Towards Improved Constructive Thinking and Greater Holistic Objectivity and Clarity in a Complex World. This Blog is a Resource of Articles on the Thinking Process from Education, Information Science, Philosophy, Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Sociology, Media Studies, Statistics, Behavioural Sciences, and Other Sources. The Development of the Precision Universal Debating Project acts as the Basic Backdrop to the Whole Subject.
(The development of the Universal Debating Project could be seen as a manifestation of Big Data needed to help humanity progress in a positive direction RS/The Blogger/Blog Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Universal_Debating_Project )
The world is awash in data. Billions of people routinely surf the web and click on links. They connect with their friends, like or block content to suit their preferences, and share information widely on social media sites. This happens every single day.
Even more people get into cars, take buses and trains, board airplanes, or move around by human power on their commutes to work, exercise routines, daily errands, and to socialize with friends and family. This also happens every single day. What most of us are just beginning to realize is that all of these activities (and many more) now produce streams of data. Data that gets aggregated. Data that is analyzed for patterns of meaning to be used by governments, research institutions, and commercial enterprises. Data that makes visible the awe-inspiring dynamics of our human world.
We now routinely hear about things like “smart cities” that can monitor real-time data to attenuate themselves in the manner of a living organism. We see analytics on the “social web” that can track emotions and cluster words that appear together in everyday conversations. This is data about ourselves. It is like holding up a mirror and seeing our behaviors reflected in the data traces left behind by our interactions in the world.
The news cycle can’t keep up with all the media produced about new products and services, startup companies deploying new technologies, and civil society institutions introducing novel practices. All of which is unfolding in every sector of society around the world every single day. Yet there is something much deeper, much more profound, going on that isn’t getting talked about at all. Humanity is waking up to the fact that culture is physical.
For millennia, at least in the Western world, our philosophies have been plagued by dualities. We have split the mental off from the physical since the days of Aristotle, reaching a pinnacle of presumed separateness during the early Modern Era in the late 16th and 17th Centuries. At that time the universe was conceived as being a giant mechanical clock—lifeless and without a mind of its own—ticking away as stars were born and died away.
It was in this context that Descartes made famous his dictum Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—the clearest articulation of mind-body dualism the world has ever known. He needed a way to preserve the existence of mind in a universe that the dominant thinking of the day dictated could not have one. So he placed the mind in a parallel universe and linked it to the physical world through the pineal gland of the human brain. And yet, even at this height of presumed separateness, seeds were being sown that would bring about the demise of dualisms in the centuries ahead.
It was Descartes’ own analytic geometry, alongside the new calculus of Newton and Leibniz, that produced the tools of reductionist science and carried us into the Age of Industrialism. And it was during the industrial era that we pushed dualistic analysis to its breaking point. Cracks in the facade became evident early on in the 19th Century with the rise of field theories in electromagnetism and later through the emergence of quantum mechanics.
This was the period of “positivism” in science that really came to a head in 1850 during the Vienna Circle, a meeting of minds in Austria whose purpose was to distinguish that which is real and measurable (and therefore worthy of calling science) from that which is ephemeral and not of the material world. The number zero was a major source of contention at that time because it both symbolized nothing of material concreteness yet was absolutely essential for the calculus so vital to the success of materialism’s greatest achievement—the field of physics itself. A major outcome of this dialogue was to declare the social sciences “soft” and unworthy of rigorous treatment.
Positivism rose and fell during the rapid expansions of knowledge in the early 20th Century, when critical theory and its allies came to battle with and weaken reductionist science. Their attacks on objectivity were most damning of all, demonstrating with a powerful efficiency that the research subject could never be separated from her object of study. It was during this time that the cracks broke through the wall of dualism and removed the capital “T” from the truth value of scientific knowledge. The final death blow came from the most unexpected of places—a discrete mathematics that had descended from Descartes’ analytic geometry. This was what led to digital computing in the mid-20th Century and the new mathematical tools that would birth a fully integrated systems science in the decades that followed.
Just as dualism was having its hey day, dividing everything into manageable bits and riding the wave of successes from reductionist science, the burgeoning realization that all is connected was growing in its voracity to undermine and usurp the pillars of science. It was digital computing that enabled the meteorologist, Edward Lorentz, to discover deterministic chaos in the 1960’s. He showed that even the smallest uncertainties can balloon beyond the size of an entire system in only a few discrete time steps. This “sensitivity to initial conditions” showed how profoundly embedded numerical computations are in real-world systems.
