by James Geary
The “fingers crossed”—folding the middle finger over the index finger—is an invocation of protection or good luck, except in Corfu and Turkey, where it means the breaking of a bond of friendship. It may have originated as a disguised version of the sign of the Cross, a kind of secret handshake among Christians.
The “OK sign”—curling the thumb and forefinger into a ring with the other three fingers extended—has a more variable significance, meaning “everything is fine” except in places like Tunisia (where it’s a threat), France and Belgium (where it means “zero”), and Germany and Brazil (where it’s a bodily orifice–related insult). Emblems like these are visual metaphors in which a physical sign or gesture is the source and an abstract idea or state of mind is the target.
Metaphorical gestures regularly accompany speech. If someone asks you how you’re feeling and you reply with a weak “Eh . . .” accompanied by a seesawing motion with the flat of your hand, you clearly signal that, as the Hausa would say, you do not taste much sweetness.
But gesture on its own is also richly metaphorical. When someone gives you the finger, there can be little doubt about the sentiment expressed, however metaphorically conveyed. This gesture’s metaphorical connotation is so clear, and so clearly derisory, that the anatomical term for the middle finger213—impudicus—is derived from it. Actions do sometimes speak louder than words.
David McNeill, an expert on the relationship between gesture and thinking, argues that gesture is not some physical grace note to the music of talk. Instead, gesture—metaphorical gesture, in particular—is an indispensable part of speech. “Language is inseparable from imagery214,” he wrote in Gesture and Thought, and imagery is “embodied in gestures that universally and automatically occur with speech.” Neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti and Michael A. Arbib suggest that a vocabulary of basic metaphorical gestures formed the scaffolding for language itself.
Brain imaging studies show that a mirror neuron system for gesture recognition exists in monkeys and in humans. In humans, it is located in the same region as the brain’s language center. And the language center, some studies suggest, is active during the execution of hand and arm movements as well as during the mental simulation of these movements. Mirror neurons seem to connect thinking and doing, so Rizzolatti and Arbib posit that the mirror neuron system is the missing link between gestural communication and spoken language215.
Rizzolatti and Arbib theorize that mirror neurons allowed early primates to match their own actions to the actions of others. Through the mirror neuron properties that endow us with our “mind-reading” abilities, early primates came to associate internal states with specific physical movements. So they knew, say, that extending the hands with the palms upward was likely to “mean” the same thing no matter who performed the gesture.
Through a process of associative learning and imitation, Rizzolatti and Arbib propose, a visual language of gestures was created. Then, as hands became more and more specialized for tool use, spoken language itself evolved from those same brain circuits. And language would have brought with it huge evolutionary advantages, such as the ability to cooperate, to share information, and to organize more complex social groups. “What made us human crucially depended at one point on gestures216,” Arbib wrote. “Gesture is not a behavioral fossil but an indispensable part of our . . . ongoing system of language.”
The co-evolution of gesture and speech could explain why so much of our talk is accompanied by some kind of hand or facial movement and would provide further evidence that metaphor is not merely a matter of language alone but of thought itself.
As much as 90 percent of spoken description is accompanied by gestures of some sort217, according to McNeill. The blind gesture during speech with the same frequency as the sighted218. Sign language even translates some of the same linguistic spatial metaphors into physical action. In American Sign Language219, for example, “communication” is depicted as an object moving from one person to another; “authority” is shown as height; and “affection” is visualized as proximity.
Metaphorical gestures routinely replace their corresponding linguistic expressions. After making a joke no one else gets (an inexplicably frequent occurrence in my experience), I quickly whisk my palm above my head while producing a whistling sound instead of saying, “I guess that went over your head,” which is in itself another case of metaphor couched in the language of the body. Indeed, when adults have their limbs restrained during speech, they produce less vivid imagery220 than when their limbs are free to gesture.
But McNeill points out (note the gestural metaphor embedded in the verb!) that gestures have meanings of their own that don’t depend on words. The physical motion of a metaphorical gesture already contains the significance it wishes to convey, he argues: “In a metaphoric gesture221, an abstract meaning is presented as form and/or space . . . The gestures provide imagery for the non-imageable222.”
Many of the gestures that occur during talk seem to be derived from embodied conceptual metaphors. The linguist Cornelia Müller has documented the unconscious metaphorical gestures that accompany ordinary speech, creating a kind of gestural lexicon from one woman’s description of her relationship with a former boyfriend223.
The woman, speaking in German, described her former boyfriend as “depressive,” a word derived in both German and English from the Latin verb meaning “to press down.” Though she was unaware of the etymology of the word, the woman extended her hand with the palm downward and slowly moved it toward the ground as she spoke. Müller concluded that the conceptual metaphor “physically down = psychologically down” was active on some nonconscious level in this woman’s mind.
