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
