"It's a war! It's a battle! It's a fight!": Do militaristic metaphors increase people's threat perceptions and support for COVID-19 policies?

ABSTRACT: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world employed militaristic metaphors to draw attention to the dangers of the virus. But, do militaristic metaphors truly affect individuals' perceived threat of the COVID-19 virus and increase their support for corresponding restrictive policies? This study assessed the effects of fictitious newspaper articles that described COVID-19 policies using similarly negatively valenced metaphors but with differing militaristic connotations (e.g., "war" vs. "struggle"). Overall, data from three framing experiments (N = 1114) in Germany and the United States indicate limited evidence on the effectiveness of the tested militaristic metaphors. In the U.S. context, the non-militaristic concept of struggle was consistently more strongly

SUBMITTER: Schnepf J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8652818 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature