The most beautiful part of some pictures is the frame.

What is it?

Imagine you are a salesperson (if you are a salesperson, you can skip this imagining).

Now imagine you read a book about powerful selling methods. Two of these methods catch your attention; they are both very easy to apply and their success rates look like this:

Method A has been shown to be effective in winning a deal in 80% of all cases. Method B has proven to fail in 2 out of 10 cases. Without too much thinking: Which method would you choose to apply for your next deal?

If you are like most of us (salesperson or not) you would opt for method A. The thing is: both are equally effective. They are just described in different ways. Method A is positively framed as winning, method B in a negative way as failing.

This is a nice illustration of the so-called framing effect. We describe a glass as half full (positive frame) or half empty (negative frame). Or as containing too much foam and too little beer (Oktoberfest frame).

One of the most prominent examples of the framing effect goes back to a study of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the early 1980s.

The participants of this study were asked to choose between two options for treatment for 600 people threatened by a fatal disease:

• With program A 200 people will survive.
• With program B there is a probability of 1/3 that 600 people will survive, and a probability of 2/3 that no one will survive.

72% chose program A for treatment, as it was framed positively, i.e., as saving 200 lives.

Now look at this version:

• With program A 400 people will die.
• With program B there is a probability of 1/3 that nobody will die, and a probability of 2/3 that 600 people will die.

With the negative frame only 33% chose program A.

If we were perfectly rational, then there should be no difference in our answers – all four statements are mathematically the same. Well, you could argue that expectation values and probabilities are not certainties and that the statements with percentages could turn out to produce other numbers “in real life”. Fair point, but at least the two first formulations are identical and should not differ in preferences of the participants.

Why does it happen?

If you do a little research, you quickly find that framing is a very broad topic. For me, frames are in a nutshell some kind of metaphors that activate “states of mind” and create images in our brains – a bit like the primes which I described in newsletter #15 (“Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes”). Frames make us see things in a different light. When manipulators use framing to influence our behavior, they intentionally trigger biases like loss aversion by the way how they frame the story they tell us. Frames impact our decisions, if we are not careful.

How can we avoid it?

Honestly, that’s difficult. We are hardly ever confronted with pure facts only. We love stories, so literally every piece of information we receive is embedded in some kind of story or at least in a specific setting (in other words: framed). However, when I’m dealing with important decision and get presented a fact with a negative or positive connotation, I try to mentally rephrase it to produce the contrary connotation before deciding. That’s a very simple yet powerful technique.

Recent research showed that the framing effect seems to be language dependent: when participants were offered different options to choose from in their native language, they were risk-seeking for losses and risk-averse for gains - exactly as expected. When the same options were offered in a foreign language, participants were almost immune to the framing manipulation.

The framing effect can also be turned off by third party advice: In a variation of the above-described experiment of Kahneman and Tversky, the effect of opinions of a trusted party or adviser was examined. In a nice example it was said that one of the options was the Republicans’ program, the other was the Democrat’s program. Guess what happened? When either a Republican or a Democrat realized that one of the options had been endorsed by his/her party, the frame that was used did not matter as much anymore. In my opinion a great example of the authority bias (see my newsletter issue #7).

What’s your thinking around that?

Does this sound familiar to you? Any own experiences or stories you would like to share? Please start a conversation in the comments section!

#decisionmaking #bias