Narrow Framing

Heidi Price was so frustrated by one of her family’s decisions that she ended up founding a business to help other families avoid the same frustration. In 2003, she was trying to help her daughter, a high school senior, pick the right college. It was a struggle finding information they could trust. All the college brochures looked alike—down to the obligatory photo of a polyracial group of students reading under a tree. (Surely those photos should be modernized to show a polyracial group of students using their smartphones to crib from Wikipedia?)

After months of consideration, her daughter eventually decided to enroll in an honors program at the University of Kansas, but the difficulty of the search nagged at Price. They’d been inundated with information, but it had been tough to tease out what was important. Curious, Price started to dig into the research on undergraduate education: What factors really made a difference for students? She started sharing her discoveries with friends, and soon they were asking for her advice: Which college do you think is right for my kid?

Convinced there was a need for a better college-selection process, Price and a partner cofounded College Match, a small firm in Kansas City that helps match students with the college that’s right for them. One of Price’s early clients was actually her nephew, Caufield Schnug, who had grown up in Texas, though he was far from the stereotypical Texas teenager. He didn’t play sports. He wasn’t a football fan. He was liberal, bright, and quirky—while in high school, he got interested in guitars, played in a band, won a writing contest, and helped his dad with a screenplay.

Often bored by school, his grades were mediocre. He was unlikely to be admitted to the best-ranked state schools, the University of Texas and Texas A&M. When his dad took him to see his other options in the state, he had to be cajoled to get out of the car.

At one university, his visit coincided with a fraternity party where drunk students were spraying one another with hoses. “One part of me thought it was fun and another part thought it was barbaric,” said Schnug. The Animal House vision of college held no allure for him. “I wanted to find out what was wrong with me—if I was good at anything. I felt like I was smart. I felt like I had interests, but what were they? I didn’t want to drink a six-pack. That wasn’t my mission.”

Price had several suggestions for Schnug, but one stood out in her mind: Hendrix College, a small liberal-arts school in Conway, Arkansas, known for its artsy, liberal culture. Schnug had never heard of Hendrix, but he agreed to visit. The change in atmosphere appealed to him—he would leave the big, hip city of Austin and move to an uncool, rural Arkansas town. “I can be ‘monkish’ here,” he remembers thinking. “I felt like I could focus on my studies.”

Schnug blossomed at Hendrix. It was the right environment for him. “My first year at Hendrix, I read three or four books every week. I watched one or two or three foreign films every single day. I took philosophy courses. I turned into an academic person,” he said.

Schnug thrived academically, double-majoring in film studies and English, and he studied abroad for two semesters, including a fall term at Oxford University. While traveling in Barcelona, he made a documentary about Gaudí’s architecture. It was a far cry from Old Milwaukee kegs and fraternity hose-downs. Eventually he decided that he wanted to get a PhD in film studies. (Getting a PhD was an aspiration his family would never have anticipated before Hendrix.) After gaining acceptance to several programs, he chose Harvard. He was one of only three students admitted to the school’s Film & Visual Studies program in 2012.

In the period described, Heidi Price helped students and parents look beyond the 20 schools at the top of the rankings to a reported 2,719 U.S. schools offering four-year degrees, most of which admitted a majority of applicants. The top-ranked schools are unquestionably fine institutions, but the rankings may signify less than meets the eye. Parents were often surprised that the U.S. News & World Report rankings described in the account used statistics such as faculty compensation and the percentage of alumni who make donations, which have little to do with the experience of students. (Nothing in the rankings directly measures whether students are enjoying their college experience or whether they are learning anything.) Price also cited research comparing earnings after accounting for student aptitude. In the comparison described, attending the more selective college did not confer the general earnings advantage families might expect. That gives families a reason to consider a less expensive state university alongside Yale; it does not guarantee identical earnings for an individual at either school.

