Framing
You’ve been sent to the grocery store with a list for your weekly shopping. You already have the essentials: bread, meat, veggies, snacks, and other items. You’re now at the bottom of the list, at the last few items, and you’ve finally arrived at the milk aisle. Nowadays, it seems there are countless options, with most of them not being dairy milk. You want whole milk but can’t decide between a container labeled “5% fat” and one labeled “95% fat-free.” Objectively, they are the same, but for some reason, the first one just feels right.
It has been discovered that regardless of objective facts, people tend to evaluate decisions more heavily based on the way they are presented. This effect is known as framing.
This cognitive bias is one of the cornerstones of behavioral economics, an idea developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli-American psychologists, in the late 1970s. Their work was based on the idea, explored in prospect theory, that we humans evaluate gains and losses differently, which in turn impacts how we make decisions.
To illustrate the effect of framing, countless variations of a now classic experiment have been conducted where a group of people must choose between two scenarios. Like in this version:
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Imagine you need urgent medical attention. Which would you prefer?
- A treatment with a 90% survival rate.
- A treatment with a 10% chance of dying.
Unsurprisingly, most participants would be inclined to choose the first option. Both choices yield the same objective result, but the positive framing of “survival” completely changes our perception and preference.
This concept is widely used today, particularly in marketing campaigns designed to influence our purchasing decisions and capture our attention. But its applications aren’t limited to commerce. It’s also used in public health (e.g., in vaccination campaigns) and public policy. After all, it’s not the same to talk about making “contributions to public infrastructure” as it is to say, “we are going to collect more taxes.”
The reason these biases are easy to understand conceptually but difficult to identify in our daily lives is that our minds find shortcuts to cope with the immense amount of stimuli we face. These shortcuts lead to predictably irrational decisions.
Now that we are aware of this phenomenon, the invitation is to do our best to lay out the objective facts when facing a potential decision. This won’t always work, but it will significantly increase our chances of making sound choices. And remember, the world isn’t the only one that can use framing. You can also leverage this cognitive bias to shape your own life, making difficult but necessary decisions easier to handle.
References
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
- Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458.
