laughter is the best medicine.
• Implied metaphor: This type of metaphor implies comparison without mentioning one of the things being compared. Take this example, where the coach’s voice is implied to be as loud as thunder: “Don’t give up!” thundered the coach from the side lines.
• Visual metaphor: This type of metaphor compares abstract objects or ideas that are difficult to imagine to a visual image that is easily identifiable; providing the former with a pictorial identity. This type of metaphor is most widely used in advertisements. For example, for the phrase ‘ The Earth is melting’ , the visual metaphor used to signal global warming is a melting ice cream.
• Extended metaphor: This type of metaphor extends the comparison throughout an article, document, or stanza. For example, when poet Emily Dickinson wrote “Hope” is the thing with feathers, she used feathers as a metaphor to compare hope to a bird with wings.
• Grammatical metaphors : Also known as nominalization, this type of metaphor rewrites verbs or adjectives as nouns. It’s most commonly used in academic and scientific texts as a way to separate spoken and written language, remove personal pronouns, and write in a concise manner. For instance, ‘ Millions of men, women and children starved to death in the 1943 Bengal Famine as a direct result of Churchill’s policies.’ This can be rephrased as ‘British policies led to the 1943 Bengal Famine, impacting the country’s people and politics for decades.’

Using metaphors in academic writing

Scholars pride themselves on creating research papers that are factually correct and precise, and metaphors may be perceived to detract from this. However, using metaphors may be a great way to explain scientific and technical concepts to readers, who may not know as much about the subject. While metaphors can add to formal academic writing and make it more engaging, it’s important to find a balance. Here are some tips to keep in mind when using metaphors in academic writing:

• Don’t use metaphors as the foundation of your academic content, use them instead to support your argument and drive home a point.
• Choose your metaphors carefully taking into account your primary audience; using figures of speech specific to any one region can introduce confusion instead of clarity.
• Use metaphors wisely and only when needed so not to distract the reader. They should flow naturally and enhance the content rather than detract from the point.

Metaphors are a nifty way to create engaging content even for academic writers. Greek philosopher Aristotle once wrote, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others.” So get ready to wield that pen and reach for the stars!

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Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning

Affiliation Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America

* E-mail: [email protected]

• Paul H. Thibodeau, 
• Lera Boroditsky

• Published: February 23, 2011
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782
• Reader Comments

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.

Citation: Thibodeau PH, Boroditsky L (2011) Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16782. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782

Editor: Jan Lauwereyns, Kyushu University, Japan

Received: November 3, 2010; Accepted: January 13, 2011; Published: February 23, 2011

Copyright: © 2011 Thibodeau, Boroditsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This research was funded by NSF Grant No. 0608514 to LB. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Both crime, and the criminal justice system designed to deal with crime, impose tremendous costs on society. Over 11 million serious crimes are reported in the United States each year [1] , and the US has the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country [2] . Despite being home to only 5% of the world's population, the United States holds 25% of the world's prisoners, with nearly 1% of the US population living behind bars [3] . Addressing the crime problem is an issue of central importance in social policy. How do people conceptualize crime, and how do they reason about solving the crime problem?

Public discourse about crime is saturated with metaphor. Increases in the prevalence of crime are described as crime waves, surges or sprees . A spreading crime problem is a crime epidemic, plaguing a city or infecting a community . Crimes themselves are attacks in which criminals prey on unsuspecting victims . And criminal investigations are hunts where criminals are tracked and caught . Such metaphorical language pervades not only discourse about crime, but nearly all talk about the abstract and complex [4] – [5] . Are such metaphors just fancy ways of talking, or do they have real consequences for how people reason about complex social problems like crime?

Previous work has demonstrated that using different metaphors can lead people to reason differently about notions like time, emotion, or electricity [6] – [11] . For example, people's reasoning about electricity flow differed systematically depending on the metaphoric frame used to describe electricity (flowing water vs. teeming crowds) [6] . Such findings on metaphorical framing are grounded in a larger body of work that has established the importance of linguistic framing in reasoning [12] , and the importance of narrative structure in instantiating meaning [13] . However, questions about the pervasiveness of the role of metaphor in thinking remain. Critics argue that very little work has empirically demonstrated that metaphors in language influence how people think about and solve real-world problems [14] .

In this paper we investigate the role of metaphor in reasoning about a domain of societal importance: social policy on crime. Beyond establishing whether metaphors play a role in how people reason about crime, our studies are designed to further illuminate the mechanisms through which metaphors can shape understanding and reasoning. If metaphors in language invite conceptual analogies, then different metaphors should bring to mind different knowledge structures and suggest different analogical inferences. In this paper we ask if metaphors indeed play such a role in reasoning about social policy. That is, do we reason about complex social issues in the same way that we talk about them: through a patchwork of metaphors?

Some observations of crime policy in the real world suggest that people may indeed take metaphors as more than just talk. For example, shifts in metaphors are often accompanied by shifts in policy. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs , with smugglers, dealers, and users defined as the enemy to be fought. Policies in line with the war on drugs mandated longer, harsher sentences for drug-related crime. Since then, the incarceration rate has more than quadrupled in the US [15] .

Others have taken the crime is a virus metaphor seriously and have implemented programs to treat crime as a contagious disease. For example, a crime-prevention program run by an epidemiologist in Chicago treats crime according to the same regimen used for diseases like AIDS and tuberculoses, focusing on preventing spread from person to person [16] .

Some criminal justice scholars have even implicated bad metaphor as the root of failure in crime prevention [17] . In one case described by Kelling, a serial rapist attacked 11 girls over a 15-month period before being captured by the police. During those 15 months, the police had information that (had they shared it with the community) could have prevented some of the attacks. Instead, they opted to keep that information secret to set traps for their suspect. The police, on Kelling's analysis, were entrenched in their metaphorical role of hunting down and catching the criminal, and neglected their responsibility to inoculate the community against further harm. The girls, Kelling writes, “were victims… not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor” (p. 1).

In this paper we empirically investigate whether using different metaphors to talk about crime indeed leads people to reason about crime differently and, in turn, leads them to propose different solutions to the crime problem. We will focus on two contrasting metaphors for crime: crime as a virus and crime as a beast. Do these metaphors subtly encourage people to reason about crime in a way that is consistent with the entailments of the metaphors? For example, might talking about crime as a virus lead people to propose treating the crime problem the same way as one would treat a literal virus epidemic? Might talking about crime as a beast lead people to propose dealing with a crime problem the same way as one would deal with a literal wild animal attack?

To help generate a clear set of predictions, we conducted a norming survey asking 28 participants on Amazon's Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com ; [18] ) to describe what should be done to solve a literal virus or beast problem. We asked people to imagine a “virus infecting a city” or a “wild beast preying on a city” and then to describe the best way to solve the problem that they had imagined. Participants who imagined a “virus infecting the city” universally suggested investigating the source of the virus and implementing social reforms and prevention measures to decrease the spread of the virus. That is, they wanted to know where the virus was coming from, whether the city could develop a vaccine and how the virus was spreading. They also wanted to institute educational campaigns to inform residents about how to avoid or deal with the virus and encourage residents to follow better hygiene practices. Participants who imagined a “wild beast preying on a city” universally suggested capturing the beast and then killing or caging it. They wanted to organize a hunting party or hire animal control specialists to track down the beast and stop it from ravaging the city.

