When linguistics and political science come together: measuring the impact of deliberately used metaphors on citizens’ perception of and opinions on political issues

As an interdisciplinary research team, we seek to tackle one important question: what is the impact of metaphors on recipients? In this context, we propose to present two experiments we conducted that both aim at measuring the impact of metaphors on citizens’ perception of and opinion on two political issues, that is Belgian federalism, and the basic income. Our first experiment was based on a newspaper article from Le Soir (July 2013) in which Belgian federalism was compared to a Tetris game. 500 participants were distributed across four experimental conditions according to the type of input they were exposed to, i.e. no input, text and image, text only and image only. They were asked to perform three interrelated tasks: a free description task, a picture association task, and a questionnaire measuring their attitude towards Belgian federalism. The results suggest that the participants who had been exposed to the experimental text tended to frame their perception of Belgian federalism differently from the other participants. However, these results suggest that reading a text might have an influence on citizens’ representations, but they do not allow us to determine the specific role played by the Tetris metaphor. We therefore developed a follow-up experiment for which we produced two different versions of the experimental text: one version where the Tetris metaphor remained explicit and a second version where this metaphor was left out. This experiment was conducted among 600 participants distributed across 3 conditions: no input, metaphorical text and non-metaphorical text. This second design should allow us to further assess to what extent the Tetris-metaphor does in fact have an impact on citizens’ representations of Belgian federalism. Our second experiment aims at measuring to what extent metaphors might have an impact on citizens’ opinion on the idea of basic income. This experiment was conducted among 750 participants who were distributed across seven experimental conditions. For the first condition, there was no input at all. The second condition consisted of a simple text explaining in a few words what the basic income is. The third, fourth and fifth condition presented the same text, but with three different metaphors added to the text, comparing the basic income to respectively allowance money, a springboard and a base frame. The two final conditions presented a non-metaphorical version of the third, fourth and fifth condition. The results of both experiments will be the main topic of our contribution