[lg policy] Framing a poll

Mon Dec 21 15:27:29 UTC 2009

 Framing a poll <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1978>

December 20, 2009 @ 9:26 am · Filed by Mark
Liberman<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=2>under Language
and politics <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=16>

Back in 2005, when George Lakoff's ideas about "framing" in political
discourse were a hot media
topic<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002335.html>,
the common journalistic mistake was to see the issue in terms of words
rather than concepts<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001247.html>.
Now the whole issue seems to have fallen out of fashion -- at least, an
interesting study, published about a month ago in *Psychological Science*and
featured <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;326/5956/1045-c> in
the Random Samples section of Science Magazine, hasn't (as far as i can
tell) generated a single MSM news story or even blog post.

The paper is Mark Landau, Daniel Sullivan, and Jeff Greenberg, "Evidence
That Self-Relevant Motives and Metaphoric Framing Interact to Influence
Political and Social
Attitudes<http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122659026/abstract>",
*Psychological Science *20(7): 1421-1427, November 2009. The abstract:

We propose that metaphor is a mechanism by which motivational states in one
conceptual domain can influence attitudes in a superficially unrelated
domain. Two studies tested whether activating motives related to the
self-concept influences attitudes toward social topics when the topics'
metaphoric association to the motives is made salient through linguistic
framing. In Study 1, heightened motivation to protect one's own body from
contamination led to harsher attitudes toward immigrants entering the United
States when the country was framed in body-metaphoric, rather than literal,
terms. In Study 2, a self-esteem threat led to more positive attitudes
toward binge drinking of alcohol when drinking was metaphorically framed as
physical self-destruction, compared with when it was framed literally or
metaphorically as competitive other-destruction.

Their simple and clever technique involved three experimental steps, which
I'll describe in detail for their first experiment.  69 Arizona
undergraduates participated in what was billed as a study about media
preferences.  In the first step, subjects read an article about airborne
bacteria:

[P]articipants in the contamination-threat condition read an article,
ostensibly retrieved from a popular science magazine, describing airborne
bacteria as ubiquitous and deleterious to health. Participants in the
no-threat condition read a parallel article describing airborne bacteria as
ubiquitous but harmless.

In the second step, subjects read one of two articles about U.S. domestic
issues other than immigration. One of these articles contained a number of
"country = body" metaphorical expressions, while the other one didn't:

In the body-metaphoric-framing condition, the essay contained language
subtly relating the United States to a body (e.g., "After the Civil War, the
United States experienced an unprecedented growth spurt, and is scurrying to
create new laws that will give it a chance to digest the millions of
innovations"). In the literal-framing condition, the same domestic issues
and opinions were discussed using literal paraphrases of the metaphors
("After the Civil War, the United States experienced an unprecedented period
of innovation, and efforts are now underway to create new laws to control
the millions of innovations").

In the third step,

[P]articipants completed two questionnaires, counterbalanced in order,
assessing their agreement with six statements each about immigration and the
minimum wage. The immigration items included "It's important to increase
restrictions on who can enter into the United States" and "An open
immigration policy would have a negative impact on the nation." The
minimum-wage measure included statements like "It's important to increase
the minimum wage in the United States." Responses were made on 9-point
scales (1 =strongly disagree, 9 =strongly agree) and were averaged to form
composite scores for anti-immigration attitudes (α= .87) and agreement with
increasing the minimum wage (α= .88). Preliminary analyses revealed no
significant effects involving presentation order, so we omitted this factor
from subsequent analyses.

As a final check, they asked participants "To what extent did the article on
airborne bacteria make you more concerned about what substances your body is
exposed to?" and "To what extent did the article on airborne bacteria
increase your desire to protect your body from harmful substances?".  As
expected, the subjects in the  contamination-threat group were slightly more
concerned about exposure to harmful substances than subjects in the
no-threat group (mean response 5.64 vs. 4.48 on a 9-point scale, SDs 2.18)
and 2.20).  Similarly for concern about protecting their bodies from harmful
substances (M= 5.60, SD= 2.14 vs. M= 4.70, SD= 2.15).

Our primary prediction was that a bodily-contamination threat would lead to
more negative immigration attitudes when the United States was framed in
body-metaphoric terms than when it was framed in literal terms, whereas
minimum-wage attitudes would be unaffected by this manipulation.

And this is indeed how it came out. Their Table 1 shows the size of the
effect on the answers to the immigration question:

The answers to the minimum-wage question were not significantly affected.

I wouldn't have been confident of seeing this doubly-indirect framing
effect. Reading an article about the dangers of airborne bacteria influenced
answers about immigration -  but only if a second article, on a separate
topic like innovation, used body-metaphoric language in referring to the
United States.

The most surprising thing is that reading about bacterial contamination
didn't influence answers to questions immigration attitudes when the
intermediate article didn't use "country = body" expressions. The underlying
metaphor in that case is so ubiquitous that you'd think it would always be
activated to some extent.

The second most surprising thing is the media silence. I guess the cause is
some combination of fashion (framing is old news), distraction (the study
wasn't about health care, climate change, or Sarah Palin), and complication
(this line of research doesn't give political operatives any clear marching
orders).

December 20, 2009 @ 9:26 am · Filed by Mark
Liberman<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=2>under Language
and politics <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=16>

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1978

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