Todd K. Hartman

Dissertation

Title: The Effects of Policy Metaphors on Political Attitudes

Committee: Howie Lavine (Chair), Milt Lodge, Stanley Feldman, Scott Basinger, & Rick Lau (outside reader)

Chapter 1: Introduction

Scholars writing as early as Aristotle have argued that metaphors are persuasive in politics; yet, little empirical research exists to validate these assertions. In this dissertation, I explore how elites use policy metaphors to communicate information to citizens, and what impact these messages have on their understanding and evaluation of political issues. To this end, I conduct three experiments and one content analysis to test the effects of policy metaphors on political attitudes.

Chapter 2: Theory of Policy Metaphors

In this chapter, I outline a theory of policy metaphors and derive several hypotheses for the experiments that follow. I begin by discussing the definition of a policy metaphor, which essentially means understanding a political issue in terms of an unrelated conceptual domain (e.g., international trade is war). Then I synthesize theories from cognitive psychology and political science to explain how a policy metaphor creates associations between typically unrelated concepts through a process of structural mapping. Theory suggests that the associated concepts generated from this structural mapping should come to mind automatically (i.e., outside of conscious awareness) whenever an individual thinks about the political target. In addition, I hypothesize that this process should also automatically transfer affective information from the source domain to the political target, which could influence subsequent evaluations of the political issue. While these processes are occurring largely outside of conscious awareness, policy metaphors should also facilitate political persuasion by helping individuals understand complex or unfamiliar issues. I then explore the role that general and issue-specific political sophistication plays in moderating the effects of policy metaphors on political attitudes, as well as potential mediators of these effects.

Chapter 3: A Content Analysis of Metaphors in Politics

My goal for this chapter is to demonstrate the presence of policy metaphors in everyday political communication. To accomplish this task, I am conducting a systematic content analysis of the type of policy metaphors used to define specific political issues. In addition, I am also exploring patterns of metaphor usage by different political parties. Ultimately, this chapter will provide insight into if and how policy metaphors are currently being utilized in politics.

Chapter 4: Experiment Testing the Automatic Associations Generated by Policy Metaphors

Earlier I suggested that policy metaphors should create automatic associations between an unrelated source concept and a political target; yet, no research has empirically tested this hypothesis. In this chapter, I conduct a semantic priming experiment and demonstrate empirically that policy metaphors do indeed create such associations. The importance of this finding is that it suggests when an individual is exposed to an apt policy metaphor, concepts related to the source domain will automatically come to mind when thinking about the political issue. For instance, if an individual hears a message linking international trade to war, then this person will automatically think about war-related concepts whenever the issue of international trade comes to mind. And, more importantly, these concepts will be activated whether or not the individual consciously intends for it to happen.

Chapter 5: Experiment Testing the Automatic Transfer of Affect from Source to Political Target

In this chapter, I expand upon the findings from Chapter 4 by exploring what impact the automatic associations have on people's implicit political attitudes. More specifically, I conduct an evaluative priming experiment and find that participants exposed to negative policy metaphors (e.g., international trade is war) respond significantly quicker to evaluatively congruent prime-target word pairs (e.g., international trade - rejected) than to incongruent pairs (e.g., international trade - joyful). First, I demonstrate that these effects occur outside of conscious awareness (i.e., at reaction times of 300ms or less). Second, and more importantly, I find that these effects hold only for participants exposed to policy metaphors-I find no evidence that these effects exist for literally equivalent political messages. This has important implications for political attitudes, since research has shown that automatically activated concepts have a disproportionate influence on judgments and behavior.

Chapter 6: Experiment Exploring Policy Metaphors & Political Persuasion

The previous two studies show how people process policy metaphors at a micro-level, but they do not necessarily test whether these associations actually influence overt political attitudes. Thus, I conduct two persuasion experiments with samples of adults recruited from the Internet to measure the effects of policy metaphors on attitudes. In one study, I find that policy metaphors significantly increase support for a proposed national civil service requirement for the least politically sophisticated participants, which is consistent with my theoretical expectations. Closer inspection of these results reveals that this effect is mediated by an increased perception of argument quality. I am currently conducting a follow-up study to determine if these results hold for a different and more complex political issue, as well as whether these effects will include political sophisticates (because of the increased complexity of the issue).

Chapter 7: Conclusion

In sum, I find that policy metaphors are an important yet understudied concept in political science. First, policy metaphors appear to create automatic associations between an unrelated source concept and a political target. Not only are these associated concepts important because they come to mind any time the political target is accessed in memory, but they also carry affective information to the target domain. This is important because research has shown that automatically activated concepts disproportionately influence subsequent political attitudes. Second, the political persuasion study demonstrates that policy metaphors influence political attitudes of the least sophisticated citizens by increasing the perceived quality of the message arguments. Taken together, these studies provide evidence revealing how and when policy metaphors will lead to political persuasion.