Another Preview From My Upcoming Book, What Moves People.
"I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everyone's going to be running around acting like warriors… And when you're at war, you need an enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your enemy."
That line comes from Major "Bunny" Colvin in Season 2 of The Wire, and it captures something the behavioral science on metaphor has now spent decades quietly confirming. The words we use to describe a problem don't just dress it up — they hand our audience a whole mental model for how to think about and respond to it. Change the metaphor, and you often change the solution people are willing to accept.
This month, instead of the usual research digest, I'm sharing a section from Chapter 5 of my upcoming book — "Wielding Words: Metaphors as Tools and Architects of Mental Models" — covering:
- Why Lakoff and Johnson's work on metaphor argues that phrases like "war on drugs" don't just describe reality — they activate a schema that supplies enemies, battlefields, and acceptable casualties.
- Thibodeau and Boroditsky's (2011) "beast vs. virus" crime study — how a single-word swap made the same audience recommend fundamentally different policies for the exact same crime statistics.
- What a meta-analysis of ~90 studies and ~35,000 participants tells us about when metaphors actually move people — and why one well-placed metaphor structuring your whole argument beats a dozen colorful ones sprinkled on top.
Read the full preview on the archive page — and subscribe to receive next month's issue in your inbox.