Surfaces and Essences

  Yes, analogies manipulate us, and yes, we are enchained by them. This is a fact that we simply must recognize. Not only are we prisoners of the known and the familiar, but we are serving a life term. But luckily for us, we have the power to enlarge our prison over and over again, indeed without any limits. Only the known can free us from the known.

  CHAPTER 6

  How We Manipulate Analogies

  Sticks for Stirring Become Javelins for Rowing

  Emmanuel and Doug have just gone out for their habitual afternoon coffee break. “Two crèmes,” says Doug to the server. When the drinks arrive, Doug pours some sugar in his cup, takes the spoon from the saucer, and while stirring, says, “Here in Europe, nobody is surprised to see coffee served in real cups, with real saucers and real metal spoons. It’s par for the course.”

  “Sure!” says Emmanuel. “But why would that surprise you?”

  “It was like that in the U.S. when I was a grad student,” says Doug nostalgically, “but nowadays, wherever you go, coffee is always served in big tall cardboard or styrofoam cups, and instead of a spoon all you get is a super-thin little wooden or plastic stick. Why doesn’t anyone ever complain? It’s as if, uhh… It’s as if some tourists came to a lake and wanted to rent a rowboat and then, instead of being given oars, they were given a pair of javelins. Can you imagine that? And on top of that, imagine that nobody uttered a peep in protest.”

  Caricature Analogies: A Creative Communication Tool

  What Doug just came out with is a caricature analogy — a very common sort of cognitive act consisting in the dreaming-up of a new situation that differs greatly from the original one, at least on the surface, but which, at a deeper level, is “exactly the same thing”, and which has aspects that cannot help nudging the listener towards the conclusion desired by the speaker. Such a process is generally triggered when one is desirous of sharing a strong personal reaction, such as indignation, to a situation. Often one fears that a direct and straightforward recounting of the situation itself will be too bland to get anyone else to feel one’s intense sense of indignation. And so, dipping judiciously into one’s vast system of categories, one tries to concoct a fictitious situation in a distant domain yet very much like the situation at hand, sharing a “conceptual skeleton” with it, and hopefully vivid enough to pull listeners in and get them to see the original situation through one’s own eyes. We now illustrate this phenomenon through a series of examples drawn from daily, often quite mundane, interactions.

  A scientist seeking a job abroad wrote to a colleague: “I love my country, but doing science here is like playing soccer with a bowling ball.”

  Doug said to Carol, “The German word for ‘tortoise’ is ‘Schildkröte’, which literally means ‘shield-toad’.” Quite tickled, Carol replied, “Shield-toads, eh? And I suppose that over there they don’t have eagles but feather-cows?”

  Carol asks Doug, “You don’t have a pen on you, by any chance, do you?” Doug, who makes a point of never being without a pen, replies to his wife’s question just as he has replied to it a hundred times before: “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  At a party an adult asks a teen-ager how old she is, and she says, “I’m seventeen.” Her father reminds her that she’s still just sixteen. “Oh, come on, Dad!” she retorts. “My birthday’s just two weeks away!” He counters, “Sure, sweetie. And today’s September 29th. So October has already started, I suppose?”

  A journalist asked Paul Newman why he remained faithful to his wife, actor Joanne Woodward. (Their marriage lasted fifty years, until Newman’s death.) He answered, “Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?” And when he was asked why he missed the ceremony in which, in his sixties, he was at long last being awarded an honorary Oscar, Newman explained, “It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for eighty years. Finally she relents, and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry — I’m tired.’ ”

  S. says to her father, “This morning I went to the store with Jack [her brother] and this girl named Jill.” Perplexed, her father replies, “What’s with calling her ‘this girl named Jill’, eh? She’s been over here at least a dozen times, and I always had to drive her home, and each time I spent ten or fifteen minutes talking to her! Don’t you remember all those times? You might as well have said to me, ‘ This morning I went to the store with a guy named Jack…’ ”

  A feminist slogan of the eighties said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

  A common bumper sticker on American cars during the Vietnam war said, “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.”