Might these schematic representations for solving literal virus or beast problems transfer to people's reasoning about crime if crime is metaphorically framed as a virus or a beast? That is, if crime is talked about as a virus, will people suggest diagnosing the root cause of the problem and enacting social reform to treat and inoculate the community? If crime is a beast, will people suggest catching and jailing criminals in order to fight off the crime attack?

In Experiment 1, we gave people a report about increasing crime rates in the City of Addison and asked them to propose a solution. For half of the participants, crime was metaphorically described as a beast preying on Addison, and for the other half as a virus infecting Addison. The rest of the report contained crime statistics that were identical for the two metaphor conditions. The results revealed that metaphors systematically influenced how people proposed solving Addison's crime problem. When crime was framed metaphorically as a virus, participants proposed investigating the root causes and treating the problem by enacting social reform to inoculate the community, with emphasis on eradicating poverty and improving education. When crime was framed metaphorically as a beast, participants proposed catching and jailing criminals and enacting harsher enforcement laws.

In Experiment 2, we modified the report and repeated the study. Whereas in Experiment 1, the metaphoric frame was established using vivid verbs with rich relational meaning in phrases scattered throughout the report (e.g., crime was said to be either preying & lurking, or infecting & plaguing). In Experiment 2, we used a single word to instantiate the metaphoric frame. Despite this small difference between the virus and beast conditions in the modified report (“Crime is a virus/beast ravaging the city of Addison”), we again found that participants in the two conditions offered different problem solving suggestions. The findings of Experiment 2 demonstrate that these relational elements need not be specified explicitly. People spontaneously extracted the relevant relational inferences even given a single metaphorical noun in Experiment 2.

In Experiment 3 we tested whether the influence of the metaphor observed in the first two studies could have come about through simple spreading activation from lexical associates of the words “beast” and “virus.” Perhaps simply hearing a word like beast, even outside of the context of crime, would activate representations of hunting and caging. These activated lexical associates might then bleed into people's descriptions of how to solve the crime problem. To test for this possibility we dissociated the words “beast” and “virus” from the metaphorical frame in Experiment 3. Before reading the crime report, participants were asked to provide a synonym to the word “beast” or the word “virus” – thereby priming representations for a beast or a virus. They then read the same report about crime as in Experiment 2, but with the metaphorical word omitted (“Crime is ravaging the city of Addison”). This disconnected lexical prime did not yield differences in people's crime-fighting suggestions, revealing that metaphors act as more than just isolated words – their power appears to come from participating in elaborated knowledge structures.

In Experiment 4 we tested whether metaphors can affect not only how people propose solving the problem of crime, but also how they go about gathering information for future problem solving. If participants seek out information that is likely to confirm the initial bias suggested by the metaphor, this may be a mechanism for metaphors to iteratively amass long-term effects on people's reasoning. Indeed, when people were presented with a metaphorically framed crime problem and then given the opportunity to gather further information about the issue, participants chose to look at information that was consistent with the metaphorical frame.

In Experiment 5 we investigated the time-course of how metaphors influence the construal of complex issues. One possibility is that metaphors influence reasoning by providing people a knowledge frame that structures subsequent information. After being exposed to the metaphor, participants assimilate all further information they receive into this knowledge structure, instantiating any ambiguous information in a way that would be consistent with the metaphor. If this is the case, if metaphors actively coerce incoming information, then metaphors should have the most impact when they are presented early. This was the structure of the report in Experiment 4 (and Experiment 2): the metaphoric frame was presented in the first sentence of the report.

Alternatively, if metaphors simply activate a stored package of ideas and do not encourage the kind of active assimilation process described above, then they should be most effective when they are presented late in the narrative, as close to when people are asked to reason about a solution as possible. This way, the memory of the metaphor should be fresh and any knowledge activated by it should have the best chance to influence reasoning. This was the structure of the report in Experiment 5: the metaphoric frame was presented in last sentence of the report. Unlike the results of Experiment 4, this late metaphorical framing had no effect on people's crime-related information foraging. These findings suggest that metaphors can gain power by coercing further incoming information to fit with the relational structure suggested by the metaphor.

One of the most interesting features of the effects of metaphor we find throughout these studies is that its power is covert. When given the opportunity to identify the most influential aspect of the crime report, participants (in all four studies that include a metaphoric frame) ignore the metaphor. Instead, they cite the crime statistics (which are the same in both conditions) as being influential in their reasoning. Together these studies suggest that unbeknownst to us, metaphors powerfully shape how we reason about social issues. Further, the studies help shed light on the mechanisms through which metaphors influence our reasoning.

Ethics Statement

The experiments reported here were done in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Additionally, they followed the ethical requirements of the Stanford University institutional review board and complied with ethics guidelines set forth by the IRB recommendations. Participants were informed that their data would be treated anonymously and that they could terminate the experiment at any time without providing any reason. We received written informed consent from all participants before they participated in an experiment.

Participants

In Experiment 1, 485 students – 126 from Stanford University and 359 from the University of California, Merced – participated in the study as part of a course requirement. Experiments 2–5 were conducted online with participants recruited from Amazon's mechanical Turk (347, 312, 185, and 190, respectively). In exchange for participation in the study, people were paid $1.60 – consistent with a $10/hour pay rate since the study took 5 to 6 minutes to complete.

Gathering data from these various sub-populations allowed us to sample a broader cross-section of the general population. This is important since people's conceptions of social issues like crime are likely to differ as a function of factors like socioeconomic status and personal experience. This is particularly true of the sample that was recruited online, which was more diverse than that available at Stanford specifically or on college campuses generally [18] .

Running Experiments 2–5 online also afforded careful control over our sample population. We used Mechanical Turk's exclusion capabilities and tracked IP addresses to ensure that participants were not repeatedly sampled. We also restricted our study to Turkers with a 95% or better performance record to ensure that we were sampling high quality participants (“Requesters” have the opportunity to publicly give positive or negative feedback to their participants, which can then be used as a criterion for future “Requesters”). At the end of the online version of the study we asked participants to describe their language history, current geographic location, and provide some background information. We then restricted our analysis to residents of the United States who were native English speakers. The characteristics of our samples are detailed in the Results section below.

In each of the five experiments, participants were presented with a survey that included a short paragraph about crime in the fictional city of Addison and some follow-up questions. The survey differed subtly between experiments, but always contrasted a crime-as-virus framing with a crime-as-beast framing.

It should be noted that there are two somewhat different metaphorical frameworks that treat crime as an illness. In one, the community or population is seen as an organism, and crime is a disease that is developing inside that organism (e.g., “Violent crime is a cancer that eats away at the very heart of society.”). In another, the community is seen as individual agents and crime is a contagious disease that can be passed on from one person to another forming an epidemic. In this paper the stimuli did not strongly distinguish between these different varieties of crime as illness metaphors, but doing so would be an interesting extension of this work, as these metaphors suggest somewhat different implications for treating crime.

Experiment 1.