Around the same time, computers enabled the first massive calculations of population dynamics in the newly born field of ecology. This made visible the numerical patterns of living systems that could be studied with increasing sophistication as hardware improvements increased the computational power available to researchers. Biology was starting to benefit from the advanced tools of physical science—more cracks in the dualism wall whose far-reaching consequences would take decades to fully see.
Dualism had its time in the lime light even as the shadows were creeping in. We now live in a world dominated by complex systems designed and built by humans. Computers that manage our financial transactions, even to the point of collapse as interdependence rears its ugly head and cascades disruptions across our global economy. They also monitor internal pressure, temperature, and mixing ratios of chemicals in the engines of our automobiles to allow us to squeeze every ounce of energy out of liquid fuels. Computers even keep blood flowing through our hearts with the pacemakers that monitor and influence the chaotic attractors that are capable of beating out of sync with our bodies in the turbulent flows that produce heart attacks.
We have always been embedded in (and arising from) physical systems, though it wasn’t until recently that this fundamental truth made its way into mainstream thinking. That same data explosion we started this article out with is now producing daily experiences of immersion in the physical world. Our mobile phones, with their GPS tracking devices and integrated software applications, are helping us to visualize and make real the fact that we have always been a part of this world.
Humanity is waking up to its ecological nature.
The recent events have revived my interest in an old idea… here are a few thoughts on it; let me know what you think…
The Game of Understanding
After recent experiences of some people’s inability to participate in a rational discussion and their recalcitrance towards any attempt to help them to participate appropriately I have been thinking about a framework to enable people to participate in a rational discussion…
Consider the following flowchart, which is discussed in the invitation to a conversation from my blog back in 2008… Can this basic approach be turned into a computer assisted forum that enables people to conduct a rational discussion?
The aim of the game is to generate, assess, refine and categorise logical statements regarding a topic, thereby building up a body of true statements that comprise models of the collective knowledge regarding the discussion topic. There are also collections of false statements that comprise anti-models. When a statement is judged to be true or false this is done relative to a model given its axioms and supporting statements. Hence a statement may be true in regards to some models but false in regards to others. In this way various hypotheses can be explored and tested or alternative coherent understandings can be mapped out.
The structure of the interface is designed to guide the participants, forcing them to take certain steps that are vital to the preservation of coherence within a rational discussion. In particular the calling out of disruptive participants as well as the detection of fallacies and other polemical tactics, along with the resolution of these problems within self-contained meta-discussions.
This allows the participants to rationally explore the space of coherent understandings of a topic without it devolving into antagonistic polemic about who is right or wrong, instead multiple understandings can be mapped out and assessed. Eventually the various models may be rated based on their explanatory power and self-consistency thus decisions of right or wrong can be made. However in many cases there is no right or wrong, there are just several coherent understandings, thus it is useful to map them out in the same space and see how they relate to each other; where they connect, where they differ and why.
At the end of the discussion, rather than just having a vast disorganised thread of verbiage, instead there is a structured archive of statements about subtopics, which are formed into models and anti-models of the group’s understandings of the primary topic.
Each model is built upon a set of axioms. If several different sets of axioms and hypotheses are to be tested there can be multiple models (and anti-models).
What are the primary entities involved? (for details see the object model)
Participant
Discussion Topic
Forum: primary, meta
Term
Definition (multiple allowed, each signified by a postfix on the associated term, e.g. information[CM] for information defined within the context of computational metaphysics)
Irrelevant, incoherent and uncivil statements go into the trash (but are still archived) and will count against the participants score. See the invitation to a conversation for a definition of the term ‘uncivil’.
Statements that are relevant, coherent and civil are then assessed as to whether they are true or false.
False statements are archived as failed arguments against the model (forming the anti-model).
True statements are archived as successful arguments for the model.
If there are multiple models then the statements are archived as true or false in relation to each model.
Statements are categorised by a structured voting system, where the quality of and confidence in the supporting and counter arguments is rated by participants. One cannot simply vote according to unsupported opinion and if participants attempt to distort things this will trigger a meta-discussion on their behaviour. When agreement cannot be reached regarding a statement it remains unclassified until its arguments for and against are further clarified. This process can be recursive to several levels of nesting. It is preferable that this process be completed before the primary discussion can continue onto other top-level statements.
Only a certain number of statements made by any one participant can remain unresolved – this is to disallow roaming arguments that never come to any agreement on any points along the way but just create noise in the forum. Whenever an obstacle is encountered it cannot just be ignored, it must be addressed. There can be multiple meta-discussions related to a participant if there is a need to challenge their disruptive behaviour.
The archives provide a record of all the statements made, the subtopics addressed, the terms used and their definitions.
