| REU 2008 - Mentor abstract |
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Marti Hope Gonzales
Psychology
Most recently, graduate students and I have begun preliminary work on just what informs citizens' conceptions of the relationship between government and the public. More specifically, we are interested in testing some of cognitive linguist George Lakoff's ideas about the role of metaphorical thinking in the political domain. Briefly, Lakoff argues that in order to understand large, complex phenomena, people often use smaller, simpler metaphors. For example, in forming concepts of or attitudes toward the relationship between government on the one hand and citizens on the other hand--a complex relationship, of course--people often draw upon their metaphors for what the ideal family should be. According to Lakoff, there are two basic metaphors for family, and these two different metaphorical schemas are differentially associated with political conservatism and liberalism: the "strict father" schema, more likely to be embraced by conservatives, and the "nuturant parent" schema, more likely to be embraced by liberals. He further argues that specific social and political attitudes--toward the death penalty, taxes, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and so on--are informed by these two different schemas, and that what sometimes appear to be inconsistencies among the attitudes of citizens are not inconsistent at all if one considers the implications of adherence to either the "strict father" or "nurturant" parent metaphorical orientations. We have been working to design and validate a measure of respondents' relative endorsement of beliefs that follow from both the "strict father" and "nurturant parent" orientations, and plan to answer a number of questions:
(1) Is endorsement of one or the other orientation related to more specific social and political attitudes?
(2) Do people spontaneously use these metaphors in thinking about the role of government or in advocating for their own social and political attitudes?
(3) Are political messages more effective when they make explicit the tenets of these two metaphorical orientations?
We welcome assistance from an REU student as our thinking and research progress.
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