Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Having cancer is often described metaphorically as a battle(“my fight against cancer”) or as a journey (“my path throughcancer treatment”). Previous experimental work has demon-strated that these metaphors can influence people’s reason-ing and emotional inferences about experiences with cancer(Hendricks, Demj ́en, Semino, & Boroditsky, 2018; Hauser &Schwarz, 2019). However, it is currently unknown how theuse of these metaphorical frames translates into behavioralchanges, such as the likelihood and magnitude of charitablegiving. Using hand-labeled data from more than 5,000 Go-FundMe cancer-related campaigns, we ask how a campaign’suse of metaphor predicts several measures of donation behav-ior beyond what other control variables predict (e.g. shares onFacebook). We find that the presence of either metaphor fam-ily (battle or journey) has a positive effect on campaign successand donation behavior.