The archive of true statements gradually builds up an agreed upon model that captures the collective understanding of the topic.
The archive of false statements gradually builds up a record of all the failed counter arguments against the model; this is the anti-model.
These archives can just be collections of statements or they can be semantically organised into structured knowledge bases.
There is only one primary forum (only one discussion topic) and as many self-contained meta-forums as are needed, one for each separate meta-discussion. The results of previous meta-discussions can be re-used when similar disruptive tactics are being challenged. The benefit of having separate meta-discussions is that the primary discussion can remain focused on the primary topic, whilst the messy and often emotional exchanges that tend to arise when people’s behaviour is called into question in a meta-discussion won’t corrupt the clarity and flow of the primary discourse.
Once a person has been called into a meta-discussion for the same offence a certain number of times, without showing any meaningful signs of recognition of their offence or any attempt to overcome it, they should immediately be expelled – because they have proven themselves unable to participate appropriately. In this way the interface is acting as an impartial moderator so that individual participants won’t have to perform the expulsion and thereby be left open to false accusations (such as silencing dissent), which could easily be believed by those who are ignorant of the protocols of a rational debate.
Statements can be linked to other statements, e.g. a false argument and the true arguments that showed it to be false. Or a true argument and the true arguments that showed it to be true. Or a statement regarding a subtopic and all the other statements that address the same subtopic. Or a statement and all of the logically derived statements that depend on the validity of the original statement. Etc… Each statement within a model has supporting or counter arguments, each of which also have supporting or counter arguments, etc, thus forming chains of statements that must eventually rest upon the axioms of the model. If the chains are still incomplete then the statement must remain uncategorised until the chains connect with the axioms via valid sequences of supporting or counter arguments.
Whenever a key term is used it must be associated with an existing definition or a new definition must be added, furthermore, each term is marked to distinguish it from other uses of the same term that have different meanings. Hence every key term that is used has an explicit definition so that trivial confusions over terms with different meanings can be easily avoided. Also any attempts to hide behind such confusion become obvious to everyone involved.
The activities of particular participants is tracked and everyone can see the number and proportion of types of statements. Thus if someone is consistently irrelevant, incoherent or uncivil this shows up in their participation record. One can also see which particular statements were made by who. Who contributed to which models or anti-models. Who focussed on which subtopics. The proportion of true and false statements made by each participant. Etc..
An important benefit of this approach is that it enables new entrants to the discussion to quickly get up to speed. Rather than just be faced with a vast edifice of unstructured verbiage, which they have to wade through and try to decipher (which most people don’t bother to do anyway), instead they are presented with a structured environment in which they can clearly see things such as:
The primary topic and all currently discussed subtopics.
The key terms, their definitions and their usages marked by postfix markers within the text of each statement.
The range of models being explored.
The axioms that each model rests upon.
The set of existing true statements that support each model and how they were shown to be true.
The set of previously tested and falsified counter arguments to each model (the anti-model) and how they were shown to be false.
The record of inputs and behaviours of each of the participants, which indicates who the trouble makers are, who the protagonists and antagonists are in relation to each model, who is interested in which subtopics, etc.
Another important benefit is that it makes explicit the process of adjusting a model of thought in response to new insights or compelling counter arguments. At present this must be done by each participant within their own minds, however often people fail to adjust their position when given new evidence or compelling arguments, thus they inadvertently perpetuate ideas that have already been shown to be false. Making this adjustment process explicit within the interface will help people to adjust their own thinking. It will also assist with the difficult process of following through on the ramifications of an adjustment, for example, if an axiom is shown to be false this can have a far reaching and subtle impact on the structure of an entire model.
Note: this game could, to a significant extent, be implemented manually in any existing forum space if people agree to a common set of protocols and curation methods. However problems often arise when a participant in the discussion tries to enforce these protocols and methods on other participants who repeatedly fail to apply them – then emotional tensions arise. Thus it is preferable if the interface itself enforces the protocols on every participant. An example of this enforcement is that the submit button will not become active until all key words have been linked to definitions – thus making it impossible to make a statement that uses key words in a vague and undefined manner.
Conceptual run-through of the main game play:
An initial discussion space has certain predefined features:
* An undefined primary topic.
* An empty list of subtopics.
* An empty primary forum and several auxiliary forums for meta-discussions.
* Several empty archives: a trash archive, and for each model there is a model and anti-model archive.
* There is an empty dictionary of key terms, their definitions and their postfix markers.
* There is a game state indicator, which indicates at which point in the flow chart the discussion is currently at.
