Earlier I’ve written
this post: Changing the Point of View Changes Your Mind on how the framing of a message changes our minds (influences decisions).
The main idea behind the framing
of outcomes effect is that we perceive outcomes as gains or losses and what
represents a gain or a loss depends on a reference that can be manipulated. The
change in decision and in behavior is due to loss aversion – losses loom larger
than gains.
There is, however, a different
type of framing – Emotional Framing – which doesn't rely only on loss aversion.
The main psychological mechanism that powers emotional framing is the affect
heuristic.
The very nature of negative
emotions is to keep us from harm. Obvious examples are fear and disgust which
are negative basic emotions and play an important role in keeping us safe from
things that might kill us. Of course this was more the case with our very
distant ancestors, but even nowadays it is wise to not stay too close to something
that smells disgusting.
Naturally we tend to avoid things
that have a negative emotion attached to it.
For example, in the recent wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expression of friendly
fire was used extensively in reports about soldiers who died. The term friendly fire sounds benign and has a
low load of negative emotion. Unfortunately the reality is that his very
smartly chosen expression stands for we
killed our own which you have to admit has a much larger negative emotions
baggage.
In the year 2013 another
term became very popular at least in the US and Europe: Monetary easing also known as Quantitative
easing. This sounds really nice and at first glance I think we could all
use some ease on our monetary affairs. Despite its benign sound, this
expression stands for Printing Money.
Of course, these days’ central banks are not actually printing extra money, but
the outcome is exactly the same (e.g. inflation)…
Another area where emotional
framing is present is in supermarket promotions, at least the ones in Albert
Heijn (the main supermarket chain in The Netherlands). It is quite common to
have promotions such as: 2 + 1 (Free)
or the second identical item is half
price.
If shoppers would actually give
some thought to what the underlying message is, they would probably buy fewer
items.
2 + 1 (Free) actually means that you get 33.33% discount if and only if you buy three items.
The second one is half price actually means that you get 25%
discount if and only if you buy two identical items.
If we would actually think like
computers it should make no difference how the message is framed, but we are
not reasoning machines.
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