This is a story from an experiment conducted in 2011 by Paul Thibodeau from the University of Stanford and Lera Boroditsky from the University of California. They wanted to check whether metaphors influence the way we reason and the way we search for more information about the same complex issue. They looked at the crime reporting in the United States and they saw that reporters used two kinds of metaphors in crime reporting – one was crime as a virus and another was crime as a beast. In the first scenario of crime as a virus the metaphors used was something like ‘Crime is infecting the city’, ‘It’s plaguing the city, it needs to be eradicated’. In the second case of crime as a beast, it spoke about, ‘Hunting down the criminal’, ‘Tracking someone down’ and ‘Capturing them’. They took a set of people and divided them into two groups. In one group they told a story about a city where there was crime but used the metaphor of virus and the same example in another place where the only thing different was the metaphor of the Beast. The only difference between the two sets of statements was just the first line. In one the first line read “Crime is a wild beast preying on the city of Addison”, in the next one it read “Crime is a virus infecting the city of Addison”. The rest was the same. “The crime rate in the once peaceful city has steadily increased over the past three years in fact these days it seems that the crime is (lurking/plaguing) every neighbourhood. 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 people who were in this experiment who were then asked what would they do if they were the police officers to eradicate this crime and also put in place a process by which this doesn’t happen again. The people who are given the virus version looked at things like going back to the source – how do you inoculate the neighbourhoods and protect them? Whereas the guys who heard the other side talked about the same thing. How do you find ways in trapping these criminals to put them in jail? What was interesting is while not only was their approach different, funnily when they were asked to explain why would they do what they do, they never said because crime is a virus or crime is a beast. They actually quoted the same data and saying because these numbers have gone up this is what we need to do. This is a great proof of how metaphors can change the way we reason. Really, stories can change the way we think, words and stories are that important. Business Points ( Tags ) #Metaphors #words #powerofmetaphors #stories #context