  “Love without jealousy is like a Polish man without a mustache.” — Polish proverb.

  A famous physics professor gets an email from a post-doc he’s never heard of. She starts out with “Dear Dan”, and then says that she’s about to submit a “revolutionary” grant proposal and hopes that “Dan” will “come on board” and co-sign it. He is shocked by the note’s presumptuousness, and says, “So if I were the Queen of England, would she have called me ‘Lizzie’?”

  A sports announcer was taking contemptuous note of the fact that some people were pushing for chess to become an official Olympic sport. He scoffed, “And so what’s next on the list — Monopoly? Clue? Tic-Tac-Toe?”

  A writer about cancer who wanted to make fun of alternative medicine wrote: “A doctor who treats stomach cancer by advocating a diet of special plants is like the captain of the Titanic spending his time rearranging the deck chairs instead of issuing an SOS.”

  A physics professor said, “Imagining relativity before the equation E = mc2 was discovered is like imagining Pisa before the Tower of Pisa had been built.”

  Fred: “So did you receive my invite in the mail?” Jim: “Yeah, not only did I get your invite, I already sent you my accept.”

  A teen-ager: “Pay ten dollars to get to see the previews for Harry Potter ?! No way! I’d rather have my tongue stapled to the wall!”

  “So religious fanaticism is going to disappear during this century? Wonderful! And you know what? I have a great bridge I can sell you for just ten dollars!”

  M., who’s always loved puns, is annoyed that many bright people ridicule them. She says, “Why do so many thoughtful people hold the art of wordplay in contempt? It’s as if some sport were a lightning rod for vicious mockery by sports lovers. Imagine that every time any pole vaulter gracefully cleared the bar and landed safely in the pit, the announcer were to groan, ‘Grotesque! What a lousy jump! It stank!’, and the crowd were to hiss loudly. Why do so many people do just that every time that they hear a pun, no matter how clever it is?”

  A couple introduce their cat Snoopy to a friend, who scratches his head and asks, “Why did you call a female cat ‘Snoopy’? Everyone knows Snoopy is a male beagle!” The wife answers, “It’s because she’s constantly snooping. That’s her signature. Her name has nothing to do with Peanuts. The connection never came to our mind!” The friend replies, “Oh, come on! It’s as if you were telling me, ‘When we named our son “Adolf Hitler”, it never crossed our mind that anyone would think of the Nazi Führer!”

  A young woman reveals to her brother how badly her fiancé has verbally abused her for years. She tearfully adds, “I’m just so used to it; I’ve never known anything else. Sometimes I really do think I deserve all his insults.” Her brother replies, “That’s crazy. You’re like a whipped dog who accepts cruelty as normal, while all the other neighborhood dogs have kind masters who pet them all the time, and who couldn’t imagine hurting their dog.”

  Two friends on a walk notice a café called “The Corkscrew”. Chuckling, one says, “Do you think the same people own a cocktail lounge called ‘The Coffee Grinder’?”

  A dad plays blindfold chess with his daughter, beating her in 40 moves. He mutters to a friend, “Oh, I played so badly!” The friend replies, “You remind me of a talking dog who complains that he can’t get rid of all the split infinitives in his speech.”

  At a
dinner party, P. is sitting next to a doctor who states his view that midwives should all be women, because only women know what it is to give birth. P. reacts, “By that logic, breast-cancer specialists would all have to have had breast cancer, and only someone handicapped could sell wheelchairs. And of course, a bald person couldn’t be a hairdresser.”

  Investment guru Warren Buffett commented that the huge profit-making opportunities opened up by the global financial crisis made him feel “like a hungry mosquito at a nudist camp.”

  A trouble-shooting site on the Web tries to explain why its Webcam seems so slow. “Why does our video camera run so slowly? Well, the amount of information it has to transmit is very large, and standard telephone lines and an old modem struggle to process all of the data. It’s like trying to route the entire Mississippi River through the plumbing in your house. It just doesn’t fit, but we do our best!”