In the first experiment, participants were presented with one of two versions of the crime paragraph. The two versions of the paragraph differed only in the embedded metaphor: In one, crime was a beast; in the other, crime was a virus. The majority of the paragraph consisted of crime statistics, which were the same in both versions. Half of the participants were given the crime-as-beast version and half the crime-as-virus version. The paragraph read:

Crime is a {wild beast preying on/virus infecting} the city of Addison. The crime rate in the once peaceful city has steadily increased over the past three years. In fact, these days it seems that crime is {lurking in/plaguing} every neighborhood. In 2004, 46,177 crimes were reported compared to more than 55,000 reported in 2007. The rise in violent crime is particularly alarming. In 2004, there were 330 murders in the city, in 2007, there were over 500.

This report was followed up with two questions: 1) In your opinion what does Addison need to do to reduce crime? 2) Please underline the part of the report that was most influential in your decision. This question was aimed at discovering if participants explicitly noticed or made use of the metaphor.

Experiment 2.

The crime report used in the second experiment was similar, but not identical to the one used in Experiment 1. Importantly, it instantiated the beast or virus metaphor for crime with a single word. It read as follows:

Crime is a {beast/virus} ravaging the city of Addison. Five years ago Addison was in good shape, with no obvious vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, in the past five years the city's defense systems have weakened, and the city has succumbed to crime. Today, there are more than 55,000 criminal incidents a year - up by more than 10,000 per year. There is a worry that if the city does not regain its strength soon, even more serious problems may start to develop.

In Experiment 2, we asked three follow-up questions in the following order: 1) In your opinion what does Addison need to do to reduce crime? 2) What is the role of a police officer in Addison? 3) Please copy the part of the report that was most influential and paste it in the text area below. Questions one and two were free-response. Question three was copy and paste (participants were shown the report adjacent to an open text field and were asked to copy the portion of the report that was most influential in their reasoning and paste it into the open text field).

Experiment 3.

The design of Experiment 3 was similar to that of Experiment 2; however, before participants read the crime report, they were shown the word “beast” or the word “virus” and were asked to “list a synonym” for it. After completing this task, they were presented with the paragraph on crime in Addison on a separate screen. The crime report used in Experiment 3 was the same as the crime report for Experiment 2, except that it did not contain a virus or beast metaphor. The first sentence of the report read: “Crime is ravaging the city of Addison.” It was otherwise identical to the report from Experiment 2.

Experiment 4.

The crime report used in Experiment 4 was the same as the crime report used for Experiment 2. However, instead of asking the follow-up questions from Experiments 2 and 3, we asked participants to select one of four crime-related issues for further investigation – with the knowledge that this information should be used to help them make a more informed crime-reducing suggestion. The instructions read as follows: “Now imagine that Addison has consulted you about the crime problem. You have the resources to investigate one of the following four issues. Please select one from the list below.” The issues included: 1) the education system and availability of youth programs, 2) the economic system including the poverty level and employment rate, 3) the size and charge of the police force, and 4) the correctional facilities including the methods by which convicted criminals are punished.

Experiment 5.

The materials and task in Experiment 5 were identical to those of Experiment 4 except, instead of presenting the metaphor frame at the beginning of the report, we presented the metaphor frame at the end of the report, as shown below. All other aspects of the design were identical to Experiment 4. The paragraphs used were:

Five years ago Addison was in good shape, with no obvious vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, in the past five years the city's defense systems have weakened, and the city has succumbed to crime. Today, there are more than 55,000 criminal incidents a year - up by more than 10,000 per year. There is a worry that if the city does not regain its strength soon, even more serious problems may start to develop. Crime is a {beast/virus} ravaging the city of Addison.

In Experiment 1 the survey was included in a larger packet of questionnaires that were unrelated to this study.

In Experiments 2–5, each step of the experiment was presented on a separate screen. That is, the initial crime report was presented on a screen by itself. After participants read the report and clicked a button indicating they had finished reading it, the report disappeared and the first follow-up question appeared on a screen by itself. Similarly, each subsequent question was shown on a separate screen. On the final screen, participants were asked several background questions (e.g., What is the first language you learned to speak?).

Participants in Experiments 2–5 were explicitly instructed not to use the “back” button on their browser. If they did use the “back” button, the experimental session was terminated. This ensured that participants did not reread the crime report when they were later asked questions about it.

Experiment 1

In Experiment 1, we explored whether framing a crime problem with one of two contrasting metaphors for crime could systematically influence how people reasoned about the problem. Participants were presented with one of two versions of the crime paragraph (as detailed above) and asked a set of free response follow-up questions. Of particular interest, participants were asked how they would recommend solving Addison's crime problem.

Proposed solutions to the crime problem in Addison were coded into two categories in line with the results of the norming study described in the introduction: 1) diagnose/treat/inoculate, and 2) capture/enforce/punish. Responses were categorized as “diagnose/treat/inoculate” if they suggested investigating the underlying cause of the problem (e.g., “look for the root cause”) or suggested a particular social reform to treat or inoculate the community (e.g., fix the economy, improve education, provide healthcare). Responses were categorized as “capture/enforce/punish” if they focused on the police force or other methods of law enforcement (e.g., calling in the National Guard) or modifying the criminal justice system (e.g., instituting harsher penalties, building more jails). For brevity, we will refer to the “diagnose/treat/inoculate” category as “reform” and the “capture/enforce/punish” category as “enforce.”

Each participant's response was weighted equally – as a single point towards the analysis. For solutions that solely emphasized either reform or enforcement, the respective category was incremented by a point. Responses that exclusively emphasized one approach were the majority. Occasionally, however, participants listed both types of suggestions. In this case, if the response listed a disproportionate number of suggestions that were consistent with one approach (e.g., if the response listed three suggestions in line with reform and only one in line with enforcement, as in “investigate the root cause, institute new educational programs, create jobs, and hire more police”) then it was coded as a full point for the corresponding category. However, if the response equally emphasized both approaches, then the point was split between the categories such that each was incremented by .5.

Thirty of the 485 responses (6%) did not fit into either category. In every case this was because the response lacked a suggestion (e.g., “I don't know”, “I need more information”, “It should be addressed”). These data were omitted from analysis.

Participants' crime reducing suggestions were coded blindly by two coders. Cohen's kappa – a measure of inter-rater reliability – was .75 indicating good agreement between the coders ( p <.001). All disagreements between the coders were resolved between them before analyzing the data.

Overall, participants were more likely to emphasize enforcement strategies (65%) than reform (35%), χ 2  = 41.85, p <.001. However, as predicted, the solutions participants proposed to the crime problem in Addison differed systematically as a function of the metaphorical frame encountered in the crime report (see Fig. 1 ). Participants given the crime-as-beast metaphorical framing were more likely to suggest enforcement (74%) than participants given the crime-as-virus framing (56%), χ 2  = 13.94, p <.001. See Table 1 for response frequencies.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782.g001

Interestingly, when asked to identify the most influential aspect of the report, most participants ignored the metaphor. Only 15 participants (3%) identified the metaphoric frame as influential to their problem solving strategy. Removing these participants from the analysis did not affect the results (the proportion of responses that were congruent with the metaphor was not different in the two analyses, χ 2  = .0001, p  = .991). The vast majority of the participants identified the statistics in the crime report as being most influential in their decision – namely, the final three sentences of the paragraph that state the increasing crime and murder rate.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782.t001

Discussion.

