OVERVIEW
Climate change, financial meltdowns, global pandemics, the opioid crisis — the greatest challenges we face involve incredibly complex physical and social systems. Even when these issues impact our daily lives, they can still seem remote and dicult to grasp. How do people think and reason about such abstract topics? Much of what we know about the world comes not from direct experience, but from what we hear and read. As a result, our work focuses on how language and public discourse reflect and shape attitudes and decision-making. We take a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on behavioral, analytic, and computational methods from cognitive and social psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and communications. Read on for more information about some of our ongoing projects.
METAPHOR in LANGUAGE and THOUGHT |
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LINGUISTIC FRAMING |
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Language is our primary tool for communicating our thoughts and feelings to others, and for getting them to see the world the way we want them to. Researchers from many disciplines study framing effects, examining how subtle linguistic cues affect attitudes and decision-making. Our studies have shown how and why certain syntactic constructions impact how we think about group differences, and how a 'victim' label can influence how people evaluate criminal assault cases. Recently, we have been developing a general framework that accounts for many linguistic framing effects using basic principles of discourse processing and pragmatic reasoning.
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