People often encounter information that has been framed in different ways across contexts. A voter might hear a presidential candidate describe a set of military options in terms of deaths prevented, and later hear the opposing candidate describe the same options in terms of lives saved. An online news reader browsing the morning headlines might see one article written using language that frames the job market in terms of gains (e.g., 90% employment), and then encounter a different article that talks about it in term of losses (10% unemployment). Yet despite this tendency for the same information to be framed and reframed over time, we know very little about whether and how framing effects might carry over beyond the immediate context in which they are first encountered. Instead, most existing research on framing has focused on the current - and presumably temporary - effects of frames on judgment. These effects are dramatic, and have been shown to impact preferences and behavior across economic, political, psychological, and health domains. Yet they may be capturing only one snapshot of what is in fact a dynamic process.
Building on a foundation of successful pilot data, this interdisciplinary project advances an expanded theoretical understanding of framing effects, suggesting that frames can stick: Once a person conceptualizes something as a loss or gain based on the current framing, it may be difficult to reconceptualize it using a different frame. Moreover, loss frames may be fundamentally stickier than gain frames in their ability to shape people's thinking across time and situations. Thus, while citizens may be able to shift with relative ease from thinking of a policy issue in terms of gain to thinking of it in terms of loss, it may be much more difficult to shift from loss to gain.
The intellectual merit of this project is associated with its theoretical implications across the social sciences: its expansion of our understanding of framing effects beyond a single shot, context-dependent phenomenon to investigate the asymmetric effects of sequentially encountered frames and the basic mechanisms that produce this pattern. Building on the co-PIs' joint expertise in studying issues at the intersection of psychology and political science, a series of experiments will replicate and extend the results of two pilot studies that established initial evidence for an asymmetric stickiness effect by expanding on a classic Tversky and Kahneman framing paradigm. It is predicted that changing the framing of a problem from gain to loss will have a larger impact on participants' preferences, compared to changing the frame from loss to gain, consistent with the notion that loss frames are stickier than gain frames and more resistant to reframing. Subsequent experiments will test basic cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect, and build a bridge to future research by testing these processes in the context of mock news stories about the economy.
The broader impacts of the project emanate from its potential implications for consequential policy issues, including how the order in which citizens are exposed to gain and loss economic signals may affect public perceptions of the economy. For instance, following an economic recession, news reports on the economy may move from loss frames to gain frames as the economy begins to show signs of recovery. Yet if loss frames are more sticky, as hypothesized, then the later gain frames may have a muted effect on economic perceptions. In this way, the sequential use of loss and gain frames in the news may directly affect the rate at which consumer confidence - and, thus, the economy itself - recovers. The theory advanced by the proposed research could therefore have substantial implications for understanding and improving economic recovery in the wake of a recession.
