Lera Boroditsky

How do you make sense of that? I make sense of that with We think we know what's right and what's wrong and how people should live their lives.

Lyra, L-E-R-A, Boroditsky.

It's a wonderful researcher and a woman who's talking about how language, the language we're taught actively constructs our perception.

And in some of her more recent talks, she's talking about how when you judge something, You think you're right.

Right? Like, the thing is, is metaphors, seriously, we use them all the time, but we don't often use them deliberately.

And that's a shame because we have research to show that the metaphors we use can change how people look at something, right? So one of my favorite studies of all time, they gave, uh, participants, Thibodeau and Boroditsky back in 2011, gave participants a vignette about crime, and they either described crime as a beast attacking our city or a virus infecting our city, but the rest of the vignette was exactly the same.

And they asked both groups, "What should we do about crime?" Well, if I receive the beast metaphor, I naturally ask myself, "What would I do about a beast? I wanna cage it, I wanna capture it, I wanna punish it." Whereas if I receive the virus metaphor and you ask me, "What should you do about crime?" I think, "Well, what would I want to be done to a virus," right? I wanna protect people from getting infected by it.

I wanna stop the spread.

Yeah.

They'll go, like, "The secret life of Lera Boroditsky, spy," and blah, blah, and they'll put that, and they'll be like, "She was welcomed everywhere." And then they'll put us up.

[laughs]

"Hello, Lera.