Priming Effects Are Fake, but Framing Effects Are Real

A few decades ago, it was pretty common to mush together priming effects and framing effects and see them as two closely connected parts of a single Bigger Truth about the human mind. Of course, everyone understood that the effects themselves were a bit different, but one common view was that they were providing evidence for the same larger picture. That larger picture said: People’s judgments are radically unstable, easily pushed around by subtle and almost unnoticeable factors.

Things have changed so much since then. Priming research in social psychology has experienced a series of truly spectacular replication failures, while research on framing effects continues to look very solid. In light of this change, we should rethink our understanding of what framing effects show about human cognition. We shouldn’t see them as part of a larger picture that also includes priming. We need an understanding of framing that allows us to situate it within a larger picture, according to which priming effects are not real.

The priming literature seemed to be showing that people’s judgment and decision-making are highly unstable and can be easily shifted around by small manipulations of the external situation. The thought was that if you just happen to be holding a hot coffee, or sitting at a dirty desk, or in a room that includes a picture of dollar bills, your whole way of thinking about things will be shifted in some fundamental respect. For example, you will end up making deeply different moral judgments.

The key lesson of more recent research is simple: these priming effects do not occur. More generally, we cannot shift people’s moral judgments around in some radical way just by making subtle changes in their situation. Your moral judgments will not shift around completely if you are seated at a dirty desk. That is not how the human mind works.

Okay, with all of that in mind, let’s rethink framing effects. For concreteness, we can focus on a famous study from Tversky and Kahneman (1981). In this study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Participants in the gain framing condition read the following case:

A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:

• If you choose the first option, 200 people will be saved.

• If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that 0 people will be saved.

Meanwhile, participants in the loss framing condition read:

A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:

• If you choose the first option, 400 people will die.

• If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 0 people will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.

Clearly, the two descriptions are logically equivalent, but they tend to yield very different responses. Participants tend to be risk-averse in the first case, risk-seeking in the second.

During the heyday of priming research, many of us thought that this sort of effect should be understood within a larger picture of the mind that also included priming. Basically, the idea was something like this: “People’s judgments about a case can be shifted around but all sorts of little things, including everything from the decor in the room to the precise words used to describe it.” But in light of everything we know now, we need to revisit this view. Framing effects are very real, but that larger picture seems to be mistaken. We need to understand framing effects within a larger picture of the mind, according to which people’s judgments don’t just shift around randomly as a result of all sorts of little factors.

I’d be very open to different views about what the right picture is, but just as a first step in this direction, let’s consider a picture that emerges not from social psychology but rather from very traditional work in philosophy. This picture says that people often have a collection of different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent. These intuitions need not be unstable in any way. It might be that each individual intuition is completely stable; it’s just that the different intuitions contradict each other.

To illustrate, consider intuitions about free will. I might find myself having the following three intuitions: (a) All human behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, (b) If a person’s behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, that person’s behavior is not performed with free will, (c) Some human behaviors are performed with free will. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, this does not mean that people’s free will intuitions have to be unstable in any way.

On the contrary, a single individual could easily have all three intuitions at the same time. For example, as a philosopher, I might start out a paper by explaining that each of these three claims seems intuitively to be true, that they are mutually inconsistent and hence cannot all be right, and that we therefore face an interesting philosophical problem. Alternatively, someone might simply have each of these three intuitions, but without noticing that they contradict each other. In such a case, the person would be failing to notice something important, but that would not mean that the person’s intuitions were unstable. Each of the three intuitions might be perfectly stable; it’s just that the three intuitions are not consistent.

Some philosophical problems seem to have very much the structure we see in framing effects. Consider the philosophical problem of moral luck. The problem starts with three intuitions: (a) An agent who doesn’t bring about any bad outcomes deserves relatively little blame, (b) An agent who performs the exact same behavior but who ends up bringing about a bad outcome deserves a lot of blame, (c) If the agent performs the exact same behavior in two cases and the only difference is in the outcome that ends up occurring, that difference by itself cannot be relevant to how much blame the agent deserves. I myself have all three of these intuitions. Since the intuitions are mutually inconsistent, they cannot all be right, but that does not mean that my intuitions are unstable. Each of the three intuitions is completely stable and emerges in all situations; it’s just that the three intuitions are in tension with each other.

Let’s now return to framing effects. In the days when it seemed like priming was real, I totally see why researchers would think that framing was a lot like priming. But in light of subsequent studies, maybe we should see it in a completely different way. Framing does not involve people’s judgments being unstable; it instead involves people having different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent.

Take the example described above. Looking at that example, I have the following three intuitions: (a) The correct answer in the first case is to take the non-risky option, (b) The correct answer in the second case is to take the risky option, and (c) It cannot possibly be the case that the correct answer in the first case is different from the correct answer in the second case. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, each individual intuition can be perfectly stable. In fact, thinking about the problem right now, I find myself having all three intuitions at the same time.

Turning the traditional view about framing effects upside down, one might even see framing effects as an extreme case of stability. Just as we continue to experience a visual illusion even when we know that it is illusory, we continue to have the inconsistent intuitions that together constitute a framing effect even when we know that they cannot all be right.

[I discuss this issue in this paper, but please feel free to respond to this blog post even if you haven’t looked at the full paper.]