* There is an empty list of participants along with various scores for their number of contributions and the number of these that are irrelevant/relevant, incoherent/coherent, uncivil/civil, false/true (in regards to each model). Initialisation:
The initial participants are registered.
The primary topic is clearly defined.
Any initial key terms are added to the dictionary and defined.
Any initial subtopics are added to the list.
In each model archive we first create axiomatic statements. Note, these can be added to or adjusted later if necessary and alternate models can also be created later. However it is easiest to set this up to begin with in order to avoid complex re-adjustments later.
Now the game begins:
The first move is made when a participant makes a logical statement regarding the primary topic.
The next move is when the group assesses the statement for relevance, coherence and civility.
If not passed the next move is to begin a meta-discussion about the irrelevance, incoherence or incivility of the statement. This either leads to a reassessment or adjustment of the original statement or (if required) the deletion of the statement and the expulsion of the participant.
If passed the next move is to assess the truth value of the statement in regards to each model. This may generate other statements that must then be assessed before the original statement can be assessed. This may lead to other statements, and so on. In this way statements are recursively generated and eventually connect with the axioms of the models (or new axioms are created and even new models if the axioms don’t fit any existing models). Then the process returns (back through the recursion levels) eventually resulting in the assessment of the original statement.
Note: any subtopics introduced are added to the list of subtopics, and key words are entered into the dictionary and defined.
When a statement is assessed to be true in relation to a model:
If in support of a model it is added to that model.
If against a model the model must be adjusted and the ramifications of the adjustment followed through.
When a statement is assessed to be false in relation to a model:
If in support of a model the model must be adjusted and the ramifications of the adjustment followed through.
If against a model it is added to that model’s anti-model.
Using this general procedure the game continues, with statements being made, recursively assessed and archived in relation to the models.
As this proceeds a score is kept for each participant, showing the quality of their participation (which is taken into account during meta-discussions, especially in regards to the issue of expulsion). The subtopics are tracked as well, so that one can later list the statements grouped by subtopic.
There are other complexities but that is the main flow of the game play…
Over the last few decades, new experiments have changed science's picture of the way we think — how we succeed or fail to obtain the truth and achieve our goals. The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning. Social psychology has learned about how groups succeed or fail. Behavioral economists have measured the way humans decide against models of optimal decision-makers, and discovered that we often decide suboptimally. Less Wrong is a site for people who want to apply these findings to their own thinking.
This wiki is a companion for the community blog Less Wrong. Our criterion for "notability": a concept needs to be discussed in at least one promoted article, and later be referenced by another (possibly unpromoted) article. If you want to write about something that isn't "notable" yet, do it on the blog!
In the process of debating psychology places a vital role. In the Universal Debating Project it is essential to try, and reach the most "objective" understanding of any issue. Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Universal_Debating_Project
The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions.[1] It is at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and [probability theory].
Psychological experiments on how humans and other animals reason have been carried out for over 100 years. An enduring question is whether or not people have the capacity to be rational. What does it mean to be rational? Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, judgments, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development.
How do people reason about sentences in natural language? Most experimentation on deduction has been carried out on hypothetical thought, in particular, examining how people reason about conditionals, e.g., If A then B.[2] Participants in experiments make the modus ponens inference, given the indicative conditionalIf A then B, and given the premise A, they conclude B. However, given the indicative conditional and the minor premise for the modus tollens inference, not-B, about half of the participants in experiments conclude not-A and the remainder concludes that nothing follows.[2]
The ease with which people make conditional inferences is affected by content, as demonstrated in the well-known selection task developed by Peter Wason. Participants are better able to test a conditional that contains sensible content, e.g., if the envelope is sealed then it must have a 50 cent stamp on it compared to one that contains symbolic content, e.g., if the letter is a vowel then the number is even.[2] Background knowledge can also lead to the suppression of even the simple modus ponens inference [3] Participants given the conditional if Lisa has an essay to write then she studies late in the library and the premise Lisa has an essay to write make the modus ponens inference 'she studies late in the library', but the inference is suppressed when they are also given a second conditional if the library stays open then she studies late in the library. Interpretations of the suppression effect are controversial [4][5]
