How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 231

They set up a set of four experiments to test the power of the two
metaphors once more, but this time gave them a series of possible
reforms to tackle those issues. What they found was that they did
indeed change which solutions people favoured.
"People who read that crime was a beast were more likely to rank
one of the enforcement-oriented responses as the best (42%) than
those who read that crime was a virus (31%)," the researchers wrote.
Not only that, but most people did not include the metaphor when
selecting what motivated their response, writing "we found that
people rarely identified the metaphor as influential in their thinking
despite its influence. We found that the metaphors influenced even
those people who could not remember the metaphorical frame."
The researchers concluded that study reveals that people can be
unwittingly swayed by metaphors when reasoning about social
policy. Metaphors encourage particular conceptualisations of
problems and, depending on the situation, can be helpful or
misleading. We hope that coming to appreciate the role that
metaphors play in reasoning can help decision-makers be mindful of
the limitations and the virtues of the metaphors they chose to frame
issues. .
15.11 Powerful Metaphor Communication
In our modern, western world the tradition of telling and listening to
stories has been replaced with passive activities of watching
television or playing computer games which do little to generate
connections for change in the brain. The most powerful
communicators of our time such as, Nelson Mandela, Winston
Churchill, or Martin Luther King all used metaphor