Analogy use in naturalistic settings: The influence of audience, emotion, and goals

Abstract

The ways in which analogy was used in a nonexperimental environment-politics-was investigated. We used the framework developed in analogy research to analyze the selection of analogical sources in political discourse. We took all the analogies reported in newspapers during the final week of a referendum campaign in Canada and analyzed the features of the different analogies used. We identified 234 analogies and analyzed the range over which analogies were used, semantic categories of analogies, goals of the analogizer, and emotional connotation of the analogies. Our results reveal that analogy was frequently used, that over two-thirds of the analogical sources were nonpolitical, and that many of the sources had strong emotional connotations. Furthermore, the goal of the analogizer influenced the selection of sources. We conclude that characteristics of the audience and emotionality of the source analog are important features in the selection of source analogs.

Reviving Inert Knowledge: Analogical Abstraction Supports Relational Retrieval of Past Events

“…Analogical retrieval: A good match is still hard to find One striking aspect of the current results is how poorly participants perform at analogical retrieval and transfer in the absence of analogical comparison. Although this finding of poor relational retrieval has been found repeatedly in the laboratory, the current research is unusual in using people's real-life memories as the memory set (see also Blanchette & Dunbar, 2001). Thus, the pattern cannot be dismissed as an artifact of laboratory studies.…”

“…This failure of relational transfer appears less severe for experts than for novices (Blanchette & Dunbar, 2001;Novick, 1988), suggesting that experts are more likely to encode situations in ways that can be relationally retrieved. However, this only highlights the question of how expertise is attained, given that novices often fail to access the very kind of prior knowledge that would favor achieving new insights.…”

What Does (and Doesn’t) Make Analogical Problem Solving Easy? A Complexity-Theoretic Perspective

“…The ability of experts to retrieve exemplars with good relationally-based (as opposed to merely surface-similarity-based) matches with new probleminstances (Blanchette & Dunbar, 2001;Novick, 1988) as opposed to the often abysmal retrieval abilities of people in general (Gick & Holyoak, 1983;Ross, 1989a;cf. Dunbar, 2001).…”

“…Dunbar, 2001). That being said, relationally-based exemplar retrievals do occur, and are much more frequently done by experts (Blanchette & Dunbar, 2001;Novick, 1988) or people in general who are able to compare problem-instances prior to retrieval (Gentner et al, 2009). These improvements in performance have been attributed to common (re)coding of exemplars and probes (Medin & Ross, 1989) and the use of small schema abstractions as both stored exemplars and probes (Gentner et al, 2009).…”

Abductive Inference: From Philosophical Analysis to Neural Mechanisms

“…Analogical inference often involves emotional content, especially when it is used in persuasion to transfer negative affect from a source to a target (Blanchette and Dunbar, 2001;Thagard and Shelley, 2001) …”