Other investigations of propositional inference examine how people think about disjunctive alternatives, e.g., A or else B, and how they reason about negation, e.g., It is not the case that A and B. Many experiments have been carried out to examine how people make relational inferences, including comparisons, e.g., A is better than B. Such investigations also concern spatial inferences, e.g. A is in front of B and temporal inferences, e.g. A occurs before B.[6] Other common tasks include categorical syllogisms, used to examine how people reason about quantifiers such as All or Some, e.g., Some of the A are not B.[7]
There are several alternative theories of the cognitive processes that human reasoning is based on.[8] One view is that people rely on a mental logic consisting of formal (abstract or syntactic) inference rules similar to those developed by logicians in the propositional calculus.[9] Another view is that people rely on domain-specific or content-sensitive rules of inference.[10] A third view is that people rely on mental models, that is, mental representations that correspond to imagined possibilities.[11] The mental model theory is the subject of the mental models website A fourth view is that people compute probabilities.[12]
One controversial theoretical issue is the identification of an appropriate competence model, or a standard against which to compare human reasoning. Initially classical logic was chosen as a competence model.[13] Subsequently some researchers opted for non-monotonic logic[14][15] and Bayesianprobability.[16] Research on mental models and reasoning has led to the suggestion that people are rational in principle but err in practice.[6][7] Connectionist approaches towards reasoning have also been proposed.[17]
Inductive reasoning makes broad generalizations from specific cases or observations. In this process of reasoning, general assertions are made based on past specific pieces of evidence. This kind of reasoning allows the conclusion to be false even if the original statement is true.[20] For example, if one observes a college athlete, one makes predictions and assumptions about other college athletes based on that one observation. Scientists use inductive reasoning to create theories and hypotheses.[21]
In opposition, deductive reasoning is a basic form of valid reasoning.[21] In this reasoning process a person starts with a known claim or a general belief and from there asks what follows from these foundations or how will these premises influence other beliefs.[20] In other words, deduction starts with a hypothesis and examines the possibilities to reach a conclusion.[21] Deduction helps people understand why their predictions are wrong and indicates that their prior knowledge or beliefs are off track. An example of deduction can be seen in the scientific method when testing hypotheses and theories. Although the conclusion usually corresponds and therefore proves the hypothesis, there are some cases where the conclusion is logical, but the generalization is not. For example, the statement, “All young girls wear skirts. Julie is a young girl. Therefore, Julie wears skirts,” is valid logically but does not make sense because the generalization from the original statement is not true.
The syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning in which two statements reach a logical conclusion. With this reasoning, one statement could be “Every A is B” and another could be “This C is A”. Those two statements could then lead to the conclusion that “This C is B”. These types of syllogisms are used to test deductive reasoning to ensure there is a valid hypothesis.[21] A Syllogistic Reasoning Task was created from a study performed by Morsanyi, Kinga, Handley, and Simon that examined the intuitive contributions to reasoning. They used this test to assess why “syllogistic reasoning performance is based on an interplay between a conscious and effortful evaluation of logicality and an intuitive appreciation of the believability of the conclusions”.[22]
Another form of reasoning is called abductive reasoning. This type is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available. Abductive reasoning produces the kind of daily decision-making that works best with the information present, which often is incomplete. This could involve making educated guesses from observed unexplainable phenomena. This type of reasoning can be seen in the world when doctors make decisions about diagnoses from a set of results or when jurors use the relevant evidence to make decisions about a case.[21]
Judgment and reasoning involve thinking through the options, making a judgment or conclusion and finally making a decision. Making judgments involves heuristics, or efficient strategies that usually lead you to the right answers.[20] The most common heuristics used are attribute substitution, the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic and the anchoring heuristic – these all aid in quick reasoning and work in most situations. Heuristics allow for errors, a price paid to gain efficiency.[20]
Other errors in judgment, therefore affecting reasoning, include errors in judgment about covariation – a relationship between two variables such that the presence and magnitude of one can predict the presence and magnitude of the other.[20] One cause of covariation is confirmation bias, or the tendency to be more responsive to evidence that confirms your beliefs. But assessing covariation can be pulled off track by neglecting base-rate information – how frequently something occurs in general.[20] However people often ignore base rates and tend to use other information presented.