In this experiment, we found that crime-reducing suggestions differed systematically as a function of the metaphor used to frame the crime problem. Participants who read that crime was a virus were more likely to propose treating the crime problem by investigating the root causes of the issue and instituting social reforms than participants who read that crime was a beast. Participants who read that crime was a beast were more likely to propose fighting back against the crime problem by hiring police officers and building jails – to catch and cage the criminals – than participants who read that crime was a virus.

Further, despite the clear influence of the metaphor, we found that participants generally identified the crime statistics, which were the same for both groups, and not the metaphor, as the most influential aspect of the report. These findings suggest that metaphors can influence how people conceptualize and in turn approach solving an important social issue, even if people don't explicitly perceive the metaphor as being especially influential.

Experiment 2

In Experiment 2, we made two substantive changes to the task to further test the role of metaphor in reasoning. First, we changed how the metaphoric frame was presented. In Experiment 1, the metaphoric frame was established several times and included vivid relational language. For example, crime was said to be either preying & lurking, or infecting & plaguing the community. These metaphorical verbs explicitly specified relations between crime and the community. Is specifying relations explicitly in this way necessary for people to make appropriate inferences, or might people be able to spontaneously extract the relevant relational inferences given a minimal metaphorical suggestion? Might a single carefully chosen and appropriately placed word be enough to instantiate a metaphorical frame and induce different reasoning strategies?

In Experiment 2 we tested this hypothesis by removing the relational verbs from the report. We replaced them with a single word metaphor that described crime as a “virus” or “beast” in the introductory sentence. The two conditions differed only in this one word, and otherwise included all the same information.

The second change we made was that we added an additional follow-up question: What is the role of a police officer in Addison? This question aimed to disambiguate the modal crime-reducing suggestion from Experiment 1, which was “increase the police force.” In that context, we interpreted the response (and close variants of it) as a suggestion for increased law enforcement and punishment. However, police officers do not just catch and punish criminals. They also serve as crime deterrents, educators, and role models and it is possible that some participants intended for the increased police presence to serve in this way. Including this question allowed these participants an opportunity to explicitly specify how they envisioned the increased police force impacting the community.

Participant characteristics.

We restricted our analysis of the initial sample of 347 Turkers to residents of the United States who were native English speakers. This left data from 253 participants for analysis (i.e., 94 participants were excluded – 27% of the initial dataset). Of these 253 participants, 157 were female and 96 were male. Their ages ranged from 18 to 66, with a mean age of 32 (and median age of 29). Eighty-two reported an affiliation to the Democratic Party, 57 reported an affiliation to the Republican Party, and 114 were Independent.

Crime-reducing suggestions were coded into two groups (reform and enforcement) as they were in Experiment 1. However, in Experiment 2 we coded one additional feature of this question: whether the participant exclusively suggested increasing the police force. For these responses, we planned to use the follow-up question about the role of a police officer in Addison to disambiguate whether the participant thought a police officer's primary role was as an instrument of social reform and prevention or an instrument of law enforcement and punishment.

Interpretations of the role of a police officer were coded into two groups that were analogous to the categories created for the first question: 1) crime deterrent, and 2) law enforcer and punisher. Interpretations that emphasized the police officer's role in preventing crime, educating youth, or serving as a role model in the community were coded as “crime deterrent.” Interpretations that emphasized the police officer's role in catching criminals, responding to crime reports, or punishing criminals were coded as “law enforcer and punisher.” As in Experiment 1, each response contributed one point to the analysis. This point either went entirely to one of the two categories or was split evenly between them.

Seven (3%) crime-reducing suggestions and 18 (7%) police officer interpretations were not coded. In every case this was because the response lacked a suggestion or interpretation and were eliminated from the analysis. It is possible that relatively more police officer interpretations fell into this category because the question was not prefaced with “In your opinion” (several responses to this question were a variant of “the report didn't say what the role of a police officer in Addison was”).

Answers to both of the free response questions were coded blindly by two coders. Inter-rater reliability was high for both: Cohen's kappa for crime-reducing suggestions was .86 ( p <.001); Cohen's kappa for interpretations of the role of a police officer was .72 ( p <.001). All disagreements between the coders were resolved between them before analyzing the data.

The results of Experiment 2 replicate our findings from Experiment 1. Participants were again overall more likely to suggest enforcement (62%) than reform (38%), χ 2  = 13.67, p<.01. However, the tendency towards enforcement was more pronounced among participants who read that crime was a beast (71%) than among participants who read that crime was a virus (54%), χ 2  = 6.50, p<.05. See Table 1 for response frequencies by condition.

Of the responses, 81 (31%) exclusively suggested increasing the police force. Disambiguating these responses by the participants' corresponding views of the role of a police officer in Addison further clarified the effect of the metaphor. Because “police” responses were previously coded as enforcement, disambiguating them created an overall shift to the reform category in both conditions, with a larger shift in the virus condition as predicted. With the “police” responses disambiguated, 37% of the responses advocated enforcement in the virus condition, and 59% advocated enforcement in the beast condition, χ 2  = 10.76, p<.01 (see Fig. 2 ).

The left panel displays results from Experiment 2 (with a one-word metaphor frame); the right panel displays results from Experiment 3 (in which a synonyms task preceded the non-metaphorically framed paragraph).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782.g002

Further, as in Experiment 1, participants did not explicitly report the metaphor as being influential in their reasoning. Only 18 of the 253 participants (7%) identified the metaphor as influential. Excluding participants who identified the metaphor as influential did not change the reported results (the proportion of responses that were congruent with the metaphor was not different in the two analyses, χ 2  = .01, p = .92).

Results of Experiment 2 replicate and extend the findings of Experiment 1. Manipulating the metaphor used to frame the issue of crime influenced how people approached solving the crime problem. When crime was framed as a virus, participants were more likely to suggest social reform. Alternatively, when crime was framed as a beast, participants were more likely to suggest law enforcement and punishment.

Remarkably, presenting an otherwise identical report with only one word different in the introductory frame (“Crime is a virus/beast ravaging the city of Addison”) yielded systematically different problem solving suggestions just as in Experiment 1. While in Experiment 1, the metaphoric frame was established using vivid verbs with rich relational meaning (e.g., crime was said to be either preying & lurking, or infecting & plaguing). The findings of Experiment 2 demonstrate that these relational elements need not be specified explicitly. People spontaneously instantiated the relevant relational inferences even given a single metaphorical noun in Experiment 2.

Further, in Experiment 2 we asked participants to provide their views on the role that a police officer should play in Addison. This afforded us a clearer interpretation of their crime-reducing suggestions and boosted our power to detect the influence of the metaphor.

Interestingly, despite the clear influence of the metaphor, we found that participants generally identified the crime statistics, which were the same for both groups, and not the metaphor, as the most influential aspect of the report.

