Framing and nudging

I’m still working on Nudge but the basic concepts are in the early going. The second half of the book works through how these nudges might be implemented in various public policy issues: health care, school choice, marriage, etc. There are still many fascinating bits in the public policy discussion, and of course it’s easy there to see what’s at stake, but true to form I’m most interested in the way the conceptual underpinnings lend themselves to various kinds of analogies, especially analogies in teaching and learning. (There are powerful analogies and even outright connections here as well for my work on Paradise Lost and Milton generally, but I’ll save that for another time.)

Tonight I want to meditate just for a moment on Thaler and Sunstein’s use of a psychological concept called “framing.”  The authors explain this idea with a simple example. Credit card companies didn’t want customers to perceive that they paid more when they bought something with a credit card. Nevertheless, the government decreed that credit card companies could not force retailers to charge the same price for credit as for cash. So the credit card companies “framed” the choice this way: the credit price was a normal price, and if one paid cash one could receive a “cash discount.” At first blush, the idea seems too transparently manipulative to work. But work it does.

The credit card companies had a good intuitive understanding of what  psychologists would come to call “framing.” The idea is that choices depend,   in part, on the way in which problems are stated.

The credit card companies had a good intuitive understanding of what  psychologists would come to call “framing.” The idea is that choices depend,   in part, on the way in which problems are stated.

But why would so simple a technique actually work? Stated in cold prose, the manipulation is not only transparent but almost ridiculous. Who could be fooled by such tactics? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains have evolved. Our “blink” brain (to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) tends to have a fast, all-at-once, go-from-the-gut response, typically linked to emotion and fight-or-flight reactions. Its speed was critical to our survival on the savannah, and Gladwell argues persuasively that there’s often an eerie trustworthiness in these rapid responses, as they are less susceptible to certain kinds of biases in our more executive brains, what psychologists call our “reflective systems.” This reflective system is slower but more rational. (The paradox that Gladwell explores is how this very rationality can methodically and persuasively lead us into cascading errors of judgment–but that’s another story.) Thaler and Sunstein argue that people employ their “reflective system” erratically, largely because there’s so much information to process (and that’s just in everyday life–online doesn’t enter into it) and because decisions have to be made fairly quickly. The result is that even simple kinds of framing can have enormous effects. The authors explain:

Framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive  decision makers. Their Reflective System does not do the work that would  be required to check and see whether reframing the questions would produce   a different answer. One reason they don’t do this is that they  wouldn’t know what to make of the contradiction. This implies that  frames are powerful nudges, and must be selected with caution.

Here’s where my ears perked up. It’s one thing to say that people are lazy and unreflective. Even to the extent it may be true, it’s not a very inviting doorway to understanding–more like an invitation to a good upbraiding. Box the apprentice’s ears and make him work harder next time. It’s also not a very effective strategy for awakening the joy of learning, in my view (though I suppose everyone needs some of this extrinsic motivation now and then). By contrast, it’s another thing altogether to consider that people don’t think about the framing itself because “they wouldn’t know what to make of the contradiction.” To put it another way, a way I think is consonant with Thaler and Sunstein’s argument, to think about framing is not just to detect and denounce various kinds of manipulation. Rather, it’s to awaken one to the intensely provisional quality of most of understanding itself, since all understanding happens in a context, and contexts appear relevant to a large degree depending on how questions and choices are framed. To think about framing, then, is to explore (to a certain extent) the instability of the boundary between context and irrelevant detail.

If you think I’m going too meta with this train of thought, re-read Hamlet. Or talk to any theater director. I was doing just that a couple of days ago, and she said something quite wonderful about context: the prop on the stage, placed within a charged context, acquires weight–that is, meaning and significance. And it’s the placing within that context (“framing” not only as the order of choices but the placing-within-a-context) that’s the larger point Thaler and Sunstein are making, I believe. Ultimately, what they term “choice architecture” depends on the time-and-space marker of the frame. And thinking about the frame in those terms makes folks feel uncertain, a feeling they’d like to avoid.

But of course asking our students to dwell within these thoughts, uncertainties, and contradictions is at the heart of what we call education. As Jerome Bruner points out in Toward a Theory of Instruction, inquiry is born out of “conjectures and dilemmas,” while too often education is about reporting results. And insofar as students sense their job is to memorize and spit back those results stripped of the conjectures and dilemmas that lend them meaning and human significance (honestly felt with uncertainties intact), they will naturally be suspicious of any effort to get them to think about framing per se. Yet thinking about framing, and learning the art of reframing, is at the heart of the mystery of human consciousness.

I’ve thought a good deal about framing lately. Sometimes I call it “tuning,” to evoke a musical analogy. Either way, it’s a participatory meta-perspective I try to urge upon myself and my students, not so we all join Hamlet in his rest, but so we can become better choice architects ourselves.