There are more sophisticated judgment strategies that result in fewer errors. People often reason based on availability but sometimes they look for other, more accurate, information to make judgments.[23] This suggests there are two ways of thinking, known as the Dual-Process Model.[24] The first, System I, is fast, automatic and uses heuristics – more of intuition. The second, System II, is slower, effortful and more likely to be correct – more reasoning.[20]
How do various related factors such as linguistic pragmatics and emotion relate to the inferences people draw?[25][26]
Decision making is often influenced by the emotion of regret and the element of risk. People are strongly motivated by regret and we can see this when they select options they tend to select the option that they will regret the least trying to minimize the amount of regret we will have.[27] Many decisions also include a large element of risk, and in these cases people tend to ask themselves what the level of risk is. They ask themselves how much dread they would experience when thinking about a nuclear accident, and then use that dread as an indicator of risk.[28] We ask “how does this make me feel?” rather than “how risky is this?” Antonio Damasio suggests that somatic markers, certain memories that can cause a strong bodily reaction, act as a way to guide decision making as well. For example, when you are remembering a scary movie and once again become tense and your palms might begin to sweat. Damasio argues that when making a decision we rely on our “gut feelings” to assess various options, and this makes decide to go with a decision that is more positive and stay away from those that are negative.[29] He also argues that the orbitofrontal cortex - located at the base of the frontal lobe, just above the eyes - is crucial in your use of somatic markers, because it is the part in the brain that allows you to interpret emotion.
Another note to make is that when emotion shapes decisions, the influence is usually based on predictions of the future. When people ask themselves how they would react, they are making inferences about the future. Researchers suggest affective forecasting, the ability to predict your own emotions, is poor because people tend to overestimate how much they will regret their errors.[30]
Jump up ^Leighton, J. P. (2004). Defining and describing reason, in The Nature of Reasoning (eds Leighton, J. P. and Sternberg, R. J.) Cambridge University Press
^ Jump up to: abcEvans, J.St.B.T., Newstead, S. and Byrne, R.M.J. (1993). Human Reasoning: The Psychology of Deduction. Hove, UK, Psychology Press
Jump up ^Byrne, R.M.J. (1989). Suppressing valid inferences with conditionals. Cognition, 31,61-83
Jump up ^Bonnefon, J-F. & Hilton, D. (2002). The suppression of modus ponens as a case of pragmatic preconditional reasoning. Thinking and Reasoning, 8, 21-40.
Jump up ^Byrne, R.M.J., Espino, O. & Santamaria, C. (1999). Counterexamples and the suppression of inferences." Journal of Memory & Language", 40, 347-373.
^ Jump up to: abJohnson-Laird, P.N. (2006). "How we reason". Oxford: Oxford University Press
Jump up ^Byrne, R.M.J. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (2009).'If' and the problems of conditional reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 282-287
Jump up ^O’Brien, D. (2009). Human reasoning requires a mental logic. Behav. Brain Sci. 32, 96–97
Jump up ^Cosmides, L. et al. (2005) Detecting cheaters. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 9,505–506
Jump up ^Johnson-Laird, P.N. and Byrne, R.M.J. (2002) Conditionals: a theory of meaning, inference, and pragmatics. Psychol. Rev. 109, 646–678
Jump up ^Oaksford, M. and Chater, N. (2007) Bayesian Rationality. Oxford University Press
Jump up ^See, e.g., Wason, P. C. (1966). "Reasoning", in Foss, B. M.: New horizons in psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Jump up ^Da Silva Neves, R., Bonnefon, J. F., & Raufaste, É. (2002). An empirical test for patterns of nonmonotonic inference. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 34, 107-130
Jump up ^Stenning, K. & van Lambalgen, M. (2005). Semantic Interpretation as Computation in Nonmonotonic Logic: The Real Meaning of the Suppression Task. Cognitive Science, 29, 919-960
Jump up ^See, e.g., Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (2001) The probabilistic approach to human reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 349-357
Jump up ^Sun, R. (1994). Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Commonsense Reasoning. John Wiley and Sons, New York.
Jump up ^Demetriou, A. (1998). Cognitive development. In A. Demetriou, W. Doise, K. F. M. van Lieshout (Eds.), Life-span developmental psychology (pp. 179-269). London: Wiley.
Jump up ^Demetriou, A., Mouyi, A., & Spanoudis, G. (2010). The development of mental processing. Nesselroade, J. R. (2010). Methods in the study of life-span human development: Issues and answers. In W. F. Overton (Ed.), Biology, cognition and methods across the life-span. Volume 1 of the Handbook of life-span development (pp. 36-55), Editor-in-chief: R. M. Lerner. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
^ Jump up to: abcdefgReisberg, Daniel. (2013). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Jump up ^Morsanyi, Kinga; Handley, Simon J. (2011). Syllogistic Reasoning Task. doi:10.1037/t09520-000
Jump up ^Oppenheimer, D.M. (2004). Spontaneous discounting of availability in frequency judgment tasks. Psychological Science, 15, 100-105.
