Framing

What Is A Frame?

"Frames are principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters."

(Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA & London, U.K.: University of California Press.)

Why Should I Care?

I remember a performance discussion with my manager a while back when I was in a very political role. He made the point that whenever I was faced with a contentious issue, my instinct was to try to tie the arguments back to objective facts, while this was not always going to be the best tack to take. While at the time I shrugged this comment off, actually he had a perfectly good point. Couched in researchers' terms (see below), I was assuming everyone made decisions on "Type 2 processing", and they don't.

Ever wondered why your carefully crafted logical arguments aren't making as much of an impression as you hoped?

Frames are much more important than you might think if you work in an analytical, scientific discipline, for instances - mathematical modelling and information technology. If you do, you're hopefully highly skilled in symbolic and logical manipulation, which means you can easily perceive the logical structure of arguments.

But this ability comes with a downside. When two analysts end up on opposite sides of an issue, bad feeling can easily be created because both sides feel that they have "proved" that they are correct. The end result is frequently that discussion is bogged down in technicalities. Frequently, meta-arguments develop other whether some deductive step is valid, or over the precise definition of ad hominem, etc.

The real problem, however, is frequently that the frames of the participants have produced different ways of modelling the situation. A purely analytical approach will not necessarily bring agreement at this point, since the difference is in the categories upon which the analytical discourse is based.

Why does this happen? And how can this problem be overcome - if, indeed, it can be overcome?

Noteable Researchers On Framing

Erving Goffman was the first to write about framing analysis.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have carried out a number of experiments on how frames practically affect the choices that people make. Kahneman got the so-called "Nobel Memorial Prize in Econonics" for work on this and related fields in 2002.

Dual Process Theory And Framing

What Is Dual Process Theory?

A Dual Process Theory in the context of framing concerns describes thinking processes as split between implicit and explicit styles:

• Implicit processing (sometimes called "System 1" or "Intuition") is fast, automatic, and uses intuitive heuristics that are not obvious.
• Explicit processing ("System 2", "Reasoning") is slow, conscious, and uses explicit models that can easily be discussed.

How Dual Process Theory and Framing Interact

Framing works on implicit processing: this is the part of Dual Process Theory that is not under conscious control. This makes the effects of framing very hard to overcome by the more deliberate reasoning of explicit processes.

This means that if choices are deliberately presented in a fashion that uses framing to tie strongly into implicit processing, decisions will be favoured accordingly.

Examples

Anchoring

Anchoring is perhaps the strongest interaction point between framing and processing. People will start with an initial approximation ("anchor") and then view alternatives as being in relation to the anchor. So by setting the original "anchor", a great deal of influence can be bought to bear over preference.

One example is a deal being advertised as reduced from a higher price, the "anchor" being the higher price.

Availability

People evaluate the world in terms of "salient" concepts. So by framing in a way that ties directly into high-availability concepts, a far more direct tie-in is achieved. One way to do this is by "priming" - leading up to a decision point in a manner that highlights aspects of reality that the framer wants to be foremost when a decision is taken.

Representativeness

By constructing a carefully chosen representative item in people's minds, they can become primed to interpret unspecified characteristics in terms of the representative, ignoring more general information about base rates of those characteristics.

Loss Aversion

People generally prefer avoiding losses to gaining. So if a frame is chosen where the desired alternative is framed as a potential gain relative to the base case, that alternative is far more likely to be favoured than if the reverse is true.

More On Heuristics

Evidence of heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents

A great paper, available here: www.snowpit.com.

"Even though people are capable of making decisions in a thorough and methodical way, it appears that most of the time they don’t. A growing body of research suggests that people unconsciously use simple rules of thumb, or heuristics, to navigate the routine complexities of modern life. In this paper, I examine evidence that four of these heuristics – familiarity, social proof, commitment and scarcity – have influenced the decisions of avalanche victims."

Causes Of Framing Mismatches

Evidence-Based Frames

What you have seen is not the same as what someone else has seen. That's a pretty good reason for frames to differ.

However, people are not always explicit about the evidence that has gone into their framing - so it's easy for such causes to be overlooked because they are not explicitly stated.

Scared Frames: Framing From Negative Experiences

A single bad experience can condition people to take great pains to subsequently avoid whatever they perceive as the causes of that experience. This can cause framing differences in a number of ways.

Firstly, people may not even be consciously aware of why they view a potential course of action in such a hostile fashion, and will fabricate logical arguments to justify their emotional reaction.

If they are consciously aware of the source of their aversion, they may actually be mistaken as to the true cause(s) of the original bad experience.

Even if they have a justified aversion, based on valid experience, they still need to convey this to others who will not have had the opportunity to learn the same lessons.

Example: "We can't use XXX! The team I was in 10 years ago used XXX to do YYY when I was working at ZZZ and it was a complete failure - everyone got fired"

Fixed Frames: Confirmation Bias

Everyone suffers from a large number of cognitive biases that impair the process of framing. One bias that is particularly relevant to framing is confirmation bias, the way that information is fitted into one's current preconceptions: this can act as a filter so contrary information is not even consciously perceived.

However, even if information that doesn't fit the current frame is perceived, it can still be ignored because of cognitive dissonance, the desire to interpret evidence so as to make decisions already made appear in a positive light. Finally, there is the understandable reluctance of people to invest energy in continually re-analysing and re-modelling situations.

Example: "I don't care what the User Acceptance Tests say - I know that this is the right thing to do"

Imposed Frames: Institutional Causes

Things are the way they are because they got that way - Gerald Weinberg

An organisation will have certain patterns of behaviour that are rewarded, and certain patterns of behaviour that are discouraged. This will inevitably shape people's perceptions of what is possible and/or desirable. For instance, a company with a dysfunctional IT infrastructure may end up not pursuing improvements that need IT infrastructure changes, because attempting to push such improvements through tends to have negative consequences for the individual(s) involved.

Example: "If you try to fix system XXX then manager AAA will act against you - he got his current position on the back of system XXX being an unqualified success"

"Stretching" Frames

Sometimes, people attempting to construct post hoc justifications for a desired conclusion will - deliberately or otherwise - "stretch" a frame from an area where it is valid, to one where it is inapplicable. This can be particularly hard to deal with, since refuting arguments requires refuting the implicit framework in which the discourse is occuring.

Bridging The Framing Gap

Make Assumptions Explicit

This is the single most powerful way to deal with incorrect frames. A large part of a frame's power derives from its implicit nature - once "Type 2" processing is enabled against an agreed background, people will become at least capable of rational debate.

Discuss Alternative Frames

There are generally many ways to frame any given situtation, with no objective reason to prefer one over the other.

But often people will be unaware that more than one valid frame exists.

This is particularly true for people from a science background, who will tend to lack a background of studying subjects that make use of frame analysis. By setting out more than one way of framing an analysis, the possibility of alternatives is opened up.

Be On The Lookout

Don't be surprised if people deliberately set up inappropriate frames for discussing a topic. Nowadays, framing is increasingly part of any politician's armoury.

Look for attempts by others to alter frames, rather than engaging with the underlying issues. If an organisation's dominated by framing-oriented shuffles rather than concrete discussion, that's not a good sign.