Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People frequently use metaphors to communicate and reasonabout complex topics. However, many studies of metaphoricalreasoning exclusively rely on researcher intuitions aboutdifferent metaphors and their associated entailments. Here wedescribe a more principled method for mapping the structureof metaphorical lay theories, focusing on metaphors forteaching. Across two studies, we identified four common, aptmetaphors for the teacher-student relationship and used factoranalysis to explore whether these metaphors reflectsystematically different intuitions about the qualities of collegeteachers. Our findings demonstrate that (1) people endorse avariety of different teaching metaphors, and (2) thesemetaphors bring to mind distinct, coherent clusters of teacherattributes. This work demonstrates a novel method forsystematically mapping the structure of metaphorical laytheories and sets the stage for future research on metaphoricalreasoning as well as innovative educational interventionscentered on shifting lay theories of teaching.