Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Immigration policy has been one of the top concerns of American voters over the last decade and has attracted some of the most heated rhetoric in politics and news media across the world. Much like other political language, talk about immigration is suffused with metaphor. To what extent does the language about immigration, and specifically the metaphors used, influence people’s views of the issues? How powerful are these metaphors? In our studies, we exposed participants to one of four versions of a passage about an increase in immigrants in one town. The four versions of the passage included all identical facts and figures and differed in only a single word at the beginning of the passage, describing the increase in immigrant labor as either an “increase,” a “boost,” an “invasion,” or a “flood.” Although the passages differed only in this one word, participants’ attitudes towards this increase and their predictions about its effects on the economy differed significantly depending on the metaphor. Of course, opinions on immigration differ across political affiliations. Remarkably, the single word metaphor was strong enough to mitigate much of the difference in opinion on immigration between Democrats and Republicans in our sample. Further analyses suggested that the results are not due simply to positive or negative lexical associations to the metaphorical words, and also that metaphors can act covertly in organizing people’s beliefs.