Metaphorical gestures can vary by culture, just like metaphorical ideas about time. Describing the excitement of her first encounter with her boyfriend—on a bus during a school outing—the woman in Müller’s study said it was as if an electric spark passed between them, using the words “It sparked224” (Es hat gefunkt). In German, the phrase is a colloquialism for falling in love, similar to the English expression “It was love at first sight.” As she uttered the word gefunkt, Müller observed, the woman brought her fingertips together and quickly released them, mimicking the flaring of an actual spark.
In northwestern Kenya, speakers of Turkana use a similar gesture to convey the concept of knowledge225. In the West, knowledge is typically conceived as an object conveyed—or passed on—from one person to another. In the Turkana culture, however, knowledge is depicted as something plucked from the brow and released into the air. When talking about knowledge, Turkana speakers pinch their fingers and make a plucking motion at the brow, then quickly open the fingers as if releasing a butterfly into the air.
Metaphorical gesture, like metaphorical speech, opens a window onto the inner world of thought and feeling, a metaphysical world rooted firmly in physical experience. Abstract concepts only take flight when tethered to the language of the body.
Metaphor and Politics
Freedom Fries and Liberty Cabbage
Jacques Jean Lhermitte, a French neuropsychiatrist who died in 1959, is best remembered for his identification of “Lhermitte’s sign,” a painful sensation occurring when bending the head forward so that the chin touches the chest. The pain, often compared to the sensation of an electric shock, is a symptom of multiple sclerosis.
Lhermitte specialized in the study of neurological anomalies such as Lhermitte’s sign as well as phenomena like visual hallucinations and demonic possession. He was also a student of some of the stranger side effects of strokes and, like Swiss neurologist Édouard Claparède, who gave patients surreptitious pinpricks, was partial to experiments that in some ways resembled practical jokes.
In one impromptu study, Lhermitte performed an early priming test by inviting to his apartment two patients who had suffered stroke-related damage to the prefrontal cortex in brain areas involving the planning and control of actions. As the patients milled about his rooms, Lhermi
tte casually mentioned the word “museum.226” The two patients suddenly behaved as if they were actually in a museum, carefully studying the paintings and posters on the walls and examining with great interest various objects on the tables. Neither patient thought their behavior odd.
Social psychologist John Bargh performed a variation on this experiment with university students, none of whom had any stroke-related brain damage. As part of an ostensible language test, participants read a list of words. One group read a list that included synonyms for rudeness; the other group read a list that included synonyms for politeness.
Bargh then instructed members of both groups to walk down the hall, where they ran into a staged situation to which they could respond in either a rude or a polite manner. Those who had read synonyms for rudeness tended to respond more rudely, while those who had read synonyms for politeness tended to respond more politely. None of the participants connected their behavior to the words they had read.
These experiments prove the power of suggestion, yet they also indicate something more. This persuasive power resides in the swirl of associations arising from even the most ordinary words, associations that can directly—and sometimes dramatically—affect our attitudes and behavior, usually without our conscious knowledge. No prefrontal cortex damage required.
In a separate experiment, Bargh assembled two groups, priming one with words stereotypical of the elderly, such as “gray,” “bingo,” and “Florida.” He then again sent subjects in both groups down the hall for a stroll. Primed participants walked more slowly than control participants, just as actual elderly people do227.
The same thing happened with other kinds of primes. Subjects primed with words relating to cooperation, for example, cooperated more on test tasks than those who were not primed; those presented with achievement-related primes performed better on tests than those not presented with those primes228. Bargh’s conclusion: the stereotypical associations and behavioral norms triggered by primes prompt people to think and act in line with those same stereotypes and norms.
Priming can even influence judgments intended to be objective, unbiased, and completely independent. A muster of German trial judges read the details of the same criminal case in which the defendant was found guilty229. Researchers then told one group that the prosecutor demanded a two-month sentence and another group that the prosecutor demanded a thirty-four-month sentence. The judges were then asked for their recommendations.
The average sentence was nineteen months when judges were told that the prosecutor demanded two months and twenty-nine months when they were told that the prosecutor demanded thirty-four months. Judges even gave significantly longer sentences when they were told that the person demanding the thirty-four-month jail term was not a prosecutor but a first-semester computer science student.
Of course, prosecutors’ demands—much less the demands of a first-semester computer science student!—should have no bearing whatsoever on the length of sentence. Yet the German judges were clearly swayed by calls for a comparatively harsh or a comparatively lenient prison spell. Merely weighing these demands, however irrelevant, and assessing them against the judges’ own opinions influenced their actual decisions.
Percy Bysshe Shelley might have misstated the case when he declared, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world230.” It would be more accurate to say that metaphor is the unacknowledged legislator of the world, since it so pervasively primes so many of our opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Shelley was on firmer ground, though, when he wrote:
Language is vitally metaphorical231; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until words, which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts.
