Psychology professor Mark Landau notices metaphors all the time. Whether he's talking with a friend, reading a newspaper or listening to a politician, the metaphors are everywhere, he said.
Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. He says there are brighter days ahead.
"The country's not actually relocating. Days won't literally be brighter," Landau said. "The way we make sense of politics, science, art--they all share the same basic toolbox of concrete metaphors."
People use metaphors to talk about abstract ideas or emotions. For example, "I'm feeling down" or "I'm cheering up." But Landau knows it's more than a manner of speaking. He has completed a series of studies that tested the effect that metaphors have on people's understanding of their lives.
"The way metaphors are structured in language tells us a great deal about the underlying structure of thought," Landau said.
In one experiment, he examined a common metaphor of verticality. Up is generally viewed as good and down as bad. Specifically, he looked at the metaphor progress is up, as reflected in expressions such as "moving up in the world."
Previous studies found that if a word or face is positioned higher on a screen, people more readily attribute positive qualities to it than a word or face positioned lower. Landau decided to take the idea further than previous experiments had. He tested whether this metaphor affects people's satisfaction with a major life decision.
He looked at a decision that all the participants in the experiment would have in common: The decision to attend KU.
A group of about 80 freshmen, who earned course credit for participating, completed a questionnaire. They considered six factors that influenced their decision to come to KU. The instructions asked half the participants to write the earliest factor in their decision on the bottom line and work their way up to the most recent factor on the top line. The other participants listed decision factors in the opposite direction, starting with the earliest factor on the top line and listing downward.
Eric Nevels, Landau's research assistant, monitored the study.
"At first I wasn't really sure what would happen," Nevels said. "But after a while, as more and more people did it, I thought it would work out the way he thought it would."
Landau predicted that the students who listed factors from bottom to top would express greater satisfaction with their decision to come to KU than the students who wrote from top to bottom. After writing their lists, students rated on a scale from one to seven how much they agreed with the statements: "I was destined to come to KU; I never had a doubt that KU was the ideal school for me; Being at KU gives me a strong feeling of purpose in life."
The results supported Landau's prediction: students who ordered decision factors in an upward direction rated themselves as significantly more satisfied with their decision to come to KU than those who ordered decision factors in a downward direction.
When designing the experiment, Landau tried to answer questions that critics might raise. He wanted evidence that the experiment supported his hypothesis for the reasons he thought it did.
He included additional questions to test if he'd simply affected the general mood of respondents. Nevels asked students after the experiment about any suspicions they had. Neither factor interfered with the test results, but as with any science experiment, influences are infinite.
"No one study can account for all possible explanations," Landau said.
He said his findings could interest KU recruiters. While he hopes someone explores that possibility, his work aims primarily at shedding light on how people make sense of their world.
"It's one drop in the total psychological bucket," he said.
Landau's interest in metaphor began in 2005 when he read the book, "Metaphors We Live By." In the book, linguists Lakoff and Johnson make a case for metaphor's role in everyday thought, which is what Landau designed his experiments to test.
Honors English Professor Mary Klayder teaches the book in her "Ways of Seeing" class. She too sees metaphor as more than a language tool.
"I think sometimes we use it consciously to explain something unfamiliar by comparing it to something familiar," she said. "But I talk about the way we set our lives on metaphoric structure. If we see college as a game we're going to win, we have a different mindset than if we see it as a journey."
Similarly, Landau said that attitudes toward complex social issues are often grounded in metaphor. He considers that one person might understand the U.S. drug problem as a war, while another thinks it's a chess game. They will approach the problem differently because the metaphors will guide them in different directions. He would like to explore this idea with future experiments
"It would mean understanding the basic building blocks of people's attitudes," Landau said.
He is expecting to hear in the next few weeks if his first series of experiments on metaphor has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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