Experiment 3

In Experiment 3 we tested whether the influence of the metaphor observed in the first two studies could have come about through simple spreading activation from lexical associates of the words “beast” and “virus.” Perhaps simply hearing a word like beast, even outside of the context of crime, would activate lexical associates like “hunting” and “caging”. These activated lexical associates might then color people's descriptions of how to solve the crime problem. To test for this possibility we dissociated the words “beast” and “virus” from the rest of the crime report in Experiment 3. Before reading the crime report, participants were asked to provide a synonym to the word “beast” or the word “virus” – thereby priming representations for a beast or a virus. They then read the same report about crime as in Experiment 2, but with the metaphorical word omitted (“Crime is ravaging the city of Addison”). Might a non-metaphorical lexical prime have the same effect as a metaphor?

Of the 312 Turkers that were initially sampled for Experiment 2, 76 (24%) were excluded because they did not live in the United States or because they were not native English speakers. This left data from 236 participants for analysis. Of these 236 participants, 136 were female and 100 were male. Their ages ranged from 18 to 81, with a mean age of 29 (and median age of 26). Seventy-six reported an affiliation to the Democratic Party, 48 reported an affiliation to the Republican Party, and 112 were Independent.

Answers to the free response questions were coded as they were in Experiment 2. Fifteen crime-reduction suggestions (6%) and 21 police officer interpretations (9%) did not fit into either category. In every case this was because the response lacked a suggestion or interpretation.

Answers to both of the free response questions were coded blindly by two coders. Inter-rater reliability was high for both: Cohen's kappa for crime-reducing suggestions was .87 ( p <.001); Cohen's kappa for interpretations of the role of a police officer was .84 ( p <.001). All disagreements between the coders were resolved between them before analyzing the data.

The synonyms that participants listed were analyzed to ensure that the lexical prime had the intended effect. Of the 124 participants in the crime-as-beast condition, all except one listed a synonym of “beast”. The modal response was “animal”, but others included “monster”, “mongrel”, “invader”, etc. The single respondent who did not list a synonym to “beast” instead wrote “I forget what a synonym is.” This participant's subsequent responses were omitted from the analyses reported below. Of the 112 participants in the crime-as-virus condition, all listed a synonym of virus. In this case, the modal response was “disease”, but others included “bug”, “cold”, “sickness”, “illness”, etc.

In Experiment 3, unlike Experiments 1 and 2, there was no difference in crime-reducing suggestions as a function of the condition – i.e., whether the participant listed a synonym to “virus” or “beast” before reading the crime paragraph did not affect what solutions they suggested to the crime problem. Overall, participants were significantly more likely to suggest enforcement or punishment (64%) than social reform (36%), χ 2  = 18.0, p <.001; however, there was no difference between participants who were lexically primed with “beast” (64% suggesting enforcement and punishment) versus those who were lexically primed with “virus” (65%), χ 2  = .001, p  = .99. See Table 1 for response frequencies by condition.

Further, disambiguating the responses that called for an increase to the police force did not differentiate the groups. Sixty-eight of the 235 responses (29%) were disambiguated. Of these, 29 (43%) interpreted the role of a police officer as a crime deterrent, 37 (54%) interpreted the role of a police officer as a law enforcer or punisher, and two responses could not be disambiguated. This disambiguation did not reveal a difference between conditions: Participants who were lexically primed with “virus” were no more likely to suggest enforcement (50%) than those who were lexically primed with “beast” (51%), χ 2  = .006, p  = .94 (see Fig. 2 ).

Comparing the results from Experiments 2 and 3 we find an interaction between the form in which the word “beast” or “virus” is presented (i.e., metaphor vs. lexical prime) and the extent to which crime-reducing suggestions are congruent with the prime. That is, we find that the metaphor in Experiment 2 was significantly more influential than the lexical prime in Experiment 3. To quantitatively compare the results of the two experiments we performed a chi-square contingency test as well as a set of logistic regressions. In Experiment 2, 61% of the responses were congruent with the metaphor (i.e., suggested “reform” when presented with crime-as-a-virus or suggested “enforcement” when presented with crime-as-a-beast), whereas only 50% of the responses in Experiment 3 were congruent with the lexical prime, χ 2  = 4.23, p <.05. Similarly, a logistic regression revealed that an interaction term for experiment X condition was a significant predictor of people's crime-fighting suggestions: a model that included the three predictors (experiment, condition, and the interaction term) was significantly better than a model with two predictors (omitting the interaction term), χ 2 (1, 459) = 5.85, p< .05.

In Experiment 3 we tested whether the influence of the metaphor observed in the first two studies could have come about through simple spreading activation from lexical associates of the words “beast” and “virus.” We dissociated the words “beast” and “virus” from the story, so that they could act as non-metaphorical lexical primes. These disconnected lexical primes did not yield differences in people's crime-fighting suggestions. These results suggest that metaphors act as more than just isolated words – their power appears to come from participating in elaborated knowledge structures.

Additionally, the results of Experiment 3 shed some light on this population's baseline preference for reducing crime. That is, in Experiment 2 it might have been the case that participants had a general preference for reducing crime through enforcement and that it was the crime-as-virus frame alone that shifted peoples' responses. The results of Experiment 3, however, suggest that the population does not seem to favor either of the two crime-reducing suggestions absent a metaphoric frame and that both frames are influential.

Experiment 4

In Experiment 4 we tested whether the influence of the metaphor would persevere even if people were able to select responses from a full set of options. One possibility is that a metaphorical frame affects what kind of solution comes to mind easiest. However, when faced with a complete set of options, people may realize they had neglected to attend to other alternatives and no longer show the influence of the metaphor. For example, a participant in the “beast” frame may not have spontaneously thought to address underlying problems in the economy or education. However, if these are made explicitly available as response options, the participant may recognize them as good ideas and may re-bound from the metaphorical framing. To test for this, in Experiment 4, we presented participants with a list of four possible approaches to the crime problem and asked them to choose one. These included two options that were more consistent with social reform (education, economy) and two options that were more consistent with enforcement and punishment (police, jails).

Rather than asking participants to make a crime-reducing suggestion as in previous studies, the task in Experiment 4 was to select an area to investigate further (in preparation to making a crime-fighting suggestion). This aspect of the experiment was designed to test whether metaphors can affect not only how people propose solving the problem of crime, but also how they go about gathering information for future problem solving. If participants seek out information that is likely to confirm the initial bias suggested by the metaphor, this may be a mechanism for metaphors to iteratively amass long-term effects on people's reasoning (as people seek out more and more confirming evidence).

Of the 185 Turkers who participated in Experiment 4, seven (4%) were excluded because they did not live in the United States or because they were non-native English speakers. This left data from 178 participants for analysis. Of these 178 participants, 89 were female and 89 were male. Their ages ranged from 18 to 70, with a mean age of 31 (and median age of 28). Seventy-eight reported an affiliation to the Democratic Party, 28 reported an affiliation to the Republican Party, and 72 were Independent.

Choosing to gather additional information about the education system or economic system was coded as a social reform category of response; gathering additional information about the police force or criminal justice system was coded as an enforcement and punishment category of response.

Results of Experiment 4 replicate the effects of metaphorical frames found in Experiments 1 and 2. Participants who were presented with the crime-as-a-beast metaphor were more likely to gather additional information about the city's criminal justice system (40%) than participants who were presented with the crime-as-a-virus metaphor (22%), χ 2  = 5.72, p <.05. See Table 1 for response frequencies by condition.

