“It’s a war! It’s a battle! It’s a fight!”: Do militaristic metaphors increase people's threat perceptions and support for COVID-19 policies?

Abstract

Governments around the world have made use of militaristic metaphors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to draw attention to the dangers of the virus. But do militaristic metaphors indeed affect individuals’ threat perceptions and support for restrictive COVID-19 policies? Using a fictitious newspaper design, COVID-19 policies were described with similarly negatively valanced metaphors but different in militaristic connotation (e.g., “war” vs. “struggle”). Overall, data of 3 framing experiments (N = 1,114) in Germany and the United States indicate limited evidence on the effectiveness of the tested militaristic metaphors. In the U.S. context, the non-militaristic concept of struggle was consistently more strongly associated with the desired outcomes than militaristic metaphors. In study 2 and 3, we also tested whether a narrative compared to factual style of reporting additionally influenced the framing effect. A congruency effect of narrative reporting style and the use of warfare metaphors was found in the German but not in the U.S. sample. Results of post-experimental norming studies (N = 437) in both countries revealed that the metaphor of war is associated with higher responsibility ascriptions to the government, whereas the concept of struggle triggers individual responsibility in the pandemic. The results are discussed in light of the usefulness and appropriateness of militaristic metaphors in medical contexts.

“Flying over the crisis”: A study on interdisciplinary metaphors of resilience

“…Due to the limited data material, not all metaphors could be categorized into a metaphorical concept, still description of all metaphor source domains is provided for disclosure (see Table 3). Our experts’ use of metaphors is in line with public discourses concerning crises, where battle has also been found to be the most frequently used metaphor, lately around the SARS-CoV2-pandemic (Schnepf & Christmann, 2022). (B) The metaphor source domains we found in the interviews predominantly did not refer to only one of the pre-defined target domains of resilience as trait, process or outcome only, but were related to all three target domains, with a small predominance of process.…”