Root metaphor is one of the most powerful, least known discoveries of the last fifty years.

In a much cited paper, Smith and Eisenberg conclude that the root metaphorical shift from “drama” to “family” served, during a strike, as the driving conflict between employees and management in the perennially joyful world of Disney.  I was introduced to root metaphor by Sarah Allan, who had learned about it from Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work Metaphors We Live By (MWLB).  

MWLB sits on my desk, where I can easily pull it down and browse its pages.  A root metaphor is a part is an unconscious model by which we evaluate the world around us.  Root metaphors show up in language.  For example, argument is war is a root metaphor that gives English speakers a wide range of phrases like, “I attacked his point.” and “I defended my position.”  In another culture, the root metaphor may be argument is ceremony.  Still more low lying metaphors exist, like good is up:  “things are looking up”; “that business is on the up-and-up”; “she’ll rise to the top”.

In Rock’s SEEDS framework, I see categories of unconscious bias mapping to root metaphor:

Similarity Bias – People like me are better than others

“buddy up”; “let’s stick together”; “we think alike”

All of these phrases have an upbeat, good connotation, just as the similarity bias predicts.

Expedience Bias – If it feels right, it must be true

“I feel good about that”; “go with your gut”; “that rubs me the wrong way”

Experience Bias – My perceptions are accurate

“I have a cloudy view [of some abstract subject]”; “I know it when I see it”;

Distance Bias – Closer is better than far

“Be close”, “be near”, and phrases like them are all expressions of love and friendship.

Safety Bias – Bad is stronger than good

“I’m sunk!”; “lose-lose situation”; “one in a million”

My mappings are imperfect, but the root metaphorical associations to unconscious bias are so easily assigned as to be self-evident.  I would be very surprised if this argument hasn’t already been made somewhere in the literature.

What does it mean for root metaphor and unconscious bias to be “buddied up”?

It is a new inroad to understanding ourselves.  Both frameworks provide considerable insight into our inner workings.  Root metaphor is more of a cogno-linguistic exercise, while unconscious bias deals most directly with neuroscience.

It would be easy to declare this a chicken-and-the-egg situation, but I will insist on a directionality.  The brain’s biases are not derived by brain structure.  Brain structure and how it affects our thought is plainly the vice-strong domain of David Rock.  But Rock talks about how our brain structure affects our ability to multitask, maintain focus, and similar.  When he begins talking about bias, he is talking about higher cognitive function.  Bias may be pre-programmed, but it isn’t an anatomical area of the brain.

Steven Pinker explains how language exposes and affects bias.  Even in the node.js community, there are holy wars over the use of gendered pronouns and how they affect our perceptions of women in the workplace [check out what Pinker has to say about the problem in the Pronouns section of this Wikipedia article].  I am not an expert, so I offer my conclusion humbly:  language is not an outward manifestation of an inward bias.  Language is the bias.  Rock’s SEEDS don’t produce root metaphor, but rather are different manifestations of the same source as that of language itself.  The spinning bias motor of language is what propels SEEDS biases forward.

This is why IF-THEN exercises are so successful.  They force us to put our unconscious bias into language, allowing us to grapple with it directly.  While we may wish to manipulate, we definitely don’t want to rid ourselves of these behaviors.

What would we do if things stopped looking up?