As we saw in Experiments 1 and 2, when given the opportunity to identify the most influential aspect of the report, the vast majority ignored the metaphor. Only 27 participants (15%) reported that the metaphor influenced their decision. Eliminating these participants from the analysis does not change the results (the proportion of responses that were congruent with the metaphor was not different in the two analyses, χ 2  = .003, p  = .96).

In Experiment 4 we found that the effect of metaphorical framing persists even when the list of all possible approaches to solving crime is explicitly presented. Laying out four possible approaches to crime shifted the overall likelihood that people wanted to pursue social reform. It seems that explicitly seeing the space of possible responses makes people more likely to attempt reducing crime through reform than enforcement. However, we still found that peoples' responses were influenced by the frame that they read. Additionally, the results of Experiment 4 reveal that the metaphorical frame influences how people go about gathering information for future problem solving. People tended to seek additional information about the city that confirmed their initial (metaphor-induced) suspicion about how to solve crime.

Experiment 5

In Experiment 5 we investigated the time-course of how metaphors influence people's construal of and reasoning about problems. One possibility is that metaphors influence reasoning by instantiating a knowledge frame that structures subsequent information. After being exposed to the metaphor, participants may assimilate all further information they receive into this knowledge structure, instantiating any ambiguous information in a way that would be consistent with the metaphor. For example, words like “vulnerabilities”, “defense”, “weakened” may take on different meanings depending on whether they are understood in the context of viruses or beasts [13] , [19] . If this is the case, if metaphors actively coerce incoming information, then metaphors should have the most impact when they are presented early, such that their impact can accumulate in the course of assimilating further information.

Alternatively, if metaphors simply activate a fossilized package of ideas and do not encourage the kind of assimilation process described above, then they should be most effective when they are presented late in the narrative, as close to when people are asked to reason about a solution as possible. This way, the memory of the metaphor should be fresh and any knowledge activated by it should have the best chance to influence reasoning. In Experiment 5, we repeated the design of Experiment 4, but moved the metaphorical frame so that instead of being the first sentence in the crime report it was the last.

As in Experiment 4, choosing to gather additional information about the education system or economic system was coded as a social reform category of response; gathering additional information about the police force or criminal justice system was coded as an enforcement and punishment category of response.

As in Experiment 4, participants in Experiment 5 were overall more likely to gather information relating to the city's social situation (67%) than the criminal justice system (33%), χ 2  = 19.55, p <.001.

However, unlike Experiment 4, there was no effect of the metaphorical frame. Participants who were presented with the crime-as-a-beast metaphor were about equally likely to gather additional information about the city's social situation (69%) as participants who were presented with the crime-as-a-virus metaphor (64%), χ 2  = .29, p  = .59 (see Fig. 3 ). See Table 1 for response frequencies by condition.

The left panel displays results from Experiment 4 (with a one-word metaphor frame at the beginning of the report); the right panel displays results from Experiment 5 (with the same one-word frame but at the end of the report).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782.g003

This pattern was significantly different from the effects found in Experiment 4, χ 2  = 5.45, p <.05. That is, significantly more participants were influenced by the metaphor when it was presented at the beginning of the report (Experiment 4) than at the end of the report (Experiment 5). This conclusion is also supported by a logistic regression, which revealed that an interaction term for experiment X condition was a significant predictor of people's crime-fighting suggestions: a model that included the three predictors (experiment, condition, and the interaction term) was significantly better than a model with two predictors (omitting the interaction term), χ 2 (1, 346) = 5.34, p< .05.

As we saw in the previous experiments, when given the opportunity to identify the most influential aspect of the report, the vast majority ignored the metaphor. Only 18 participants (10%) reported that the metaphor influenced their decision.

In Experiment 5 we investigated whether when a metaphor is introduced affects the metaphor's influence. Experiment 5 repeated the design of Experiment 4, but we moved the metaphorical frame so that instead of being the first sentence in the crime report it was the last. Unlike the results of Experiment 4, this late metaphorical framing had no effect on people's crime-related information foraging. These findings suggest that metaphors can gain power by coercing further incoming information to fit with the relational structure suggested by the metaphor.

These results are particularly striking since in Experiment 5, the metaphorical frame appears in much closer proximity to the measure of interest. It would have been reasonable to predict that a metaphorical frame that is more fresh in mind should have the largest effect. Instead, the way a metaphorical frame is integrated into the narrative appears to be more important. This finding also helps allay a possible worry about the findings in Experiment 3. In Experiment 3, we moved the words “virus” and ”beast” out of the crime story, and asked participants to generate synonyms to these words before they read about crime. When the words appeared in this way as disconnected lexical primes, they had no influence over people's crime-fighting suggestions. Of course, one possibility is simply that taking the words out of the narrative also made them more distant in time from the measure of interest. Results of Experiment 5 suggest that it is integration at the right point in the narrative rather than simple temporal distance that modulates our effects. In Experiment 5, the words “virus” and “beast” occurred immediately prior to the measure of interest, and yet had no effect.

In five experiments we investigated the role of metaphor in guiding how people reason about the complex problem of crime. We found that metaphors exert an influence over people's reasoning by instantiating frame-consistent knowledge structures, and inviting structurally-consistent inferences. Further, when asked to seek out more information to inform their decisions, we found that people chose information that was likely to confirm and elaborate the bias suggested by the metaphor – an effect that persisted even when people were presented with a full set of possible solutions.

Our results suggest that even fleeting and seemingly unnoticed metaphors in natural language can instantiate complex knowledge structures and influence people's reasoning in a way that is similar to the role that schemas [20] , [21] , scripts [22] , [23] , and frames [24] have been argued to play in reasoning and memory [13] , [25] – [27] . That is, the metaphors provided our participants with a structured framework for understanding crime in Addison, influenced the inferences that they made about the crime problem, and suggested different causal interventions for solving the problem. This was true even though the metaphors themselves did not strike our participants as particularly influential.

Consistent with previous work on meaning instantiation, we find that the metaphors were most effective when they were presented early in the narrative and were then able to help organize and coerce further incoming information. For example, Bransford and Johnson demonstrate that a procedural description of washing clothes was understood and remembered best when participants knew the topic of the passage before they heard the description [13] . When the topic was given at the end of the passage or not at all, participants reported being unable to make sense of what they had heard and were able to recall few details of the description on a memory test. While the crime passage we used was clearly not as ambiguous as the procedural description of washing clothes used by Bransford and Johnson, it did contain many words and phrases that would likely be interpreted differently in the different contexts represented by the metaphoric frames. For instance, in the context of an attacking beast the meaning of the words “vulnerable” and “defense system” may be different from what the same words would be taken to mean in the context of a spreading virus. Previous work has demonstrated that contextual cues can strongly influence how people interpret seemingly unambiguous text [19] , [28] – [29] .

