Moving Hearts and Minds with Metaphors
A well-structured metaphor can automatically trigger a cascade of emotions and thoughts that accelerate learning, decision-making, creativity and behavior change. Metaphors not only move my heart and mind but can also be used as a modeling tool (e.g. Zaltman’s Metaphor Elicitation Technique) to uncover the deep mental structures and cognitive needs of employees and customers.
In short, metaphors as well as similes and analogies are a powertool for cognitive designers or anyone interested in designing for how minds actually work.
In his recent book, Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition, Paul Thagard offers an analysis of emotional analogies that is useful for cognitive designers. He describes three classes of emotional analogies including those analogies about emotions, that transfer emotions and that generate emotions.
As an example of analogies used to generate emotions, Dr. Thagard describes a communication campaign launched by a university designed to get people to protect thier computer passwords with more care.
The core analog in the campagin asked students faculty and staff to “treat their computer passwords like underwear: make them long and mysterious, don’t leave them lying around, and change them often”.
The use of cognitive dissonance (congruity and incongruity between the source and target in the metaphor/analog) to generate humor and invoking a soft taboo definitely generates a jolt of mental energy but is it enough to change behavior?
To dig into the details you can read (for free) the chapter on Emotional Analogies and Analogical Inference.
