When scandals rock the business world, we all go scurrying to find big causes. Human greed. Structural economic pressures. Lax regulations. Psychological research, however, suggests that one cause may be as small as a metaphor in the mind.
Contesting theory, which my colleagues and I pioneered helps explain the cognitive roots of poor decision-making in competitive situations. The key to this theory is recognizing that abstract human experiences are mentally processed through metaphors. Invariably and unconsciously, we understand the abstract through the concrete. For example, we often interpret organizations (an abstract idea) through use of an organizations-are-plants metaphor. So we talk about "branch" offices, "pruning" the workforce, and "growing" the bottom line. When a person in love says, "look how far we've come," she is thinking of love through a journey metaphor.
To read the original article: A More Productive Way to Think About Opponents - David L. Shields - Harvard Business Review