A further question is how such knowledge structures for thinking about crime emerge? How do people build virus-like or beast-like representations of crime and what is the role of linguistic metaphor in encouraging the construction of such knowledge structures? One potential mechanism is offered by work in analogical reasoning [6] , [30] – [35] . For example, Bowdle & Gentner suggest that metaphors when first encountered are processed as analogies or structural alignments [35] . When we first hear about crime described as a beast, for example, we may carry out comparisons to discover any alignable similarities between crime and beasts. If such similarities are discovered, they can license the transfer of inferences from one domain to the other, and the most striking or stable structural similarities can be highlighted and stored in memory. With exposure to the system of “beast” metaphors, an elaborated knowledge structure can emerge for thinking about crime that mirrors in important relational structure the representations we have about the behavior of wild beasts. Through analogical transfer in this way, systems of metaphors in language can encourage the creation of systems of knowledge in a wide range of domains. Our reasoning about many complex domains then can be mediated through these patchworks of analogically-created representations.

A final question is how strong the influence of metaphorical framing really is? Focusing on a real-world social issue like crime allows us to compare the effects of metaphor we observe in the lab with the opinion differences that exist naturally in the population. People with different political affiliations hold different opinions on how to address societal problems like crime. How do the differences we find between metaphorical conditions compare to those between Democrats and Republicans, for example?

At the end of Experiments 2–5, we asked participants to report their political affiliation (Democrat, Independent, or Republican) and their gender. We found a predictable relationship between political affiliation and the tendency to emphasize enforcement in one's response. Across the four experiments, 48% of responses from Republicans emphasized enforcement whereas only 40% of responses from Democrats and Independents emphasized enforcement (data from Democrats and Independents did not differ from one another and so were collapsed). A logistic regression revealed political affiliation to be a significant predictor of people's crime-fighting suggestions: comparing a model with political affiliation included as a predictor to a constant-only model was statistically significant, χ 2 (1, 839) = 3.98, p< .05. We also found systematic differences by gender: 46% of responses from men and 38% of responses from women suggested enforcement. Comparing a logistic regression model with gender included as a predictor to a constant-only model was statistically significant, χ 2 (1, 839) = 5.389, p< .05.

Impressively the differences in opinion generated by the metaphorical frames were larger than those that exist between Democrats and Republicans, or between men and women. Metaphorical frames caused shifts of 18–22% in enforcement responses in Experiments 2 and 4. Differences between people of different political affiliations or between the two genders were 8–9%. To statistically compare the strength of these different predictors, we fit a set of logistic regression models for data from Experiments 2 and 4. We found that a model fit with a predictor for metaphor frame was significantly better than a constant-only model, χ 2 (1, 839) = 17.35, p< .001; however, including a predictor for gender, χ 2 (1, 839) = 0.013, ns , or political affiliation, χ 2 (1, 839) = 2.06, ns , or both, χ 2 (3, 839) = 3.03, ns , did not improve the model significantly. This analysis reveals a striking effect of metaphor as measured against real-world differences in opinion that exist in the population and impact policy-making.

Interestingly, we found that self-identified Republicans were also less likely to be influenced by the metaphors than were Democrats and Independents. Looking at data from Experiments 2 and 4 we find that 63% of the responses from Democrats and Independents are congruent with the metaphorical frame, whereas only 49% of those from Republicans were congruent with the metaphor. A logistic regression revealed that political affiliation was indeed a significant predictor of congruence with the metaphorical frame: comparing a model with political affiliation as a predictor against a constant-only model was statistically significant, χ 2 (1, 839) = 5.46, p<.05 . These results may be consistent with previous analyses showing a difference in openness between people of different political affiliations [36] . Men and women were equally influenced by the metaphorical frames.

The studies presented in this paper demonstrate that even minimal (one-word) metaphors can significantly shift people's representations and reasoning about important real-world domains. These findings suggest that people don't have a single integrated representation of complex issues like crime, but rather rely on a patchwork of (sometimes disconnected or inconsistent) representations and can (without realizing it) dynamically shift between them when cued in context.

Metaphor is incredibly pervasive in everyday discourse. By some estimates, English speakers produce one unique metaphor for every 25 words that they utter [37] . Metaphor is clearly not just an ornamental flourish, but a fundamental part of the language system [28] , [38] . This is particularly true in discussions of social policy [5] , [39] – [40] , where it often seems impossible to “literally” discuss immigration, the economy, or crime. If metaphors routinely influence how we make inferences and gather information about the social problems that confront us, then the metaphors in our linguistic system may be offering a unique window onto how we construct knowledge and reason about complex issues.

Conclusions

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we have explored how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that metaphors can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve complex problems and how they gather more information to make “well-informed” decisions. Our findings shed further light on the mechanisms through which metaphors exert their influence, by instantiating frame-consistent knowledge structures, and inviting structurally-consistent inferences. Interestingly, the influence of the metaphorical framing is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as an influential aspect in their decisions. Finally, the influence of metaphor we find is strong: different metaphorical frames created differences in opinion as big or bigger than those between Democrats and Republicans.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jay McClelland, Caitlin Fausey, Alexia Toskos, Steve Flusberg, Tania Henetz, and members of the Cognation Lab for inspiration and helpful, critical discussion of the content of this paper and the issues it addresses. We would also like to than Otto Murphy and Nguyen Ngo for their help in coding responses. This material is based on work supported under a Stanford Graduate Fellowship to the first author.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: PHT LB. Performed the experiments: PHT. Analyzed the data: PHT. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PHT. Wrote the manuscript: PHT LB.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Metaphor

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Metaphor by Mark Johnson LAST REVIEWED: 27 April 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 27 September 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0167

For nearly 2,500 years, since the time of Aristotle, scholars assumed that metaphor was simply a matter of language—cases in which a word with a literal meaning could have a second meaning, which Aristotle claimed was “similar” to the first. According to this comparison theory, any cognitive content a metaphor might have would supposedly be reducible to a set of literal similarity statements. Consequently, while metaphors were seen as powerful rhetorical and poetic devices of language, they were deemed nonessential for stating fundamental truth claims, which could supposedly be reduced to literal concepts and propositions. During the last half of the 20th century, however, this dominant Aristotelian perspective was shown to be wrong. A growing body of cognitive-science research on meaning, conceptualization, reasoning, knowledge, and language called for a radical rethinking of the nature and operations of metaphor. This empirical research was the basis for what came to be known as conceptual metaphor theory. It was discovered that metaphor is conceptual rather than linguistic in nature, that we think by using metaphor—not rarely or obscurely—but constantly, and that most metaphorical thought is not based on perceived similarities in the world. Instead, conceptual metaphors are frame-to-frame mappings, where frames are basic structures of everyday thought. Conceptual metaphors thus consist of “source domain” frames that are mapped onto “target domain” frames, with most of the inference structure found in the source domain carried over to the corresponding target-domain structure. This process gives rise to metaphorical reasoning. Linguistic, psychological, and neuroscientific methods of inquiry and explanation continue to shed new light on how metaphors are learned, how they structure conceptual systems, and how they shape our reasoning in all aspects of our lives. Scholars are now investigating the working of metaphor in languages and cultural systems across the world and throughout history. In addition to this cross-linguistic research, metaphor has been explored in other modes of symbolic interaction besides language, such as art, music, architecture, dance, theater, and ritual. In a few short decades, metaphor has moved from the margins to the center of the study of mind, thought, and language. First regarded as a peripheral linguistic phenomenon to be studied only in literary theory and aesthetics, metaphor is now recognized as a fundamental process of human conceptualization and reasoning.