Jump up ^Evans, J. S. B. T. (2012a). Dual-process theories of deductive reasoning: Facts and fallacies. In Holyoak, K. J., & Morrison, R. G. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (pp. 115-133). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Jump up ^See, e.g., Noveck, I. A. (2004) Pragmatic Inferences Related to Logical Terms. In Noveck, I. A. & Sperber, D. (ed.), Experimental Pragmatics, Palgrave Macmillan
Jump up ^Blanchette, I. & Richards, A. (2004). Reasoning about emotional and neutral materials. Is logic affected by emotion? Psychological Science, 15, 745-75
Jump up ^Connolly, T., & Zeelenberg, M. (2002). Regret in decision making. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 212-216.
Jump up ^Slovic, P., et al., (2002). The affect heuristic. In t. Gilvoch, D. Griffen, & New York, NY: Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Jump up ^Damasio, A.R. (1994) Descartes’ error: Emotion reason, and the human brain. New York, NY: Putnam.
Jump up ^Gilbert, Morewedge, Risen, & Wilson, T. D. (2004). Looking forward to looking backward. Psychology Science, 15, 346-350.
Jump up ^See, e.g., Goel, V. (2005). Cognitive Neuroscience of Deductive Reasoning. In Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G. (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, Cambridge University Press
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing involves the social construction of a social phenomenon - by mass media sources, political or social movements, political leaders, or other actors and organizations. It is an inevitable process of selective influence over the individual's perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases. It is generally considered[by whom?] in one of two ways: as frames in thought, consisting of the mental representations, interpretations, and simplifications of reality, and frames in communication, consisting of the communication of frames between different actors.[1]
One can view framing in communication as positive or negative - depending on the audience and what kind of information is being presented. Framing might also be understood as being either equivalence frames, which represent logically equivalent alternatives portrayed in different ways (see framing effect) or as emphasis frames, which simplify reality by focusing on a subset of relevant aspects of a situation or issue.[1] In the case of "equivalence frames", the information being presented is based on the same facts, but the "frame" in which it is presented changes, thus creating a reference-dependent perception.
The effects of framing can be seen in many journalism applications. With the same information being used as a base, the "frame" surrounding the issue can change the reader's perception without having to alter the actual facts. In the context of politics or mass-media communication, a frame defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others. For political purposes, framing often presents facts in such a way that implicates a problem that is in need of a solution. Members of political parties attempt to frame issues in a way that makes a solution favoring their own political leaning appear as the most appropriate course of action for the situation at hand.[2]
In social theory, framing is a schema of interpretation, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes, that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events.[3] In other words, people build a series of mental "filters" through biological and cultural influences.[citation needed] They then use these filters to make sense of the world. The choices they then make are influenced by their creation of a frame.
Framing is also a key component of sociology, the study of social interaction among humans. Framing is an integral part of conveying and processing data on a daily basis. Successful framing techniques can be used to reduce the ambiguity of intangible topics by contextualizing the information in such a way that recipients can connect to what they already know.
When one seeks to explain an event, the understanding often depends on the frame referred to. If a friend rapidly closes and opens an eye, we will respond very differently depending on whether we attribute this to a purely "physical" frame (she blinked) or to a social frame (she winked).
Though the former might result from a speck of dust (resulting in an involuntary and not particularly meaningful reaction), the latter would imply a voluntary and meaningful action (to convey humor to an accomplice, for example). Observers will read events seen as purely physical or within a frame of "nature" differently from those seen as occurring with social frames. But we do not look at an event and then "apply" a frame to it. Rather, individuals constantly project into the world around them the interpretive frames that allow them to make sense of it; we only shift frames (or realize that we have habitually applied a frame) when incongruity calls for a frame-shift. In other words, we only become aware of the frames that we always already use when something forces us to replace one frame with another.[4][5]
Framing is so effective because it is a heuristic, or mental shortcut that may not always yield desired results; and is seen as a 'rule of thumb'. According to Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, human beings are by nature "cognitive misers", meaning they prefer to do as little thinking as possible.[6] Frames provide people a quick and easy way to process information. Hence, people will use the previously mentioned mental filters (a series of which is called a schema) to make sense of incoming messages. This gives the sender and framer of the information enormous power to use these schemas to influence how the receivers will interpret the message.[7]
In the field of communication, framing defines how news media coverage shapes mass opinion. Richard E. Vatz's discourse on creation of rhetorical meaning relates directly to framing, although he references it little. To be specific, framing effects refer to behavioral or attitudinal strategies and/or outcomes that are due to how a given piece of information is being framed in public discourse. Today, many volumes of the major communication journals contain papers on media frames and framing effects.[8] Approaches used in such papers can be broadly classified into two groups: studies of framing as the dependent variable and studies of framing as the independent variable.[9] The former usually deals with frame building (i.e. how frames create societal discourse about an issue and how different frames are adopted by journalists) and latter concerns frame setting (i.e. how media framing influences an audience).
