
Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize - NicoJuicy
https://qz.com/1241030/metaphors-can-change-our-opinions-in-ways-we-dont-even-realize/
======
dsacco
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.

____________________________________

1\.
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016782)

2\. [https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-
uncovered-...](https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-a-
huge-fraud.html)

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lillesvin
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_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13455.Don_t_Think_of_an_Elephant_Know_Your_Values_and_Frame_the_Debate)

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

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

~~~
itsdrewmiller
They do reference Lakoff.

~~~
lillesvin
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.

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

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

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