Since metaphor did not become a focal topic of research until the 1960s, all the collections of work on metaphor have been published since then. Shibles 1972 is an early collection of essays from multiple perspectives, and Johnson 1981 provides most of the important philosophical writings on metaphor that defined the field at that time. Miall 1982 includes essays covering metaphor both in literary and scientific texts. Ortony 1993 and Gibbs 2008 are cross-disciplinary, and Raymond Gibbs’s book is especially useful to get a sense of current directions of research in the field. Komendzinski 2002 offers essays by a number of prominent scholars, many of whom adopt a conceptual metaphor theory orientation. Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009 is the only volume dealing with the new topic of multimodal or cross-modal metaphor, in which the source and target domains come from two different modalities (e.g., visual, verbal, tactile).

Forceville, Charles J., and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds. 2009. Multimodal metaphor . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

DOI: 10.1515/9783110215366

The only introduction to the new field of metaphors in which the source and target domains are from two different experiential types, such as visual metaphors or metaphors combining the verbal and the visual modes.

Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., ed. 2008. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511816802

A very impressive anthology of the most recent empirical research coming from cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, literary theory, and cultural theory. This is the best source from which to get a sense of the most-current directions of research.

Johnson, Mark. ed. 1981. Philosophical perspectives on metaphor . Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

The first and only anthology devoted exclusively to philosophical treatments. See the introductory essay for a brief survey of metaphor theory from Plato to 1980. Annotated bibliography.

Komendzinski, Tomasz, ed. 2002. Metaphor: A multidisciplinary approach . Theoria et Historum Scientiarum: An International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies 6. 1. Toruń, Poland: Nicolas Copérnicus Univ. Press.

An interesting diverse collection of essays by important contemporary researchers covering work from psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and computer science.

Miall, David S., ed. 1982. Metaphor: Problems and perspectives . Brighton, UK: Harvester.

An early, small anthology on metaphor in literature and science, with chapters by scholars who later gained some prominence in the field.

Ortony, Andrew. 1993. Metaphor and thought . 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139173865

Contains some seminal essays that still define many of the competing points of view in the field. Together with Gibbs 2008 , this lays out the landscape, and both these anthologies are excellent for a course at any level.

Shibles, Warren. 1972. Essays on metaphor . Whitewater, WI: Language Press.

A short, eclectic selection of essays relating metaphor to philosophy, psychology, religion, art, and literature.

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• What Is a Metaphor? | Definition & Examples

What Is a Metaphor? | Definition & Examples

Published on August 11, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan . Revised on November 6, 2023.

A metaphor is a figure of speech that implicitly compares two unrelated things, typically by stating that one thing is another (e.g., “that chef is a magician”).

Metaphors can be used to create vivid imagery, exaggerate a characteristic or action, or express a complex idea.

Metaphors are commonly used in literature, advertising, and everyday speech.

The exam was a piece of cake.

This town is a desert .

Table of contents

What is a metaphor, types of metaphor, metaphor vs. simile, metaphor vs. analogy, allegory vs. metaphor, worksheet: metaphor vs. simile, frequently asked questions.

A metaphor is a rhetorical device that makes a non-literal comparison between two unlike things. Metaphors are used to describe an object or action by stating (or implying) that it is something else (e.g., “knowledge is a butterfly”).

Metaphors typically have two parts:

• A tenor is the thing or idea that the metaphor describes (e.g., “knowledge”).
• A vehicle is the thing or idea used to describe the tenor (e.g., “a butterfly”).

Sophia was a loose cannon .

There are several different types of metaphor.

Direct metaphor

A direct metaphor compares two unrelated things by explicitly stating that one thing is another. Direct metaphors typically use a form of the verb “be” to connect two things.

Ami and Vera are two peas in a pod.

Implied metaphor

An implied metaphor compares two unlike things without explicitly naming one of them. Instead, a comparison is typically made using a non-literal verb. For example, the statement “the man erupted in anger” uses the verb “erupted” to compare a man to a volcano.

The captain barked orders at the soldiers. [i.e., the captain was like an angry dog]

Extended metaphor

An extended metaphor (also called a sustained metaphor) occurs when an initial comparison is developed or sustained over several lines or paragraphs (or stanzas, in the case of a poem).

Extended metaphors are commonly used in literature and advertising, but they’re rarely used in everyday speech.

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

Mixed metaphor

A mixed metaphor is a figure of speech that combines two or more metaphors, resulting in a confusing or nonsensical statement.

Mixed metaphors are usually accidental and are often perceived as unintentionally humorous. Mixing metaphors can confuse your readers and make your writing seem to lack coherence.

She’s a rising star, and with the right guidance, she’ll spread her wings.

Dead metaphor

A dead metaphor is a figure of speech that has become so familiar due to repeated use that people no longer recognize it as a metaphor. Instead, it’s understood as having a straightforward meaning.

The guest of honor sat at the head of the table .

Metaphors and similes are both rhetorical devices used for comparison. However, they have different functions:

• A metaphor makes an implicit comparison between two unlike things, usually by saying that one thing is another thing (e.g., “my body is a temple”).
• A simile makes an explicit comparison between two unlike things, typically using the words “like,” “as,” or “than” (e.g., “you’re as stubborn as a mule”).

The old man’s beard was as white as snow .

There are two main types of analogy:

• Identical relationship analogies indicate the logical relationship between two things (e.g., “‘Up’ is to ‘down’ as ‘on’ is to ‘off’”).
• Shared abstraction analogies compare two unlike things to illustrate a point.

Metaphors are sometimes confused with shared abstraction analogies, but they serve different purposes. While metaphors are primarily used to make a comparison (e.g., “John is a caveman”), shared abstraction analogies are used to make an argument or explain something.

Metaphors are sometimes confused with allegories, but they have different functions:

• A metaphor makes an implied comparison between two unlike things, typically by stating that one thing is another (e.g., “time is money”).
• An allegory illustrates abstract concepts, moral principles, or complex ideas through symbolic representation.

Allegories are typically longer than metaphors and usually take the form of a story.

You can test your knowledge of the difference between metaphors and similes with the worksheet below. Choose whether each sentence contains a metaphor or a simile.

• Practice questions
• Answers and explanations
• You sing like an angel.
• The boxer is as strong as an ox.
• Hannah is a warrior.
• Your eyes are deeper than the ocean.
• Most of the time, you’re an angel. But you’re like a demon when you’re tired.
• This sentence contains a simile because it makes a direct comparison using the word “like.”
• This sentence contains a simile because it makes a direct comparison using the word “as.”
• This sentence contains a metaphor because it makes an implicit comparison by saying that something is something else.
• This sentence contains a simile because it makes a direct comparison using the word “than.”
• This sentence contains both a metaphor (“you are an angel”) and a simile (“like a demon”).

An extended metaphor (also called a sustained metaphor ) is a metaphor that is developed over several lines or paragraphs.

The following is an example of an extended metaphor in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet :

“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief

That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.”

A metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a non-literal comparison between two unlike things (typically by saying that something is something else).

For example, the metaphor “you are a clown” is not literal but rather used to emphasize a specific, implied quality (in this case, “foolishness”).

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