Metaphors Point to Hidden Mental States
Finding unmet cognitive needs (especially ones rooted in emotions and other visceral factors) is a wellspring for product and service innovation. Discovering these needs can be tricky. Listening for metaphors (or doing a metaphor hunt) has always been a good technique.
This article provides a little empirical evidence for why it works.
“To summarize, we have offered evidence that metaphorical language may make it possible for people to convey what would otherwise be difficult or impossible to express. This seems to be the case with the quality of unobservable internal states like emotions, as evidenced by our results showing the predominance of metaphorical language during descriptions of feeling states as opposed to actions, especially when those states are intense.”
August 12th, 2008 at 7:55 am
this metaphor as an important but hidden mental states are very interesting to learn how our client’s mind work and how he behave