Mother Nature’s Fury: Antagonist Metaphors for Natural Disasters Increase Forecasts of Their Severity and Encourage Evacuation

Abstract

Natural disasters are often described as having antagonistic qualities (e.g., wildfires ravage). The information deficit model presumes that when people assess the risk of weather hazards, they ignore irrelevant metaphoric descriptors. However, metaphoric frames affect reasoning. The current research assessed whether antagonist metaphors for natural disasters affect perceptions of the risk they pose. Three studies ( N = 1,936) demonstrated that participants forecasted an antagonist-framed natural hazard as being more severe, and intended to evacuate more often, than a literal-framed natural hazard. Thus, the metaphorical language used to discuss natural disasters deserves consideration in the development of effective risk communication.

Communicating telecom fraud risk in anti-telefraud messages: The effects of metaphorical frames on attitudes

“…Supporting evidence suggests that framing a risk with a metaphor can also influence people to reason about the risk in a metaphor-congruent fashion. To take a few recent examples: (1) when the flood and hurricane were metaphorically framed as an antagonist, people were likely to forecast more damage caused by the natural disaster, compared with literal or vehicle framing conditions ( Hauser and Fleming, 2021 ), (2) animalistic descriptions of criminal acts resulted in significantly higher perceived risk of recidivism related to perpetrators and accordingly, harsher punishment for them ( Vasquez et al, 2014 ), and (3) when the influenza was metaphorically compared to a wild animal attacking one’s health, a weed growing inside one’s body or an invading army, people were more likely to have intentions to get a flu shot ( Scherer et al, 2015 ). In related studies, metaphors influence attitudes toward risk issues, including cancer ( Hendricks et al, 2018 ), COVID-19 ( Panzeri et al, 2021 ), immigration ( Brown et al, 2019 ), climate change ( Flusberg et al, 2017 ), and wildfire ( Matlock et al, 2017 ).…”

“…Importantly, an extensive body of work suggests that metaphor can guide thought and influence our reasoning about social reality, such as cancer ( Hendricks et al, 2018 ), immigration ( Brown et al, 2019 ), crime ( Thibodeau and Boroditsky, 2011 ) and natural disaster ( Hauser and Fleming, 2021 ). When one comprehends an issue that is metaphorically framed, a conceptual metaphor is activated.…”

“…For example, metaphorically framing a hurricane as an antagonist increases participants’ forecast of the number of homes destroyed, lives lost, and days without power caused by the hurricane, compared to the literal framing condition. In this case, because antagonists are dangerous, antagonist framing of a hurricane confers such qualities to the hurricane, increasing forecasts of its severity ( Hauser and Fleming, 2021 ).…”

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“…Scicomm as a field also has dedicated journals, including Science Communication (since 1975) 8 and Journal of Science Communication (since 2002), 9 which drive forward research and theory of scicomm as a discipline of expertise in its own right. These fora are occasionally used to describe lingcomm projects (e.g., Heinisch, 2021 on a citizen science linguistic landscape project in Germany), or discuss how linguistic research contributes to effective scicomm (e.g., Hauser & Fleming, 2021 on the effect of metaphor in natural disaster reporting).…”

Storylines nailing or failing sustainability: Energy, mining and mobility as narrative arenas for societal transition

“…Policy narratives involving much more than pure facts become especially important when rapid and irreversible decisions based on incomplete and uncertain knowledge are called for. Sometimes this is literally a question of life or death: for example, communication using antagonistic metaphors can aid in the implementation of evacuation plans and prevent the worst risks of natural disasters (Hauser & Fleming, 2021).…”