Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphors have been shown to be effective explanatory andcommunicative tools, shaping how people think and reasonabout complex domains. To date, however, most studies haveaddressed only coarse-grained effects of metaphor framing,leaving many questions unanswered about the relative powerof metaphor compared to more literal linguistic framingdevices. We addressed this issue in a large, pre-registeredframing study, comparing the effects of describing the role ofpolice officers as (a) metaphorical guardians of a community(b) literal protectors of a community, and (c) a no-labelcontrol. We found no main effect of framing condition,suggesting that positively valenced metaphors may exert littleinfluence on their own in this domain. However, we didobserve an interaction between condition and politicalideology, such that the guardian metaphor was especiallyeffective at improving attitudes towards police officers forliberals, whose initial approval ratings were relatively low.