  Such a list could be extended forever. It shows that caricature analogies jump to the lips of anyone and everyone, most frequently provoked by an intense and sudden reaction to a situation, such as indignation or surprise. The analogy can take on many external forms, such as “Thinking X is as dumb as thinking Y”, or “Doing X wouldn’t be any less absurd than doing Y”, or “Now that they’ve accepted X, are they going to accept Y and Z as well?”, or “You might as well believe in Y if you believe in X”, or “If X is true, then Y is true too”, and on and on. Caricature analogies are often based on extremely salient entities in their respective domains, such as Albert Einstein, the Titanic, the Mississippi River, Mount Everest, or McDonald’s, or on commonplace, hackneyed facts, such as that the earth is round, that a week contains seven days, that the Pope is Catholic, and so on.

  Unconvincing caricature analogies can of course be dreamt up, just as far-fetched categorizations can be made. After all, the human mind often widely misses the mark in its attempts to zero in on the gist of situations it faces! For example, when an overzealous computer executive was announcing a modest incremental advance in the technology of chips, he grandiosely declared, “Compared to our latest new chips, the old generation of chips is like a rusty can opener next to a brand-new Ferrari!” The mere fact that this is a cute caricature analogy doesn’t suffice to make it convincing.

  A Caricature Analogy in Slow Motion

  When in lectures we explain to audiences what a caricature analogy is, people are often stimulated by the idea and some launch right into the deliberate construction of caricature analogies themselves. When such attempts work well, some people think they know all there is to know about caricature analogies. This, however, is a pipe dream. Just as being able to drive a car doesn’t make one an expert mechanic, so being able to come up with caricature analogies doesn’t make one an expert concerning the underlying psychological mechanisms.

  What kinds of mental process give rise to this phenomenon, which ranges from the mundane to the highly creative? Among the countless new situations that we face each day, what is it about a few special ones that launches us on a quest for an analogy based on a crystal-clear but totally imaginary situation? How does one put one’s finger on the conceptual skeleton of the situation inspiring the search for a caricature? How does one choose a suitable alternative domain, and then export this same gist into it?

  In order to cast a little light on these matters, let’s delve into the first example — the scenario of javelins used as oars. Doug wants to get across to Emmanuel his annoyance at the way flimsy wooden or plastic sticks are offered in America as coffee-stirrers. He has, however, a suspicion that his friend, who has not witnessed the gradual slide in American customs, will need some help in order to be brought to the point where he sees things more or less as Doug does.

  Doug could say, “It’s as if they were giving us some needles to stir our coffee with.” And indeed, at first he feels tempted by that, but refrains; it would be too extreme and too crude. Mentally replacing thin wood sticks by needles would amount to twisting a knob to turn up the situation’s degree of absurdity. Turning such a knob, though easy, is merely indulging in exaggeration, and Doug knows that exaggeration usually reduces the credibility of what one is saying. So he wonders how he can quickly convey the crux of what bothers him without going into a long, heavy-handed explanation.

  The crux of Doug’s annoyance is the craziness of giving a stick rather than a spoon in order to stir a liquid — not just coffee, but any liquid. So he wants to put his finger on this gist by caricaturing it in a different domain, where its absurdity will stand out like a sore thumb. But for his caricature to be effective, the new domain has to be as familiar as possible. The challenge is thus to find a conceptual slippage where coffee is replaced by a generic liquid and where the use of skimpy sticks is blatantly ridiculous.

  The mental pressure is clearly pushing for a coffee ⇒ water slippage, since water is the liquid we all know best. But what familiar activities are there in which one churns up water with some object, and in which it crucially matters how much purchase the stirrer has on the water? (The paltry purchase afforded by the stirring tool is, after all, the conceptual skeleton’s backbone.) A few possibilities come to mind: the propulsion of a boat by a propeller or a paddle wheel, the act of swimming, and that of rowing or paddling. But to maintain the conversation’s momentum, it’s crucial for Doug to choose one of these in the blink of an eye.

