Persuasive analogies consist of linguistic cues that invite audiences to represent a problem in terms of an analog and to make choices compatible with this manipulated representation. The authors explore how the frequency of linguistic cues moderates analogical bias in choice behavior. Participants read versions of a managerial decision scenario differing in the number of sports (e.g., game plan) or family (e.g., parent company) idioms used to describe situational attributes and then chose between analogically consistent and inconsistent response options. Analogies consisting of an intermediate number of cues elicited higher rates of analogically consistent responding than those of higher and lower cue frequency. When explaining their responses, participants referred to the sports or family analogies most often to rationalize rejecting the analogically consistent response option after reading high cue frequency versions. These findings indicate that there are lower and upper boundaries to a persuasive analogy's optimal cue frequency.
Arrow, K.J. (1982). Risk perception in psychology and economics. Economic Inquiry, 20, 1-9.
2.
Baron, R.M., & Kenny, D.A. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1173-1182.
3.
Beach, L.R., Puto, C.P., & Heckler, S.E. (1996). Differential versus unit weighting of violations, framing, and the role of probability in image theory's compatibility test . Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 65, 77-82.
4.
Bortfeld, H. (2002). What native and non-native speakers' images for idioms tell us about figurative language. In R. Heredia & J. Altarriba (Eds.), Advances in psychology: Bilingual sentence processing (pp. 275-295). New York: Elsevier North-Holland.
5.
Corbett, E.P.J. (1990). Classical rhetoric for the modern student. New York: Oxford University Press.
6.
Gentner, D., & Boronat, C.B. (1992, September). Metaphor as mapping. Paper presented at the International Workshop on Metaphor, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
7.
Gentner, D., & Boronat, C.B. (1999, November). Word metaphors as generative domain mapping. Paper presented at the 40th annual meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Los Angeles, CA.
8.
Gentner, D., & Markman, A.B. (1997). Structure mapping in analogy and similarity. American Psychologist, 52, 45-56.
9.
Gilovich, T. (1981). Seeing the past in the present: The effects of associations to familiar events on judgments and decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 797-808.
10.
Giora, R. (2003). On our minds: Salience, context, and figurative language. New York: Oxford University Press.
11.
Glucksberg, S., Brown, M.E., & McGlone, M.S. (1993). Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 21, 711-719.
12.
Kahneman, D. (2004). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720.
13.
Kardes, F.R. (2001). Consumer behavior and managerial decision making (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Laboeuf, R.A., & Shafir, E. (2003). Deep thoughts and shallow frames: On the susceptibility to framing effects. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making , 16, 77-92.
16.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
17.
Levin, I.P., & Gaeth, G.J. (1988). How consumers are affected by the framing of attribute information before and after consuming the product. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 374-378.
18.
Levin, I.P., Johnson, R.D., Deldin, P.J., Carstens, L.M., Cressey, L.J., & Davis, C.R. (1986). Framing effects in decisions with completely and incompletely described alternatives. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 38, 48-64.
19.
Levin, I.P., Schneider, S.L., & Gaeth, G.J. (1998). All frames are not created equal: A typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76, 149-188.
20.
McGlone, M.S., & Harding, J.L. (1998). Back (or forward?) to the future: The role of spatial perspective in temporal language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, &Cognition, 24, 1211-1223.
21.
McGlone, M.S., Kobrynowicz, D., & Alexander, R. (2005). A certain je ne sais quoi: Verbalization bias in evaluation. Human Communication Research, 31, 241-267.
22.
McNeil, B.J., Pauker, S.G., Sox, H.C., & Tversky, A. (1982). On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. New England Journal of Medicine, 306, 1259-1262.
23.
Morgan, G. (1997). Images of organization (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage .
24.
Nayak, N.P. & Gibbs, R.W., Jr. (1990). Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119, 315-330.
25.
Nelson, T.E., Oxley, Z.M., & Clawson, R.A. (1997). Toward a psychology of framing effects. Political Behavior, 19, 221-246.
26.
Nisbett, R.E., & Wilson, T.D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.
27.
Page, M.M. (1970). The role of demand awareness in the communicator credibility effect. Journal of Social Psychology, 82, 57-66.
28.
Pratkanis, A.R., & Aronson, E. (2001). Age of propaganda: The everyday use and abuse of persuasion. New York: Freeman .
29.
Price, V., Tewksbury, D., & Powers, E. (1997). Switching trains of thought: The impact of news frames on reader's cognitive responses. Communication Research , 24, 481-506.
30.
Roehm, M.L., & Sternthal, B. (2001). The moderating effect of knowledge and resources on the persuasive impact of analogies. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 257-272.
31.
Shimko, K.L. (1994). Metaphors in foreign policy decision-making. Political Psychology, 15, 655-671.
32.
Sobel, M.E. (1982). Asymptotic intervals for indirect effects in structural equations models. In S. Leinhart (Ed.), Sociological methodology 1982 (pp. 290-312). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
33.
Spellman, B.A., & Holyoak, K.J. (1992). If Saddam is Hitler, then who is George Bush? Analogical mapping between systems of social roles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 913-933.
34.
Stapel, D.A., Martin, L.L., & Schwarz, N. (1998). The smell of bias: What instigates correction processes in social judgments?Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 797-807.
35.
Stapel, D.A., & Spears, R. (1996). Guilty by association (and innocent by dissociation): The impact of relevant and irrelevant analogies on political judgments. Political Behavior, 18, 289-309.
36.
Strack, F., Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Kubler, A., & Wanke, M. (1993). Awareness of the influence as a determinant of assimilation versus contrast. European Journal of Social Psychology , 23, 53-62.
37.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453-458.
38.
Wegener, D.T., Petty, R.E., Smoak, N.D., & Fabrigar, L.R. (2004). Multiple routes to resisting attitude change. In E. S. Knowles & J. A. Linn (Eds.), Resistance to persuasion (pp.13-38). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum .
39.
Zedeck, S., & Keppel, G. (1989). Data analysis for research designs. New York: Worth.
