Framing effect (psychology)

In psychology and other social sciences, the framing effect is an observed effect in which the framing (presentation) of a scenario affects people’s decision-making. In the classic examples of the framing effect, people are more likely to accept risk when it is framed as a way to avoid negative consequences (a negative frame) than as a way to achieve positive consequences (a positive frame). But framing effects go deeper than risk aversion. In politics, framing effects are familiar as "spin," and phrasing is especially important not only in campaign ads and political rhetoric but in opinion polls, where the use of positive and negative framing has a significant impact on polling results.

Background

In this context, framing refers to the social construction of phenomena that influence a subject’s perception. Like many important psychological concepts, framing was not originally described by psychologists but has important ramifications in psychological theory. Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and epistemologist, first described framing in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Framing includes not just deliberate "spin," or even the unconscious framing that occurs in communication among people, but frames in a subject’s own thoughts, such as those that result from biases, incomplete information, simplifications, or their interpretations of phenomena. By extension, the framing effect occurs regardless of whether it is being deliberately exploited. Descriptions of framing often focus on the framing effect and other cognitive biases, and so framing can seem harmful; but psychologists consider it a key part of how individuals function in the world. A frame is a mental construction affected by both biological and cultural influences that creates a filter through which the individual perceives and interacts with the world.

The frames of mass media were an early topic of research, with studies of news-watchers finding that the format of television news stories about poverty had a pronounced effect on whether or not the audience held the poor responsible for the state they found themselves in. "Human interest stories" focusing on an individual or family rather than addressing an issue on a thematic basis actually made the audience less empathic to the subject, with the end result being that—because these stories featured so prominently in the news in the 1970s when these studies were first conducted—frequent consumption of television news led to decreased concern for the poor.

Most framing experiments focus on equivalency or emphasis frames. Equivalency frames demonstrate the power of framing by offering subjects a choice between two logical equivalents, such as the choice to save one-fifth of the people in a burning building versus letting four-fifths of them die. Emphasis frames look at how people change their views of the same essential scenario depending on what aspects of the scenario are emphasized. A classic example is asking two groups to read a news story about an upcoming Ku Klux Klan rally before answering whether they think the Klan should be allowed to hold the rally. One story is about public safety concerns (the negative frame), the other addresses free speech issues (the positive frame).

Overview

Positive framing exploits a cognitive bias that favors risk aversion. In social science and psychology, a cognitive bias is a pattern of behavior that leads to individuals acting illogically or irrationally, or to misperceive or misinterpret facts. Like framing, cognitive biases are hard to describe except in negative terms, but evolutionary psychologists believe that at least some of them are adaptive heuristics that humans—or earlier animals—developed in order to make fast decisions in situations where accuracy can be sacrificed in favor of speed. Other cognitive biases have developed culturally.

Perhaps contrary to some adults’ expectations, framing effects increase with age. The reasons for this are not universally agreed on, and there may be different reasons at work at different stages of development: for instance, there is a large body of research on adolescents’ attitudes towards risk suggesting that they are less risk-averse than adults, which is sufficient to explain why the framing effect would affect adults more than adolescents. Less clear is why older adults are more affected by the framing effect than younger adults. Although some researchers have suggested as an explanation negativity bias—the idea that negative input has a greater psychological impact than positive input, and so there is a greater motivation to avoid the negative than to pursue the positive—other research has found that negativity bias decreases with age.

The framing effect has not yet been explained to the satisfaction of all psychologists. Various explanations have been proposed and advocated, including motivational theories grounded in the emotions of the subject as they consider potential outcomes, and cognitive theories that argue for different amounts of processing effort for gains or losses. In behavioral economics, prospect theory (in which the "prospect" in question is one’s prospects of winning the lottery, from a scenario in the paper that first formulated the theory) argues that people use heuristics like the framing effect to make decisions based not on the actual probability of various outcomes but the potential value of those outcomes. A simple example: when the value of the lottery is especially high, it can be expected that many people will buy tickets, which in turn reduces each individual buyer’s odds of winning the jackpot—something that each ticket buyer knows, but which has no impact on their purchasing behavior.

Experimental philosophy is a field of philosophy that has emulated experimental psychology’s methods by relying on empirical data and quantitative research rather than the a priori justification that has traditionally defined analytic philosophy. In so doing, it also opened itself to criticism. Max Emil Deutsch’s The Myth of the Intuitive (2015) is a defense of analytic philosophy against experimental philosophy’s claims that analytic philosophers rely too much on intuitions and unprovable thought experiments to support their claims. In the course of his defense, Deutsch points out flaws he considers frequent in the work of experimental philosophy, including biases introduced by framing effects.

Bibliography

Alexander, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction. Malden: Polity, 2012. Print.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Print.

Deutsch, Max Emil. The Myth of the Intuitive. Cambridge: MIT P, 2015. Print.

Fischer, Eugen, and John Collins, eds. Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism: Rethinking Philosophical Method. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, 2011. Print.

Lombrozo, Tania, Joshua Knobe, and Shaun Nichols, eds. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. Print.

Lutge, Christoph, Hannes Rusch, and Matthias Uhl, eds. Experimental Ethics: Towards an Empirical Moral Philosophy. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print.

Machery, Eduoard, and Elizabeth O’Neill, eds. Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Sarkissian, Hagop, and Jennifer Cole Wright, eds. Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Print.