  For Doug, underwater propellers and paddle wheels are not terribly familiar objects and so he skips over them, moving on to the domain of swimming. Here it’s the arms that have purchase in the water, but replacing a swimmer’s arms by some kind of thin objects is not easily visualized; one would have to imagine a bizarre surgical operation, which would make the caricature feel very forced, not graceful and natural. Another possibility would involve the swimmer’s hands, which do the brunt of the propulsion work. One might imagine a swimming coach who says, “Turn your hands so they present the least possible surface area; make them slip maximally easily through the water! Minimize your hands’ purchase!” But for a coach to come out with such nonsense is so implausible that the caricature wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of success.

  The remaining domain is that of rowboats. Luckily a rowboat’s oars look a bit like oversized spoons, and since they are relatively familiar, human-sized objects, it’s very easy to replace them, in one’s mind’s eye, by other entities. No need to imagine a surgical operation, a nutty swimming coach, or technological savvy! All Doug needs to do is find some good substitutes — that is, some familiar objects that are roughly oar-sized but that would have far less purchase on the water, and that would also recall the trendy slender sticks for stirring coffee (after all, the goal is to create a clear parody of the offensive recent convention). Since the concept needle was already activated in his mind, he imagines a giant needle — a needle as big as an oar — and all at once the image of javelins jumps to mind. Yes, javelins are very slender and smooth, and yes, they are just the right size, and of course they would have no purchase whatsoever in the water. This amusing conceptual slippage strikes him as a pretty good choice, and so, smiling internally, he takes the plunge and blurts it out.

  To concoct a convincing caricature analogy is a challenging cognitive activity in which one hopes to bring someone else around to one’s own viewpoint. Sometimes one is indignant or outraged, and that’s the feeling one wishes to induce in others; other times, one wants to convey a sense for why one is confused about some topic. This is the case in our next example, and we’ll again explore the hidden search mechanisms.

  The Highest Peak in a Carefully-selected Mountain Chain

  A., an American, receives an email telling him that the pantomime artist Marcel Marceau just died. He mentions it to a French friend, who says she’s saddened to hear the news but wonders why anyone would have bothered to send A. an email about it. Perplexed by this reaction, A. says, “What!? If the Eiffel Tower had collapsed this morning, wouldn’t that have been email-worthy?” Let’s look
at what pushed A. to make a caricature analogy and how it came into being.

  The trigger was his French friend’s casting doubt on the importance of this highly French event, and so A. wants to express, and in a vivid manner, his astonishment at her attitude. To this end, he focuses on Marceau’s world renown rather than on his artistry. Since A. had always considered Marceau to be a very major icon, and since the concept of France is highly activated in his mind, it’s no surprise that the Eiffel Tower would pop up as a quintessential member of the category icons of French culture.

  But why did A. choose an inanimate French icon rather than a famous French person — say, Descartes, Napoléon, or Louis XIV? Well, there were various mental pressures here — that is, blurry constraints — pushing in specific conceptual directions. First of all, it makes no sense to receive an email announcing a death that took place a very long time ago. Secondly, jumping to a radically contrasting domain is a more effective rhetorical strategy (recall this is why Doug shifted from the domain of stirring coffee with very thin rods to the domain of rowing in a lake with very thin rods). And lastly, why didn’t A. choose Mont Blanc, the city of Paris, or even France as a whole? Because the disappearance of any of those three would be a nearly unimaginable catastrophe; the Eiffel Tower’s collapse seems far more real.

  It’s clear that many diverse caricature analogies, not just one, are applicable to this (or to any) situation. Thus A. might well have said, “Wouldn’t you have sent me an email when the Twin Towers were destroyed?”, or perhaps “And if a nuclear explosion had obliterated Paris, wouldn’t that have been email-worthy?”, or then again, “When John Lennon was shot, I certainly would have appreciated a phone call letting me know about it.” Each of these examples conflicts in one way or another with the mental pressures we hypothesized above, which guided A. in the creation (or selection) of his “Eiffel Tower” caricature analogy, but on the other hand, each of them has its own brand of logic, making it at least a plausible candidate for utterance.