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How and why politicians, journalists, and scientists use analogy

Analogy in Politics and Science: Like all tools, handle with care!

Kevin Niall Dunbar, University of Toronto

How Analogy is used to persuade the electorate to vote a particular way, propose new theories and make complex issues understandable has been of intrigue to writers, scientists, politicians and speechwriters for decades.   Catchy analogies can move a whole nation as when the elder George Bush said that “Saddam Hussein is Hitler” and helped sway the US congress to vote for troops to enter Kuwait and drive Iraqi forces away. Powerful analogies like these are part and parcel of all elections and are used by politicians and journalists to influence public opinion away from the opponent and towards their position.  Usually,politicians and journalists, particularly op-ed writers achieve this goal by by projecting a positive emotion for their own side and a negative emotion for the opponent’s side.  Isabelle Blanchette and I found that in the final few days of a referendum on whether Quebec should leave the country of Canada hundreds of analogies were used in the newspapers using this strategy.

What happens when analogies are used is that components of something that is well known, like Hockey in Canada, are mapped over onto the political debate, like separating from Canada.  What is really amazing or insidious, depending on your point of view, is that the journalist or politician doesn’t have to draw a conclusion for the public to understand the analogy; our brains do it automatically.  Just open a newspaper and you will see analogies: In the economic meltdown of 2008-2009 the New York Times helped the public make sense of the heretofore unknown mega companies at the heart of the meltdown (in this case AIG) by saying that it was similar to people “not knowing about the appendix until they feel the pain.”  Analogy not only helps make sense of confusing situations such as the first few hours after 9/11 where over a dozen analogies were made by media outlets to prior events like Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma Bombings, IRA attacks in London etc, but analogy allows us to fill in gaps in our knowledge and make predictions.  Scientists also use analogy this way. When NASA scientists found that there is water on the planet Mars, they then predicted that there will be life there.  Of course, analogies don’t always lead to the correct predictions and we have been waiting for many years to see if there is life on Mars, or on Jupiter’s’ satellite Europa, (which has been likened to a pristine underwater lake in Antarctica called Lake Vostok) that may harbor ancient life forms. Because of this analogy NASA is piloting a mission to Lake Vostok, which is a mile underneath the Antarctic ice to see if NASA can retrieve ancient life forms without contaminating the lake with everyday bacteria or viruses.  If this works, then NASA plans to conduct the same type of mission on Europa.  Here we can see that an analogy can motivate a multi-million dollar mission to outer space.

So what is analogy? Is it seeing two things as being similar? Yes and no!  What is really interesting about analogy is that it is much more than seeing two things as similar. It is seeing the relations between two things as similar.  Seeing a computer virus and a human virus as similar has been a very powerful analogy: Both types of viruses cause damage, both infiltrate a host, and both often hijack the hosts’ machinery to cause damage.  These are relations between the virus and the host.  People can easily map from the relations of the biological virus to the computational virus.  The real power of analogy is when something about a familiar situation can be mapped onto a new situation resulting in a new solution to a problem.  Continuing with our virus analogy, biological viruses can be immunized against, by mapping from the biological virus to the computer virus, computer programmers have devised ways of immunizing computers against future viruses, often using the same types of mechanisms as the biological viruses.

One final property of analogies is that they are often emotional, particularly in politics and advertising.  When politicians want you to choose them rather than their rival, they often use a positive analogy such as a happy family for their side and a divorced family for the opponents’ side.  Sports analogies are particularly popular with politicians as most people are familiar with sports and the familiarity combined with emotions and excitement make sports analogies almost irresistible for journalists to use.  When Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama were debating in March 2008 the journalist Stephen J Silver used this analogy to add drama to the debate:  ”Obama leads Hillary 21 to 10 in a game of football. Hillary is driving with 2 seconds left on the clock. Hillary throws a Hail Mary pass and Obama is called for pass interference. Because the game cannot end on a penalty, Hillary gets one last snap with no time left on the clock. Even if Hillary scores the touchdown and converts a two-point conversion, she cannot win the game. The only way for her to win is if Obama runs on the field and kills one of the referees, forfeiting the game.”  This turned a somewhat dry debate into a cliff hanging game of epic proportions.  Yet analogies can be overdone as noted in the New York Times in March 2009 about the new chairman of the Republican party: “Most chairmen wave the party flag; Mr. Steele smiles and shreds it. A man of constantly colliding analogies, he compares Republicans to drunks in need of a 12-step program and to the mentally ill. He has insulted Rush Limbaugh and moderate Republican senators alike, and he has promised a “hip-hop makeover” that would attract even “one-armed midgets” to his party”

About the Author

Kevin Dunbar is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at the University of Toronto who’s passion is analogy. He conducts research on analogy in science, politics, and everyday life. He has published many articles for academics on analogy and this is his first article on analogy in articlesbase.