Do framing effects reveal irrational choice?

Abstract

Framing effects have long been viewed as compelling evidence of irrationality in human decision making, yet that view rests on the questionable assumption that numeric quantifiers used to convey the expected values of choice options are uniformly interpreted as exact values. Two experiments show that when the exactness of such quantifiers is made explicit by the experimenter, framing effects vanish. However, when the same quantifiers are given a lower bound (at least) meaning, the typical framing effect is found. A 3rd experiment confirmed that most people spontaneously interpret the quantifiers in standard framing tests as lower bounded and that their interpretations strongly moderate the framing effect. Notably, in each experiment, a significant majority of participants made rational choices, either choosing the option that maximized expected value (i.e., lives saved) or choosing consistently across frames when the options were of equal expected value.

Philosophers’ biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection

“…That the effect is present in participants with very high levels of expertise raises the question of whether those experts might in fact be responding rationally to relevant factors, contrary to our initial assumptions in experimental design. For example, Mandel (2014) argues that participants might naturally read ''200 people will be saved'' as meaning something like at least 200 people will be saved (and maybe more), and comparably ''400 people will die'' as meaning something like at least 400 people will die -in which case it might be rational to prefer the risky choice in the die frame and the safe choice in the save frame. If Mandel's explanation were correct in the present case, however, we might expect to see the same frame-driven pattern in the second-presented scenarios as in the first-presented scenarios, since the wording is the same; and we would probably expect to see smaller framing effects among expert participants who were presumably aware that the intended interpretation of the options is exact numbers saved and dying, not minimum numbers.…”

Who should bring home the bacon? How deterministic views of gender constrain spousal wage preferences

“…To address this issue, in Study 3 we develop a second measure to capture traditional roles from a man's perspective by asking individuals whether they want to be the primary breadwinner. Though logically equivalent to our first operationalization of Hypothesis 1, these questions may not be semantically equivalent (see Mandel, 2013, for an overview of how logically equivalent questions can elicit different responses by being semantically unequivalent). Measuring breadwinner preference for oneself (rather than one's preference for a spouse) may activate a primal goal for male respondents and thus allow us to test men's preferences and further moderation of those preferences by GD.…”

Framing effects are robust to linguistic disambiguation: A critical test of contemporary theory.

“…Signed confidence was calculated by multiplying the confidence rating (1-5) for each decision by -1 if the sure option was selected or by +1 if the risky option was selected. Compared to decision, signed confidence is a more sensitive measure of framing behavior because it allows subjects to indicate how strongly they endorse the option they chose, given that each problem requires a forced binary choice (Mandel, 2014; Reyna et al, 2014). …”

“…Only recently have they been directly compared (Mandel, 2014), but, as we argue, the results of this comparison were inconclusive.…”