POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FRAMING: AN EXPERIMENT
Perception and behavior are influenced by the way a situation or an issue is presented to an individual. This frame of reference provides a standard or an attitude within which a situation or an issue is evaluated. The psychological principles that influence perception, when the evaluation of probabilities and the making of decisions based on such evaluations are involved, affect the outcomes of such actions depending upon how an issue or decision problem is framed, according to the preponderance of the literature. Some questioning of the strength of framing as an influence on decision choices, however, is present in the literature. An experiment was conducted to test the both the capability and the strength of variations in the framing of a decision question on subject decision choices. The results of the experiment did not confirm the capability of variations in the framing of a decision question to influence subject decision choices. The results of the experiment did, however, confirm that variations in the framing of a decision question influence the strength of subject decision choices.
Kahneman and Tversky (1984, pp. 341-350) found that the psychophysics of chance induce an overweighting of both sure things and improbable events in relation to events of moderate probabilities. Because events may be framed in multiple ways, however, different decision choices may be induced in relation to the same event or in relation to similar events, an action that is contrary to the invariance criterion of rational choice. Perception, thus, frequently plays a major role in decision choice behavior.
Framing affects perception and perception is based in emotional response to a given situation (Kahneman and Tversky, 1984, pp. 341-350). The sociology of emotions is a name for a body of work that articulates the links between cultural ideas, structural arrangement, and several things a...