[Shannon Williams 2009.10.12]
Here is an article that I thought the group might enjoy. I describes
more things that PCT explains so easily. I like the sentence below:
much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes
awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern
our body's interactions with its physical environment.
Best,
Shannon
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Drake Bennett: How metaphors shape your world
07:37 PM CDT on Friday, October 9, 2009
When we say someone is a warm person, we do not mean they are running
a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually
used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is
hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat
it.
These phrases are metaphorical, and we use them and their like so
often that we hardly notice them. Metaphors are literary creations �
good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways,
the rest are simply clich�s: a test is "a piece of cake," a completed
task is "a load off one's back," a momentary difficulty is "a speed
bump."But whether they're being deployed by poets, politicians,
football coaches or real estate agents, metaphors are primarily
thought of as tools for talking and writing � out of inspiration or
out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of
the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another.
Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense
interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and
linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic
metaphors we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys
to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as
literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of
how we learn, reason and make sense of the world around us.
The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between
metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as
if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably
literal-minded children's book hero. Researchers have sought to
determine whether the temperature of an object in someone's hands
determines how "warm" or "cold" he considers a person he meets,
whether the heft of a held object affects how "weighty" people
consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of
the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.
What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren't just
how we talk and write; they're how we think. At some level, we
actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature,
and we expect people's personalities to behave accordingly. What's
more, without our body's instinctive sense for temperature � or
position, texture, size, shape or weight � abstract concepts like
kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and
importance would simply not make any sense to us. Deep down, we are
all Amelia Bedelia.
Metaphors like this "don't invite us to see the world in new and
different ways," says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and
researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the
Netherlands. "They enable us to understand the world at all."
Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable
to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with
ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how
we sell cereal. And at a broader level, it reveals just how much the
human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that
much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes
awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern
our body's interactions with its physical environment.
Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.
"The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily
world much more than we thought," says John Bargh, a psychology
professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm.
George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of
California at Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a philosophy professor at
the University of Oregon, see human thought as metaphor-driven.
Rather than so much clutter standing in the way of true understanding,
to Lakoff and Johnson basic metaphors are markers of the roots of
thought itself. Their larger argument is that abstract thought would
be meaningless without bodily experience. And primary metaphors are
some of their most powerful evidence for this.
"What we've discovered in the last 30 years is � surprise, surprise �
people think with their brains," says Lakoff. "And their brains are
part of their bodies."
Inspired by this argument, psychologists have begun to make their way,
experiment by experiment, through the catalog of primary metaphors,
altering one side of the metaphorical equation to see how it changes
the other.
Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of
Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a
cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the
study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a
person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out,
consistently described a warmer person � rating them as happier, more
generous, more sociable, good-natured and more caring � than the iced
coffee group.
The effect seems to run the other way, too: In a paper published last
year, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli of the University of
Toronto found that people asked to recall a time when they were
ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who
recalled a social inclusion experience.
In a recent paper in Psychological Science, researchers in the
Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which
subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires �
in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several
foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of
Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different
weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier
clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions
they were asked � they not only judged the foreign currencies to be
more valuable; they gave more careful, considered answers to the
questions they were asked.
Similar results have proliferated in recent years. One of the authors
of the weight paper, Thomas Schubert, has also done work suggesting
that the fact that we associate power and elevation ("your highness,"
"friends in high places") means we actually unconsciously look upward
when we think about power.
Bargh and Josh Ackerman at MIT's Sloan School of Business, in work
that has yet to be published, have done studies in which subjects,
after handling sandpaper-covered puzzle pieces, were less likely to
describe a social situation as having gone smoothly. Casasanto has
done work in which people who were told to move marbles from a lower
tray up to a higher one while recounting a story told happier stories
than people moving them down.
Several studies have explored the metaphorical connection between
cleanliness and moral purity. In one, subjects who were asked to
recall an unethical act, then given the choice between a pencil and an
antiseptic wipe, were far more likely to choose the cleansing wipe
than people who had been asked to recall an ethical act. In a
follow-up study, subjects who recalled an unethical act acted less
guilty after washing their hands.
The researchers dubbed it the "Macbeth effect," after the
guilt-ridden, compulsive hand washing of Lady Macbeth.
To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest
ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought. In
essence, that is what much metaphor research entails. And while
psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such
manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there's no
reason that they couldn't be put to other uses as well, by marketers,
architects, teachers, parents and litigators, among others.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for
example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our
sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding
that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think
of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might
make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at
everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they
meet.
Nils Jostmann, the lead author of the weight study, suggests that
pollsters might want to take his findings to heart: heavier clipboards
and heavier pens for issues that they want considered answers for,
lighter ones for questions that they want gut reactions on.
How much of an effect these tweaks might have in a real-world setting,
researchers emphasize, remains to be seen. Still, it probably couldn't
hurt to try a few in your own life. When inviting a new friend over,
suggest a cup of hot tea rather than a cold beer. Keep a supply of
soft, smooth objects on hand at work � polished pebbles, maybe, or a
silk handkerchief � in case things start to feel too daunting.
And if you feel a sudden pang of guilt about some long-ago
transgression, try taking a shower.
Drake Bennett is a staff writer for the Boston Globe, where a version
of this essay first appeared. His e-mail address is
drbennett@globe.com.