Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (77 page)

Such a list could be extended forever. It shows that caricature analogies jump to the lips of anyone and everyone, most frequently provoked by an intense and sudden reaction to a situation, such as indignation or surprise. The analogy can take on many external forms, such as “Thinking X is as dumb as thinking Y”, or “Doing X wouldn’t be any less absurd than doing Y”, or “Now that they’ve accepted X, are they going to accept Y and Z as well?”, or “You might as well believe in Y if you believe in X”, or “If X is true, then Y is true too”, and on and on. Caricature analogies are often based on extremely salient entities in their respective domains, such as Albert Einstein, the Titanic, the Mississippi River, Mount Everest, or McDonald’s, or on commonplace, hackneyed facts, such as that the earth is round, that a week contains seven days, that the Pope is Catholic, and so on.

Unconvincing caricature analogies can of course be dreamt up, just as far-fetched categorizations can be made. After all, the human mind often widely misses the mark in its attempts to zero in on the gist of situations it faces! For example, when an overzealous computer executive was announcing a modest incremental advance in the technology of chips, he grandiosely declared, “Compared to our latest new chips, the old generation of chips is like a rusty can opener next to a brand-new Ferrari!” The mere fact that this is a cute caricature analogy doesn’t suffice to make it convincing.

When in lectures we explain to audiences what a caricature analogy is, people are often stimulated by the idea and some launch right into the deliberate construction of caricature analogies themselves. When such attempts work well, some people think they know all there is to know about caricature analogies. This, however, is a pipe dream. Just as being able to drive a car doesn’t make one an expert mechanic, so being able to come up with caricature analogies doesn’t make one an expert concerning the underlying psychological mechanisms.

What kinds of mental process give rise to this phenomenon, which ranges from the mundane to the highly creative? Among the countless new situations that we face each day, what is it about a few special ones that launches us on a quest for an analogy based on a crystal-clear but totally imaginary situation? How does one put one’s finger on the conceptual skeleton of the situation inspiring the search for a caricature? How does one choose a suitable alternative domain, and then export this same gist into it?

In order to cast a little light on these matters, let’s delve into the first example — the scenario of javelins used as oars. Doug wants to get across to Emmanuel his annoyance at the way flimsy wooden or plastic sticks are offered in America as coffee-stirrers. He has, however, a suspicion that his friend, who has not witnessed the gradual slide in American customs, will need some help in order to be brought to the point where he sees things more or less as Doug does.

Doug could say, “It’s as if they were giving us some
needles
to stir our coffee with.” And indeed, at first he feels tempted by that, but refrains; it would be too extreme and too crude. Mentally replacing thin wood sticks by needles would amount to twisting a knob to turn up the situation’s degree of absurdity. Turning such a knob, though easy, is merely indulging in exaggeration, and Doug knows that exaggeration usually reduces the credibility of what one is saying. So he wonders how he can quickly convey the crux of what bothers him without going into a long, heavy-handed explanation.

The crux of Doug’s annoyance is the craziness of giving a stick rather than a spoon in order to stir a liquid — not just coffee, but any liquid. So he wants to put his finger on this gist by caricaturing it in a
different
domain, where its absurdity will stand out like a sore thumb. But for his caricature to be effective, the new domain has to be as familiar as possible. The challenge is thus to find a conceptual slippage where coffee is replaced by a generic liquid and where the use of skimpy sticks is blatantly ridiculous.

The mental pressure is clearly pushing for a
coffee ⇒ water
slippage, since water is the liquid we all know best. But what familiar activities are there in which one churns up water with some object, and in which it crucially matters
how much purchase
the stirrer has on the water? (The paltry purchase afforded by the stirring tool is, after all, the conceptual skeleton’s backbone.) A few possibilities come to mind: the propulsion of a boat by a propeller or a paddle wheel, the act of swimming, and that of rowing or paddling. But to maintain the conversation’s momentum, it’s crucial for Doug to choose one of these in the blink of an eye.

For Doug, underwater propellers and paddle wheels are not terribly familiar objects and so he skips over them, moving on to the domain of swimming. Here it’s the
arms
that have purchase in the water, but replacing a swimmer’s arms by some kind of thin objects is not easily visualized; one would have to imagine a bizarre surgical operation, which would make the caricature feel very forced, not graceful and natural. Another possibility would involve the swimmer’s
hands
, which do the brunt of the propulsion work. One might imagine a swimming coach who says, “Turn your hands so they present the
least possible
surface area; make them slip
maximally easily
through the water! Minimize your hands’ purchase!” But for a coach to come out with such nonsense is so implausible that the caricature wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of success.

The remaining domain is that of rowboats. Luckily a rowboat’s oars look a bit like oversized spoons, and since they are relatively familiar, human-sized objects, it’s very easy to replace them, in one’s mind’s eye, by other entities. No need to imagine a surgical operation, a nutty swimming coach, or technological savvy! All Doug needs to do is find some good substitutes — that is, some familiar objects that are roughly oar-sized but that would have far less purchase on the water, and that would also recall the trendy slender sticks for stirring coffee (after all, the goal is to create a clear parody of the offensive recent convention). Since the concept
needle
was already activated in his mind, he imagines a giant needle — a needle as big as an oar — and all at once the image of
javelins
jumps to mind. Yes, javelins are very slender and smooth, and yes, they are just the right size, and of course they would have no purchase whatsoever in the water. This amusing conceptual slippage strikes him as a pretty good choice, and so, smiling internally, he takes the plunge and blurts it out.

