Understanding how people make sense of social issues is a fundamental aspect of communications research. In this piece, we apply theory from psychological anthropology to provide a new perspective on this core feature of communication and argue for the importance of considering culture in applied communications research. Drawing on a study of the implicit understandings and patterns of reasoning that Americans use to think about the process of aging and older adults, we show how the theory of cultural models can be applied to arrive at a deeper view of the ways in which members of the public make meaning of aging issues. We discuss the implications of this research for those communicating about aging and other social and scientific issues. The article provides information on public understanding that is directly pertinent to those communicating about aging and demographic change in the United States.

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The FrameWorks Institute applies cultural models and metaphor theory from cognitive anthropology to develop communications devices that reframe public understandings and discourses on social problems. This article traces three case studies, in the areas of child mental health, budgets and taxes, and environmental health, where substantial gaps between scientific and public knowledge were identified, and describes the research process to develop "explanatory metaphors" to close those gaps and cultivate more accurate and expansive patterns of public thinking. Three distinct cognitively attuned communications tasks are described: (1) foregrounding an extant but recessive cognitive model prominent among the public; (2) filling a domain-specific "cognitive lacuna" in public thinking by introducing a modified version of an existing model from a kindred cognitive domain; and (3) building off or working around an existing dominant cognitive model that is consistent with expert knowledge but incomplete. The article concludes with observations on how the practice of applied communications has challenged and strengthened our theory of culture and cognition. [cultural models, communications research, applied research, metaphor, science translation] Western anthropologists have long been keen to explore the boundaries between everyday and specialized knowledge: between cultural knowledge that is broadly distributed among members of a population, and that knowledge that is more exclusively the domain of specialists who, by whatever means, have come to see and think differently about some aspect of the world. When anthropology's focus was more squarely trained on non-Western cultures, this line of exploration often delved into the study of shamans and diviners, and on the means, purposes, and functions of esoteric knowledge and ritual practice in socioreligious contexts (Benedict 1922;Boas 1902; Lévi-Strauss 1963). As the discipline's lens has turned increasingly on Western society and knowledge, the same impulse has led to explorations on the margins between everyday "common sense" notions of the world and those derived from the specialized pursuit of scientific knowledge (Kempton 1987;McCloskey 1983).

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