If Saddam is Hitler then who is George Bush: analogical mapping between systems of social roles

The analogy between World War II and the 1991 Persian Gulf crisis led people to construct a coherent system of roles for the participants in the Gulf crisis. The Analogical Constraint Mapping Engine (ACME), a model of analogical mapping by constraint satisfaction (Holyoak & Thagard, 1989), makes predictions about the types of correspondences people are likely to draw between the people and countries in these analogs. Both a survey (Experiment 1) and an experimental study (Experiment 2) revealed clear evidence that people have a strong tendency to generate mappings that honor certain basic coherence constraints. In Experiment 3, with science-fiction materials, further evidence for the generality of these constraints was obtained. Computer simulations of Experiments 2 and 3 using ACME yielded mappings similar to those generated by Ss. General models of analogical reasoning may have implications for everyday understanding of complex systems of social roles.