Framing

Framing

Suppose that you are suffering from serious heart disease and your doctor proposes a grueling operation. You’re understandably curious about the odds of surviving this ordeal. The doctor says, “Of one hundred patients who have this operation, ninety are alive after five years.” What will you do? That statement might feel pretty comforting, making you confident about having the operation.

But suppose the doctor frames his answer in a somewhat different way. Suppose he says, “Of one hundred patients who have this operation, ten are dead after five years.” If you’re like most people, the doctor’s statement will sound pretty alarming and you might not have the operation. Instinctively, you might think: “A significant number of people are dead, and I might be one of them!” In numerous experiments, people react very differently to the information that “ninety of one hundred are alive” than to “ten of one hundred are dead”—even though the content of the two statements is exactly the same. Even experts are subject to framing effects. When doctors are told that “ninety of one hundred are alive,” they are more likely to recommend the operation than if told that “ten of one hundred are dead.” 16

Framing matters in many domains. When credit cards started to become popular forms of payment in the 1970s, some retail merchants wanted to charge different prices to their cash and credit card customers. To prevent this, credit card companies adopted rules that prohibited their retailers from doing so. When a bill was introduced in Congress to forbid credit card companies to impose such rules and the bill seemed likely to pass, the credit card lobby turned its attention to language. Its preference was that if a company charged different prices to cash and credit customers, the credit price should be considered the “normal” (default) price and the cash price a discount—rather than the alternative of making the cash price the usual price and adding a surcharge for credit card customers.

The credit card companies had a good, intuitive understanding of what psychologists would come to call framing. The idea is that choices depend, in part, on the way in which problems are described. The point matters a great deal for public policy. Energy conservation is now rightly receiving a lot of attention, so consider the following information campaigns: (a) If you use energy conservation methods, you will save $350 per year; (b) If you do not use energy conservation methods, you will lose $350 per year. There is evidence that information campaign (b), framed in terms of loss, might be more effective than information campaign (a). If the government wants to encourage energy conservation, option (b) looks like a stronger nudge.

Much like status quo bias, framing effects are exacerbated by the Human tendency occasionally to be somewhat mindless, passive decision makers. Few of us bother to check whether reframing a decision would produce a different answer. One reason why we don’t check for consistency may be that we wouldn’t know what to make of a contradiction. This implies that frames can be powerful nudges, and must be selected with care and caution.