Priming experiments are case studies in the vitality of metaphorical language. A metaphor occurs when someone apprehends previously unapprehended relations between things. The metaphor perpetuates this fresh apprehension until, through time, core associations form. These associations cling fast to words themselves, eventually becoming so routine that they continue to appear long after the original relation has ceased to be consciously apprehended. In this way, the word “museum” can mean “a building filled with precious things” while also signaling that category of places requiring an attitude of quiet reverence. The word “bingo” can mean “a kind of lottery game” while also signifying that class of track-suited retiree commonly found ambling along the palm-fringed streets of Florida.
A similar phenomenon, known as “arbitrary coherence232,” occurs during financial reasoning. Give people any number—a town’s population, for example—and then ask something like, “What is the maximum amount you would pay for a house?” The answers will be influenced by the cited figure. Given a population figure of 500,000, people will quote amounts much closer to $500,000 than people given a population figure of 1 million, who will quote amounts much closer to $1 million. We’re all influenced by the seemingly irrelevant.
The coherence of metaphorical priming is anything but arbitrary, though. Metaphorical primes cohere precisely because the patterns of association connecting the concept and the behavior interlock. Criminal sentencing decisions, like all decisions, should not be influenced by irrelevant details. But they are. This is vitally important to political debate because, as conceptual metaphor theorists Lakoff and Johnson observed, “The people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true233.”
Lakoff and Johnson’s observation echoes Friedrich Nietzsche:
What therefore is truth?234 A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses.
Psychologist Thomas Gilovich demonstrated the power of these worn-out metaphors to affect our judgments by asking a group of Stanford undergraduates to imagine that they were high-ranking officials in the U.S. State Department. He informed them that a small democratic country of no vital interest to U.S. national security235 had been attacked by a moderately powerful communist or fascist country and had asked the U.S. for help. What should the U.S. do—nothing, appeal to the United Nations, or intervene?
Gilovich then gave each student one of three different descriptions of this hypothetical foreign policy crisis, each of which contained a few minor associations and a few familiar names designed to trigger different historical analogies. One scenario featured allusions to World War II, another featured allusions to Vietnam, and the third was historically neutral.
In the World War II scenario, minorities were described as fleeing in boxcars on freight trains, while the State Department briefing was described as held in Winston Churchill Hall. In the Vietnam scenario, minorities were described as fleeing in small boats up the coast, while the State Department briefing was described as held in Dean Rusk Hall, named after President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state during the Vietnam War.
These historical cues were, of course, entirely irrelevant to the decision participants had to make. Nonetheless, subjects given the World War II scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the other two. The Vietnam and control groups both tended to recommend a hands-off approach. Gilovich quizzed students afterward, and none was aware of the historical allusions embedded in the descriptions—and all denied that these associations could have influenced their decisions.
“When one must make a decision236 about a course of events, one draws analogies between existing circumstances and presumably informative past events,” Gilovich observed. “This process, in itself, is not too surprising. What is surprising is that the specific associations or analogies formed in a given situation can be influenced by such transient, incidenta
l factors . . . The manipulations used in these studies led subjects to make associations that once formed were difficult to ignore.”
Metaphors are notoriously difficult to ignore, as shown by psychologist Sam Glucksberg in a clever variation on the classic experiment demonstrating the “Stroop effect.”
The Stroop effect237 is named after John Ridley Stroop, a devout Christian preacher and professor of religion who in 1935 happened to publish one of the most widely cited studies in the history of cognitive psychology. Subjects look at the names of colors printed in variously colored inks and must name as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which a specific word is printed.
This task is easy when the word and the color of the ink are the same. People easily reel off, say, “green” when the word “green” is printed in green ink.
Things get trickier when the name of the color is different from the color in which the word is printed; for example, when the word “green” is printed in blue ink. Then, subjects are inclined to read the word “green” rather than to name the color “blue.” It takes longer for subjects to state the correct ink color, indicating that the meaning of the word itself creates “cognitive dissonance” that interferes with the ability to name the color of the ink. (To take the Stroop test, go to http://www.at-bristol.org.uk/stroopeffect.html.)
Stroop’s conclusion: it is impossible for us to ignore the literal meanings of words, even when the literal meaning produces the wrong answer. Glucksberg postulated that it is also impossible for us to ignore the metaphorical meanings of words. To prove it, he and his team carried out a Stroop test with metaphors, using literally false and metaphorically true statements.
The researchers listed four different types of sentences: literally true (“Some birds are robins”), literally false (“Some birds are apples”), metaphors (“Some jobs are jails”), and “scrambled metaphors,” sentences with no ready interpretation (“Some jobs are birds”). Participants had to identify the literally false sentences as quickly as possible.