To concoct a convincing caricature analogy is a challenging cognitive activity in which one hopes to bring someone else around to one’s own viewpoint. Sometimes one is indignant or outraged, and that’s the feeling one wishes to induce in others; other times, one wants to convey a sense for why one is confused about some topic. This is the case in our next example, and we’ll again explore the hidden search mechanisms.

A., an American, receives an email telling him that the pantomime artist Marcel Marceau just died. He mentions it to a French friend, who says she’s saddened to hear the news but wonders why anyone would have bothered to send A. an email about it. Perplexed by this reaction, A. says, “What!? If the Eiffel Tower had collapsed this morning, wouldn’t that have been email-worthy?” Let’s look at what pushed A. to make a caricature analogy and how it came into being.

The trigger was his French friend’s casting doubt on the importance of this highly French event, and so A. wants to express, and in a vivid manner, his astonishment at her attitude. To this end, he focuses on Marceau’s world renown rather than on his artistry. Since A. had always considered Marceau to be a very major icon, and since the concept of
France
is highly activated in his mind, it’s no surprise that the Eiffel Tower would pop up as a quintessential member of the category
icons of French culture
.

But why did A. choose an
inanimate
French icon rather than a famous French person — say, Descartes, Napoléon, or Louis XIV? Well, there were various mental pressures here — that is, blurry constraints — pushing in specific conceptual directions. First of all, it makes no sense to receive an email announcing a death that took place a very long time ago. Secondly, jumping to a radically contrasting domain is a more effective rhetorical strategy (recall this is why Doug shifted from the domain of stirring coffee with very thin rods to the domain of rowing in a lake with very thin rods). And lastly, why didn’t A. choose Mont Blanc, the city of Paris, or even France as a whole? Because the disappearance of any of those three would be a nearly unimaginable catastrophe; the Eiffel Tower’s collapse seems far more real.

It’s clear that many diverse caricature analogies, not just one, are applicable to this (or to any) situation. Thus A. might well have said, “Wouldn’t you have sent me an email when the Twin Towers were destroyed?”, or perhaps “And if a nuclear explosion had obliterated Paris, wouldn’t that have been email-worthy?”, or then again, “When John Lennon was shot, I certainly would have appreciated a phone call letting me know about it.” Each of these examples conflicts in one way or another with the mental pressures we hypothesized above, which guided A. in the creation (or selection) of his “Eiffel Tower” caricature analogy, but on the other hand, each of them has its own brand of logic, making it at least a plausible candidate for utterance.

We now present a cascade of three caricature analogies, spewed out one after another in ten seconds at most, and all looking extremely simple. But the mechanisms giving rise to them were far from mechanical. Moreover, this episode shows that a whole “bouquet” of caricature analogies can be triggered by a single situation.

What led M. to replace the activity of ironing by that of cooking? Her peeved tone, mocking her father’s cautious attitude, implies that he might also hallucinate danger lurking whenever anyone cooks, analogous to the danger of an iron falling off the board. Perhaps she imagined something very hot falling off the stove onto her feet (boiling oil, a hot noodle, a frying pan…). But in order to imagine such a mini-scenario, she would have to draw on years of memories of experiences in kitchens. We thus see that the use of an imaginary mini-scenario was crucial in the creation of the first caricature analogy.

And what led M. to transform her father’s request that she cover her
feet
into the rather silly request that she cover her
legs
? Is it merely because the feet of any earthbound creature are attached to its legs, thus making
foot
and
leg
close cousins in her conceptual network? Perhaps, but she also had to take into account how she herself was dressed, because the slippage
feet ⇒ legs
would be unjustified if she hadn’t been wearing shorts (there would have been no danger to her legs if they were covered). Just as in the previous case, a mini-scenario (the falling iron grazing her bare leg) was needed to give rise to M.’s second caricature analogy.

And how did she transform the idea of covering her
feet
with
shoes
into that of covering her
hands
with
gloves
? Did she simply exploit the proportional analogy
“foot
is to
shoe
as
hand
is to
glove”
? If so, why wouldn’t she just as likely have thought of the formal analogy
“foot
is to
shoe
as
head
is to
hat”
, or
“foot
is to
shoe
as
neck
is to
scarf”
? Why
didn’t she say (and why would she never have thought of saying), “Aren’t you going to insist that I put on a
hat
on when I iron?” M. didn’t entertain the scenario of an iron jumping up to hit her head any more than she entertained many other improbable mini-scenarios (
e.g.
, the iron jumping into her mouth, or suddenly falling apart, and so forth). All of this means that there was no reason for the slippage
feet ⇒ head
to occur to her. On the other hand, the slippage
feet ⇒ hands
makes perfect sense in this context, because an iron, even without falling, can still burn the hand of the person using it. And thus this mini-scenario played an indispensable role in the genesis of the third caricature analogy.

In summary, this series of casually tossed-off retorts shows that the mechanisms giving rise to caricature analogies can take all sorts of aspects of the situation into account, and that the convincingness of a caricature depends crucially on certain mini-scenarios that unfold, lightning-fast, in the mind of the caricature generator. Such mini-scenarios are stereotypical members of previously known, very familiar categories of situations, on which the generator draws in order to devise a strong caricature analogy. For all this to happen in a flash is most impressive.

The caricature analogies presented so far have all had a mocking nature, aiming at conveying a sense of outrage or confusion. But not all caricature analogies are mocking. They can also be efficacious explanatory tools. Consider S., who for many years has been unreliable with everyone he knows. One day, out of the blue, he announces to his best friend T., “I’ve been rethinking everything in my life and I’ve completely changed! I’m never going to be flaky again.” T. replies, “Congratulations, but you know, an ocean liner can’t turn around on a dime.”