Framing
February 17th, 2010
How framing affects our thought processes : Interesting article on how people on the left- or right-wing of politics view financial losses. It includes this great definition of the psychological concept of “framing”:
A take-away restaurant near my house offers customers free home delivery or a ten per cent discount if you pick up. It sounds much better than saying you get no discount for picking up and suffer a ten per cent fee for delivery – this is the power of ‘framing’.
It was like that for years at gas pumps. You got a four-cent a gallon “discount” by paying cash. This was really a slick way to pass through the credit card processing costs directly to the consumer by tacking a four-cent a gallon fee onto credit card purchases. But people would complain about a “fee,” so the station owner reverses it and calls it a “discount.”
You also see this in political surveys. I remember some site opposing same sex marriage. The site was warning visitors not to use the question “Do you want to ban same sex marriage?” because “we lose 10 points in the polls with that question.” There was some other question that, while it meant the same thing, it was just framed differently, and this framing had a huge impact on responses.