Week 5: Decision framing

This week our group had to read the paper 'What lies beneath: reframing framing effects' by Maule & Villejoubert (2007).
It is a review on previous research on decision framing. They looked at various studies on framing.
Decision framing is the internal representations of a problem, which determine the choice which is then made.
One of the studies mentioned was the Asian disease study by Tversky & Kahneman (1981). It looks at how people have a tendency to choose risk aversion when a problem is positively framed, and are risk seeking when presented with a negatively framed problem.
This corresponds to the framing effect reversal, where the preference/decision made is to do with how the problem is presented. This framing effect suggests choice behaviour may be affected by the way information is presented rather than reflecting the fundamental beliefs and values of the decision maker.
The paper looked at framing in health decision making, and in political decision making. They mention emphasis framing, where relevant information is emphasised and becomes the focus for evaluation and choice, for example economic issues raised in election campaigns, and how this can sway the preferences of the public to or away from a certain political party.

Maule et al. (2007) came up with a model called the information processing model. It tries to highlight that the framing effect involves how the decision problem has been formulated by the experimenter and how a decision-maker internally represents the problem (Kahneman, 2000). The model is a flow diagram of how the decision is made; so it starts with a problem formation which is the input of information, then mental processing happens whilst editing operations happen, internal representation and evalutaion operations in this order, and then out comes a choice behaviour as a result.

It is difficult to know how much the framing effect can influence an individual, as each individual will have different internal representations and beliefs and values that may counteract the framing effect. Also the individual can't clearly illustrate what their internal representations are and how they came to a decision.