Behavioural methods focus on the processes and products of psychological and social behaviour that is related to metaphor in order to describe and explain these processes and products as part of general language and discourse behaviour. Part of this area of research is the tailoring of general methods of observation and of manipulation (experimentation) of behaviour to the needs of metaphor research. It has provided the foundations for taking metaphor out of document and content analysis and turning it into a phenomenon of cognition and social interaction in the wild.

For DMT, in particular, these methods need to be appropriate for tracking differences between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor use. The ultimate goal is to find behavioural evidence for specific people’s referential and communicative intentions in their use of a metaphor at a specific time and place.