Abstract
The concept of framing, experimental evidence supporting framing effects, and models and theories of decision-making sensitive to framing play important roles in policy analysis. First, they are used to caution about various elements of uncertainty that are introduced through framing into policy interventions. Second, framing is often referred to in order to justify certain policy interventions, as framing effects are often seen as sources of irrationality in need of correction. Third, framing effects are often used as instruments for policy-making, as they are seen as effective ways to influence behaviour. This review discusses the different concepts of framing, surveys some of the experimental evidence, describes the dominant descriptive theories and the main attempts to assess the rationality or irrationality of behaviour sensitive to framing in order to clarify how exactly framing is relevant for policy making.
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Notes
- 1.
A qualification is necessary here. Kahneman and Tversky for example argue that specific kinds of act-framing violate the principle of dominance: “the susceptibility to framing and the S-shaped value function produce a violation of dominance in a set of concurrent decisions” (Kahneman and Tversky 1984:344). Clearly, dominance is an explicitly formulated requirement in these standard axiomatisations. However, because only special cases of framing violate dominance, and because the normative judgment apparently goes beyond these cases, it cannot be dominance violation that lies at the basis of judging framing to be irrational.
- 2.
Natural frequencies refer to the outcomes of natural sampling — that is, the acquisition of information by updating event frequencies without artificially fixing the marginal frequencies. Unlike probabilities and relative frequencies, natural frequencies are raw observations that have not been normalized with respect to the base rates of the event in question.
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Sher, S., & McKenzie, C. R. M. (2006). Information leakage from logically equivalent frames. Cognition, 101, 467–494.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science (New Series), 211, 453–458.
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Grüne-Yanoff, T. (2016). Framing. In: Hansson, S., Hirsch Hadorn, G. (eds) The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30549-3_8
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