Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize | Hacker News Reader

Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize

qz.com

32 pointsNicoJuicy6 comments

Here is the study in question[1] and the money quote from the article's description:

> In a recent Stanford study, participants were presented with brief passages about crime in a hypothetical city named Addison. For half of the participants, a few words were subtly changed to describe crime as a “virus infecting” the city. For the other half, crime was described as a “beast preying” on the city. Otherwise, the passages remained exactly the same.

I don't have a critical review to offer, but the first thing I thought of when I read this paragraph was the fraudulent study published by Michael LaCour a few years ago.[2] Ever since I read that, I've become very skeptical of new studies that purport to change opinions based on small, seemingly magical differences in interaction or presentation.

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1. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

2. https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-...

Seems odd to me that the authors don't reference George Lakoff's Don't Think Of An Elephant[0] which seems to describe much of their findings under the term "framing".

Then again, this is written in part by Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist who seems to think that doing linguistics require little to no training. For whatever reason she's extremely keen on proving "strong linguistic relativism"—i.e. the latest term for "linguistic determinism"[1] which hasn't been taken seriously by linguists for several decades—and actual linguistic research as well as very plausible alternative explanations for her findings aren't going to stop her. She comes off as a person that's looking for data to confirm her theory rather than the other way around, at least that's what I took away from her 2010 paper Remembrances of times East: absolute spatial representations of time in an Australian aboriginal community[2] which I spent a great deal of time dissecting while doing my master's in linguistics.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13455.Don_t_Think_of_an_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20959511

They do reference Lakoff.

Yeah, even the title is a reference to Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, but I meant that it was odd that they don't reference that specific book by Lakoff since it pretty much states the exact things that they do in the article.

If only this article was in the form of a metaphor, I might believe it.

Metaphors are weaponized all the time by political or religious entities.

Abortion: "removing a parasite" vs "saving a human life"

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