Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphor is replete in discourse about immigration. Recent work shows that metaphoric framing can influenceattitudes toward immigration (e.g., Landau et al., 2009). However, we know little about how and when specific information inthe source domain drives this effect. Our study takes a novel approach, examining how varying intensity of information in thesource domain frame influences attitudes toward immigrants and immigration in the U.S. We analyze various metaphors butwe focus especially on intensity effects in the conceptual metaphor IMMIGRATION IS FLUID TRANSFER. For the FLUIDTRANSFER source domain, we investigate how varying intensity of flow (e.g., rate) influences attitudes about immigration,including whether immigrants should have access to social services and what type of wall should be built, if at all. Our resultsmake a valuable contribution to metaphor research by revealing what information within the source domain has the most (orleast) robust effects on reasoning.