Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphor pervades discussions of important socio-politicaltopics. Recent research indicates that metaphorical languagecan influence how people reason about such topics, potentiallyaffecting real-world decision-making. In this study, we reporton research into the effects of metaphor on evaluative judg-ment, another aspect of decision-making that has been lesswell studied than reasoning. We use a cross-linguistic differ-ence in the metaphors used by English and Spanish speakersto discuss economic change to investigate how metaphoricallanguage affects evaluative judgment. We show that the imageschematic information inherent in the semantics of the differ-ent metaphors performs a central role in shaping this process.