Why 'War' Metaphors Can Quietly Poison Your Workplace

Say "let's kill the competition" enough times in a sales meeting, and eventually people start treating coworkers like enemies instead of teammates. That's the case ICS marketing teacher Mr. Jason made to Students Incorporated host Highlight and co-hosts Josiah and Proud, sitting alongside English Language Arts teacher Mr. Ben for an episode built around a single claim: metaphors aren't decoration on top of language. They're instructions for how to act.

"Kill the Competition" vs. "Win-Win"

Mr. Jason, who teaches marketing, entrepreneurship, and business at ICS, said he's heard war metaphors used in business more than once: "crushing your competition," "capturing territory," and, inside sales departments specifically, a line he's heard used without irony: "I'm going to kill the competition. What can we do to kill the competition?" His point wasn't that the phrase is dramatic. It's that repeating it changes behavior. Reach for war language often enough, he argued, and a team stops looking for what he called "win-win situations" (partnerships built on collaboration) and starts operating like everyone outside the group is a target. "It could hurt your organizational culture," he said, "and it could actually put people within your organization against each other as well." Metaphors are powerful enough, in his framing, that repetition turns them into belief, and belief turns into behavior: "if we continue to repeat them and use them over and over, we start to believe them and we start to act it out."

That claim has a real research base behind it, even if the research itself is contested. Stanford researchers Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky ran a now widely cited series of experiments testing whether describing crime as a "beast" preying on a city versus a "virus" infecting it changed what solutions people favored: beast language pushed readers toward more policing and punishment, virus language pushed them toward social reform, even though the two groups had read the same underlying crime statistics. Later replication attempts have complicated the finding, with some researchers failing to reproduce the effect under different conditions, so the exact mechanism remains debated among linguists. What isn't in dispute is the pattern showing up separately in business research: a Harvard Business Review analysis of corporate earnings calls found that when CEOs reached for war language, "declaring war" on competitors, framing a market as a "battlefield," financial analysts didn't read it as confidence. They read it as a signal of undue risk and aggression, reacting more negatively the less the situation actually called for that kind of language.

Teaching a Third-Grader What a CPU Is

The same mechanism that makes war metaphors dangerous is what makes the right metaphor useful in a classroom. Mr. Jason described an assignment in his technology class where students design a poster explaining a computer's internal components, written for an elementary-age audience. The technical vocabulary doesn't survive that translation on its own. Nobody expects a second grader to retain "central processing unit." So the poster has to reach for something the student already understands: CPU becomes "the brain of the computer," because everyone, adult or child, already knows what a brain does.

Both halves of the episode's argument, war language poisoning a workplace and a well-chosen metaphor unlocking a classroom, trace back to the same foundational idea in linguistics. Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in their landmark 1980 book Metaphors We Live By that metaphor isn't just decorative language layered on top of thought; abstract concepts like time, arguments, or ideas get understood, largely unconsciously, through metaphors borrowed from concrete physical experience. Research on analogy in science education backs up the classroom half of that claim directly: studies have found that analogies and metaphors motivate learners, accelerate comprehension, and deepen understanding of abstract material, with the effect strongest when students are actively involved in building the comparison themselves rather than just being handed one. A CPU that becomes "the brain of the computer" isn't a simplification for children. By this research, it's closer to how anyone, at any age, actually processes an unfamiliar idea.

He carried the same logic into his marketing class, where he tells students to compress a pitch into something a customer can grasp before their attention drifts:

A metaphor is the elevator pitch of an idea.

If you can't get a product's value across in the time it takes to name it, he said, you've probably already lost the audience.

Four Kinds of Metaphor Hiding in Plain Sight

Asked to break down how metaphors actually work, Mr. Ben ran through four categories, each with its own texture. A standard metaphor makes a flat, direct equation: "the classroom was a zoo." An implied metaphor never names the comparison at all; it hides inside a verb, the way "the rumor slithered through the hallways of the school" makes a reader think of something sneaky and venomous without ever mentioning a snake. An extended metaphor stretches a single image across several sentences: his example cast education as fuel in a gas tank, with some days spent cruising the highway and others stuck in the mud. And a dead metaphor is one so worn from overuse that it stopped registering as figurative language at all: the "foot" of a bed, the "hands" of a clock, phrases that now just function as the literal names for things.

Mr. Ben also reached for a different comparison to explain how metaphor works on a reader emotionally, describing a character as "a shark among minnows" instead of walking through a paragraph of adjectives like ruthless or emotionless. One image, he said, does the work of the whole paragraph.

When Your Metaphor Doesn't Land the Way You Meant It

Metaphors can also misfire, and Mr. Ben offered his own example to prove it. Trying to compliment Josiah as tough, durable, and able to survive in harsh conditions, he settled on a single line: "Josiah, that guy's a cactus." The problem is that a cactus doesn't read as resilient to most listeners. It reads as prickly and irritating. "What's obvious to you," he said, "is not always so obvious to somebody else. And metaphors carry power."

That same double edge showed up when the hosts asked the pair to unpack "love is a battlefield." Mr. Jason read it as a warning: a battlefield is full of hidden mines and artillery, and a relationship that feels like one means constantly bracing to avoid getting hurt rather than feeling safe. Mr. Ben read it differently: a battlefield is also where bravery and hope get tested under pressure, which makes the same metaphor a case for resilience rather than danger. Neither reading canceled the other out. That was the point: the same image can cut two directions depending on which half of it a listener holds onto, which is exactly why Mr. Jason's earlier warning about war language in business matters. A metaphor doesn't come with instructions for how to take it. Whoever hears it fills in the rest.

Linguists who study how people talk about relationships have found the choice of metaphor carries real psychological weight, not just stylistic flavor. "Love is a journey" is one of the most common conceptual metaphors in English, showing up whenever a couple is "at a crossroads" or says they've "grown apart," and researchers have found that framing a relationship as a journey after recalling a conflict actually softens how negatively people evaluate that conflict, compared with framings built around perfect unity or, by extension, battle. One widely cited thought experiment in the same research tradition swaps "argument is war" for "argument is dance": if a disagreement is a dance instead of a fight, the goal stops being to win and starts being to produce something both people find satisfying together. Mr. Jason and Mr. Ben's disagreement over "love is a battlefield" wasn't really about who was right. It was a live demonstration of exactly the effect the research describes: swap the frame, and the entire emotional logic of the situation swaps with it.

← Back to all posts