Does the COVID-19 war metaphor influence reasoning? Socio-political factors mediate the framing effect.
In recent times, many alarm bells have begun to sound: the metaphorical presentation of the COVID-19 emergency as a war might be dangerous, because it could affect the way people conceptualize the pandemic, and react to it, leading citizens to endorse authoritarianism and limitations to civil liberties. The idea that conceptual metaphors actually influence reasoning has been corroborated by Thibodeau and Boroditsky, who showed that when crime is metaphorically presented as a beast, readers become more enforcement-oriented than when crime is metaphorically framed as a virus. Recently, Steen, Reijnierse and Burgers replied that this metaphorical framing effect does not seem to occur and suggested that the question should be rephrased about the conditions under which metaphors do or do not influence our reasoning. In this paper, we investigate whether presenting the COVID-19 pandemic as a war has an effect on people’s reasoning about the pandemic. Data collected suggest that when the metaphorical framing effect occurs, it is mediated by socio-political individual variables such as speakers’ political orientation and their kind of source of information: right wings participants and those relying on independent sources of information are those more conditioned by the COVID-19 war metaphor in reasoning and opinion formation.