The question a college-bound senior should be asking, according to Price, is not “What’s the highest-ranking college I can convince to take me?” Rather, it should be “What do I want out of life, and what are the best options to get me there?” Those two questions are in no way synonymous, and once families start thinking about the latter one, they often find that they have many more good options than they ever thought possible.

Spiritual advisers are often called on to do a similar kind of “reframing.” Father J. Brian Bransfield, then associate general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that the parishioners who seek out his advice have a tendency, as do Price’s clients, to unduly narrow their options. Individuals will often approach him with a dilemma: Should I marry this person? Should I take the job I’ve been offered in another city? Should I become a priest?

His parishioners will often fret, “I just don’t know what God wants me to do,” and look at Bransfield expectantly, hoping he can act as a spokesperson. “There’s a myth that there’s only one thing that God wants you to do,” he said. “We spend so much time trying to figure out that one thing and become so fearful of making a mistake.” Bransfield challenges them to broaden their perspective:

Actually, there are 18 things that God would be very happy if you chose. You’re not cornered into becoming a priest or not. You’re not cornered into marrying this woman or not. There are 6 billion people in the world. You’re telling me that God looked at you and said, “There is only 1 thing you can do in your life, I know it and you have to guess it or else”? Could it be that you are putting your constraints on God?

Bransfield’s parishioners would often react with surprise to this message: “Really?” They’re relieved to hear that they’re not cornered. They’ve just been wearing blinders.

This tendency to see only a tiny sliver of the available landscape is a villain of decision-making: narrow framing. It’s the cognitive bias that defines our choices too narrowly, usually as a binary “whether or not” decision. In a July 2012 post on Ask.com, user claireabelle captured it perfectly: “Break up or not? I don’t know what to do. Every time I go to my boyfriend’s house or hang out with his family, I feel like I’m constantly being judged… What do I do? I like him, but I’m tired of being judged and feeling weird when I’m with them.” The responses poured in—some accepted the narrow frame (“RUN… RUN FAST”), while others widened the options (“Make other plans to hang out other places and explain to him why”). The question itself, though, demonstrates how naturally we collapse a complex situation into a simple either/or.

Researcher Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University documented just how pervasive this is. In a study interviewing 105 teenage girls about their decisions, he found that about 65% of their choices fell into two categories: “statements of resolve” (like “I’m going to stop blaming others”) or “whether or not” decisions (for instance, whether to break up). Teens, like the rest of us, routinely fail to consider multiple alternatives. They, and we, slip into narrow frames.

Narrow framing isn’t just a personal habit; it infects organizations, too. When Steve Cole, VP of R&D at HopeLab, faced a decision about which design firm to hire for a device that measures kids’ exercise, the conventional path would have been a bidding process that pits a few proposals against each other—a narrow “pick the best one” frame. Instead, Cole ran what he called a “horse race.” He reduced the project’s scope to only its first step and, rather than selecting a single firm, hired five firms independently to do that initial piece of work. This gave him multiple design alternatives, allowed him to combine the best features of each, and let him evaluate how the firms actually performed before committing. His colleagues initially thought the approach was insane, but the richer insights and convergence it produced made it standard practice.

The horse race illustrates a crucial shift: instead of asking “Should I do this OR that?” we can ask, “Is there a way I can do this AND that?” or “What are the ways to explore several paths at once?” A pros-and-cons list can preserve a narrow frame if it evaluates only the options already visible. The limitation is the restricted set of choices, rather than the act of comparing their merits. The horse race, on the other hand, expands the frame by running multiple experiments simultaneously. You don’t decide which design to build; you build several early versions to see what works. You don’t choose between “buy a new car or not”; you ask, “What’s the best way to spend money to improve my family’s well-being?” You don’t settle for “break up or not”; you ask, “What are ways I could make this relationship better?” or “What changes could I make in how I interact with his family?”

When a decision feels like a choice between two unattractive outcomes, ask what the question has left out. A new option might change the timing, scope, people involved, or way of testing the decision. Some choices will still be binary after that search; the useful step is to check rather than assume.