New article on the role of extendedness in metaphorical framing
‘How viruses and beasts affect our opinions (or not)’
This is the title of the article by Gudrun Reijnierse, Christian Burgers, Tina Krennmayr
and Gerard Steen on the role of extendedness in metaphorical framing.
“Based on the assumption that extended metaphor may constitute a case of deliberate
metaphor and therefore has the potential to influence people’s opinions,
this paper investigates whether extending a metaphorical frame in a text leads
people to perceive policy measures that are in line with that frame as more effective
for solving a crime problem than other policy measures. The metaphorical
frames ‘Crime is a virus’ and ‘Crime is a beast’ were extended in one experiment
each via a series of additional conventional metaphorical expressions having
crime as the target domain and beasts/viruses as the source domain. Participants
(N = 354, Experiment 1; N = 361, Experiment 2) were randomly assigned to one
of five experimental conditions with increasing numbers of sentences containing
metaphorical expressions, and rated the effectiveness of a set of policy measures
to solve the crime problem described in the text. The data yield limited support
for our hypothesis. When controlling for political affiliation, the ratings for frameconsistent
measures trended in the hypothesised direction in Experiment 2.
Experiment 1 yielded a trend for frame-inconsistent measures. These results suggest
that metaphorical framing effects may be more subtle than has been assumed.”