How Interpretation of Metaphors Change People’s Understanding of Others

Abstract

Metaphors are implicit comparisons that are widely used in everyday language all over the world. Metaphors can be defined as applying the speech to another action and they are figures of speech that are used to refer to something but mean another. The aim of this study is to show how people interpret metaphors differently from each other. Expecting people to understand a metaphor, in the same manner, may cause misunderstandings in real life. This applies to the therapist-patient relationship as well, because if a therapist misunderstands their client, the therapy cannot benefit the patient. Therefore, measuring whether the interpretation of metaphors changes from person to person will be beneficial for having mutual understanding in the communication, which will be a significant topic for therapists to consider while they are doing therapy. To measure whether people interpret metaphors differently, an online self-report questionnaire with 10 questions was created by using the Zayed et al. (2020) article and data was gathered from 132 participants. According to the results, the hypothesis of this study has been supported, which is that every individual interprets metaphors in a unique way and their understanding of metaphors is different from each other.