Fighting Addiction: A War on Metaphors in the Public Sphere

Abstract

This study sought to examine the effects of war metaphors on participant ratings to engage in behaviors that prevent drug addiction. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that framing addiction using war metaphors would lead participants to be less interested in engaging with self-limiting (but not self-bolstering) behaviors to prevent addiction, compared to when addiction was framed using a more neutral metaphor ("imbalance"). Participants read a brief passage about drug addiction that either framed the illness as an enemy or an imbalance and reported their intentions to engage in both self-limiting and self-bolstering behaviors that prevent addiction. The results did not support our hypothesis, in that there was no significant difference between the self-limiting intentions of those primed with the enemy metaphor versus those primed with the imbalance metaphor. There was, however, a main effect of behavior type: intentions to engage in self-limiting behaviors were significantly higher than intentions to engage in self bolstering behaviors. We theorized that our hypothesis was not supported because our paragraph was very biological in nature, which might not appeal to certain demographics of individuals in America. In future studies, we would like to explore the behavioral effects of framing addiction as a "virus" or a "beast." Keywords: drug addiction, enemy metaphor, imbalance metaphor, self-limiting behaviors, self-bolstering behaviors