Fighting Fire or Fighting War: Examining the Framing Effects of COVID-19 Metaphors

ABSTRACT

Metaphorical language describing the COVID-19 pandemic as a war has been pervasive in public discourse (e.g. “the pandemic is a war,” “the virus is an enemy,” and “the vaccine is a weapon”). This study employs an online survey experiment (N = 551 U.S. adults) to examine the impact of war metaphors compared to non-metaphorical literal frames and fire metaphors (e.g. “the pandemic is a wildfire”). War metaphors exhibited little advantage over literal frames across a variety of desirable outcomes (i.e. the adoption of pro-health behaviors against COVID-19, perceived solidarity and collective responsibility to curb the pandemic, and intentions to discuss and share the health news with others). However, this study revealed some benefits of war metaphors over fire metaphors. Compared with fire metaphors, health news featuring war metaphors increased both positive emotions and perceived threats of COVID-19, which in turn promoted pro-health behaviors against COVID-19 and perceived solidarity to cope with the public health crisis. Moreover, positive emotions in response to war metaphors also indirectly encouraged the retransmission of science-based COVID-19 health news. This study thus showcased the benefits and limitations of war metaphors and revealed the mediating roles of perceived threats and positive emotions in explaining war metaphorical framing effects. Implications of using war and fire metaphors for communicating about public health crises are also discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data available on request from the authors.

Notes

1. We conducted a 3 (Metaphor: Fire metaphor vs. War metaphor vs. Literal frame) X 2 (Recommended action consistency: metaphor-consistent vs. metaphor-inconsistent recommended action) between-subject factorial design, where participants were randomized to view one of the three versions of COVID-19 news stories and one of the two descriptions of recommended actions to prevent COVID-19. However, the interaction between the two factors was not significant. And we did not find significant main effects of recommendation consistency. Thus, we focus on reporting the effects of metaphorical framing in this manuscript and include recommendation consistency as a covariate in all analytical models.

2. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

3. While flu shots cannot prevent the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, they can ameliorate the pandemic by reducing the number of symptomatic patients who visit healthcare providers and prevent hospitalizations (Conlon et al., 2021).

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Evjue Centennial Chair in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin.