Framing Effect
Also known as: Framing Bias
Formulated by Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman (1981)
Definition
A cognitive bias in which people's decisions and preferences shift based purely on how logically equivalent information is presented, or 'framed', typically as a gain versus a loss, even when the underlying facts and probabilities are identical. Named and formally documented by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in a landmark 1981 study, in which participants asked to choose a policy to fight a hypothetical disease overwhelmingly preferred the safe option when it was framed as saving '200 out of 600 people', but preferred the risky option when the mathematically identical choice was framed as '400 people will die'. The effect is a direct consequence of prospect theory: people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point and feel a framed loss more sharply than they value an equivalent framed gain. Framing is used, deliberately or not, in politics ('tax relief' versus 'tax increase on the wealthy'), medicine (a treatment described as having a '90% survival rate' sounds far more appealing than the identical '10% mortality rate'), and marketing (ground beef labeled '75% lean' outsells the same product labeled '25% fat').