Still thinking all this through–definitely a work in progress. And while I’m sure there are very sophisticated philosophical reflections available on this topic, and I hope to find them and welcome their insights, I have to say that Scott McCloud gets to the heart of the matter mighty well:

frame_mccloud

From "Understanding Comics," by Scott McCloud

5 thoughts on “Framing and nudging

  1. Great post, as always. I think this is relevant to my field, too (religious studies). It occurs to me that some day when you have lots of free time you might enjoy an article that made a big impression on me a long time ago: James Fernandez, “Edification by Puzzlement: Logic, Memorization and Literacy among the Fang,” in a book called Explorations in African Systems of Thought, eds. Karp and Bird (yes, really), published by Indiana UP in 1980. The article deals with ways of using contradiction, indirection, paradox and humor as teaching tools specifically in a religious context (the tribesmen Fernandez looks at are actually Christians, but still live mostly in a subsistence setting and adhere to a lot of much older traditions). The article’s pretty short. Your post made me want to reread it (it’s been about ten or twelve years). Unfortunately I don’t have a copy easily available…

  2. In International Relations theory, ‘framing’ is mostly associated with a classic article by Robert Jervis “Hypotheses on Misperception” World Politics 20 (April): 454-79 (summarized here: http://wikisum.com/w/Jervis:_Hypotheses_on_misperception) and subsequent developments of the argument that models of state interaction built upon the assumption that states act as self-interested, unitary rational actors are inherently limited by the nature of human cognition, the realities of bureaucratic politics etc. It also arises when considering the role of public opinion in foreign policy – in which framing is usually examined as a manipulative device of elites: neocon imperialism framed as defending national security etc. We see in the present healthcare mess how effective this kind of manipulative framing effort can be. In Gramscian terms, framing sets the terrain of a conflict, presumably to the advantage of the framer – see Fox News anchors deciding to use ‘government option’ in place of ‘public option’ to feed the frenzy of the kneejerk libertarian right.

    All of which is to say, when I have encountered framing up to now, it has been in rather Machiavellian contexts. What you offer here is a potentially progressive application of the term, which is very refreshing. Thanks, as always.

  3. @Nathan Thanks for the kind words, and thanks even more for that citation. I’ve just started the essay and it’s making my hair stand on end. Two great epigraphs. A lovely and graceful style of writing and argument. Jerome Bruner quoted on the third page and cited specifically later on, as is Vygotsky. A keen and playful sense of meaning-making throughout. Wow. I’m greatly in your debt for this citation!

    The Bruner connection is particularly welcome at this point because of a paper I’m giving on situated vs. symbolic cognition at the Lilly Teaching Conference in November. There are eerie synchronicities here. I’m arguing that Web 2.0 visualizations of a course of study “writing itself into being” can bridge the theoretical gap between situated and symbolic cognition and learning. The idea of puzzlement and edification dovetails so very beautifully with what I’ve been thinking that I am almost beside myself with excitement at this moment. I’ll calm down, alas, but not too much.

    There are distinct connections to Michael Wesch’s work here as well. And believe it or not, I used to dabble in both E. Leach and C. Levi-Strauss back in the early days of dissertation-making.

    All this and I’m only about half-way through the essay.

    Well, I’m buying the first five rounds, my friend, whenever we have the opportunity to raise a glass together. I’m dazzled by the light that streams through Fernandez’ essay. And I’m deeply grateful for your comment. Funny: I almost gave up on this blog post because I was so dissatisfied with it, but I pressed on. I am so very glad I did.

    Thanks.

  4. @Ed I have no idea why my blog is holding comments for moderation–I’ve done some witless box-checking in the backend and I hope it fixes the issue.

    Yes, framing as manipulation is right there with choice architecture as manipulation and with various notions of “spin.” The authors of Nudge are pretty candid about these malign uses of framing. But they also point out that nothing can be completely frame-free, and that it should be possible to use expertise as a way to frame for best results while not eliminating any choice or even making it difficult. As they say at one point, it’s a good nudge to put the fruit at eye level in the school cafeteria, but it’s not a good nudge to ban all junk food or hector the students about it.

    And yes indeed, I’m trying to get to yet another level of choice architecture in which I implicitly frame a meta-understanding (itself a kind of meta-frame, I guess) of framing itself, but in a way that lures students into their own expertise as choice architects and encourages them (in Bruner’s words) to “go beyond what is given” without making that encouragement or a particular kind of “going beyond” yet another part of “what is given.” It’s in the nature of my hope that I cannot predict what shape that “going beyond” will take, or how (if it happens, as it often does in my experience) that “going beyond” will re-frame my own experience of teaching and learning.

    Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” includes many beautiful expressions of this idea, but it’s almost beyond articulation … yet its urgency is clear, to me.

  5. As a post-script given all the breast-beating about the consequences of liberal humanistic models of autonomous choice–and I do understand the problems, or I think I do–I believe I would distinguish my goal, which is enlightened and purposeful and ethical *agency*, from a more abstract notion of “autonomy.” It’s in the nature of agency that (in my view) persons and personality matter, but I do not wish to assert that all men and women are islands or that choice does not exist in (and depend upon) context and community. But there’s the old project again, mediating self and community. I think it *must* be done without either pole being erased, but it’s tricky, no doubt about it.

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