Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When faced with a moral dilemma, following your headversus your heart can result in very different decisions. Earlierwork has argued that people who “self-locate” in the headtend to make more rational and less emotional decisions tomoral dilemmas than those who “self-locate” in the heart. Wereplicate this finding, suggest an alternative interpretation ofthe result, and then extend it with a novel experiment. In ametaphor framing task, we manipulated the salience of thehead/heart metaphors—by using them (a) in a single sentence,(b) a more elaborate paragraph, or (c) by emphasizing one incontrast to the other. We found that people who received thehead metaphor made more rational decisions than those whoreceived the heart metaphor, but only in the high saliencecondition that contrasted the two metaphors. This findingillustrates the communicative value of metaphor, which canbe enhanced through comparison.