Benefit from Bias: How to Leverage the Framing Effect for Success

It's time for another edition of A Healthy Performance Culture! If you are new, this is where we try to simplify leadership, teamwork, and performance concepts into pragmatic tips and tools.

Every week, I break down and share ONE core idea into actionable takeaways that you can use to immediately improve your performance at work. Sometimes I write about how you can apply simple concepts to improve your leadership or teamwork. Other times I break down how you can leverage cognitive biases for your benefit. And other times I share the core concepts from books that I've been reading.

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Benefit from Bias: How to Leverage the Framing Effect for Success

Would you rather choose option A that has a 40% likelihood of success or option B, which has a 60% risk of failure?? Even though the options are the same, how they are presented can actually impact how we feel about them.? This is an example of the Framing Effect, and will be this week's contribution to our continuing series of Benefit from Bias.

Research has shown that humans are not as logical as we want to believe.? We are not that rational decision maker that all economists and financial leaders describe in their theories.? Our brains are hardcoded to take shortcuts (called Heuristics) and fall victim to mental mistakes (called Cognitive Biases).? By knowing about these mental mistakes, you can either avoid them or leverage them for your benefit.? Let others glitch their way into poor decisions, while you benefit from your biases.

What is the Framing Effect?

The framing effect is a mental mistake (ie a cognitive bias) where people’s decisions are impacted by whether the options are presented in positive terms or negative terms.? For example is the option presented as either a gain or a loss.?

Research has shown the following:?

• 93% of PhD students registered early when a penalty fee for late registration was emphasized, but only 67% did so when this was presented as a discount for earlier registration.
• 62% of people disagreed with allowing "public condemnation of democracy", but only 46% of people agreed that it was right to "forbid public condemnation of democracy".
• More people will support an economic policy if the employment rate is emphasised than when the associated unemployment rates is highlighted.

This irrational thinking is further compounded when we are forced to make complex decisions (with various degrees of success).? When a decision is presented with a positive frame, people will prefer to minimize the risk.? We want the guaranteed gain vs the probabilistic gain, even if the probabilistic gain is more beneficial.?

And in the opposite situation, when the same option is presented in a negative frame, people will seek out risk.? We prefer the probability of a loss vs the guarantee of a loss. This is one of the reason people are willing to bet double or nothing. They want to avoid the guaranteed loss, so they take the risk of an even greater loss.

How to Benefit from the Framing Effect

But knowing about the Framing Effect is just half the battle.?With this knowledge, you can start Benefiting from the Framing Effect. We recommend do this in two ways: overcoming it and leveraging it.

How to Overcome the Framing Effect - It is clear that people tend to prefer things presented in a positive vs negative perspective.? This means you might be skewed for or against an idea based on how it is framed.? To overcome this, we need to assess our options from all perspectives (both positive and negative).? Our simple trick is to take whatever is presented, and try to think of it from the oppositive perspective.

If Project A is presented as having a 90% chance of success, take a moment to reflect on what that also means.? It also means that Project A is going to fail 10% of the time.? Maybe that is acceptable or maybe it isn’t, but just by considering the opposite perspective of a decision, you will thinking more logically and be less susceptible to a skewed decision.

How to Take Advantage of the Framing Effect - The Framing Effect is something you can easily leverage to your advantage.? When you are presenting your ideas, change how you frame each idea based on the desired outcome you want.? If you want others to agree to Option A, describe it using a positive frame.? If you want others to say No to Option B, then make sure it is described using a more negative frame.??

This is a simple yet powerful trick to influence and get others to say yes to your preferred ideas.? And you don’t even have to feel guilty about this trick.? You aren’t changing the facts about the options.? You are only purposefully switching how you describe those facts using a positive or negative framework.

Want help translating this knowledge into action?

There is a big difference between knowing what is right to do, and actually doing it. While I have made it ambition to simplify the concepts of leadership, teamwork, and performance, actually making these changes can be tough. The good thing is you don't have to do it alone. Healthy Performance Culture can help you. We offer customizable services to help you or your business:

• Leadership / Culture Training - Our development programs have won global awards for actually delivering measurable business results.
• Targeted Performance Coaching - Our targeted performance coaching is built around short focused sprints that provide you fast but stable progress.
• Team Acceleration - Our approach to teamwork focuses on leveraging your team's unique strengths to overcome your derailers.

Contact us or send Cary a message directly on LinkedIn.