Frame building is related to at least three areas: journalist norms, political actors, and cultural contexts. It assumes that several media frames compete to set one frame regarding an issue, and one frame finally gains influence because it resonates with popular culture, fits with media practices, or is heavily sponsored by elites. First, in terms of practices of news production, there are at least five aspects of news work that may influence how journalists frame a certain issue: larger societal norms and values, organizational pressures and constraints, external pressures from interest groups and other policy makers, professional routines, and ideological or political orientations of journalists. The second potential influence on frame building comes from elites, including interest groups, government bureaucracies, and other political or corporate actors. Empirical studies show that these influences of elites seem to be strongest for issues in which journalists and various players in the policy arena can find shared narratives. Finally, cultural contexts of a society are also able to establish frame. Goffman [3] assumes that the meaning of a frame has implicit cultural roots. This context dependency of media frame has been described as 'cultural resonance' [10] or 'narrative fidelity'.[11]
When people are exposed to a novel news frame, they will accept the constructs made applicable to an issue, but they are significantly more likely to do so when they have existing schema for those constructs. This is called the applicability effect. That is, when new frames invite people to apply their existing schema to an issue, the implication of that application depends, in part, on what is in that schema. Therefore, generally, the more the audiences know about issues, the more effective are frames.
There are a number of levels and types of framing effects that have been examined. For example, scholars have focused on attitudinal and behavioral changes, the degrees of perceived importance of the issue, voting decisions, and opinion formations. Others are interested in psychological processes other than applicability. For instance, Iyengar [12] suggested that news about social problems can influence attributions of causal and treatment responsibility, an effect observed in both cognitive responses and evaluations of political leaders, or other scholars looked at the framing effects on receivers' evaluative processing style and the complexity of audience members' thoughts about issues.
News media frame all news items by emphasizing specific values, facts, and other considerations, and endowing them with greater apparent applicability for making related judgments. News media promotes particular definitions, interpretations, evaluations and recommendations.[13][14]
Foundations of framing in mass communication research[edit]
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson first articulated the concept of framing in his 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. A frame, Bateson wrote, is "a spatial and temporal bonding of a set of interactive messages."[15]
Sociological roots of media framing research[edit]
Media framing research has both sociological and psychological roots. Sociological framing focuses on "the words, images, phrases, and presentation styles" that communicators use when relaying information to recipients.[1] Research on frames in sociologically driven media research generally examines the influence of "social norms and values, organizational pressures and constraints, pressures of interest groups, journalistic routines, and ideological or political orientations of journalists" on the existence of frames in media content.[16] Todd Gitlin, in his analysis of how the news media trivialized the student New Left movement during the 1960s, was among the first to examine media frames from a sociological perspective. Frames, Gitlin wrote, are "persistent patterns of cognition, interpretations, and presentation, of selection [and] emphasis . . . [that are] largely unspoken and unacknowledged . . . [and] organize the world for both journalists [and] for those of us who read their reports."[17]
Psychological roots of media framing research[edit]
Research on frames in psychologically driven media research generally examines the effects of media frames on those who receive them. For example, Iyengar explored the impact of episodic and thematic news frames on viewers' attributions of responsibility for political issues including crime, terrorism, poverty, unemployment, and racial inequality.[18] According to Iyengar, an episodic news frame "takes the form of a case study or event-oriented report and depicts public issues in terms of concrete instances," while a thematic news frame "places public issues in some more general abstract context . . . directed at general outcomes or conditions."[13][18] Iyengar found that the majority of television news coverage of poverty, for example, was episodic.[18] In fact, in a content analysis of six years of television news, Iyengar found that the typical news viewer would have been twice as likely to encounter episodic rather than thematic television news about poverty.[18] Further, experimental results indicate participants who watched episodic news coverage of poverty were more than twice as likely as those who watched thematic news coverage of poverty to attribute responsibility of poverty to the poor themselves rather than society.[18] Given the predominance of episodic framing of poverty, Iyengar argues that television news shifts responsibility of poverty from government and society to the poor themselves.[18] After examining content analysis and experimental data on poverty and other political issues, Iyengar concludes that episodic news frames divert citizens' attributions of political responsibility away from society and political elites, making them less likely to support government efforts to address those issue and obscuring the connections between those issues and their elected officials' actions or lack thereof.[18]
Clarifying and distinguishing a "fractured paradigm"[edit]
Perhaps because of their use across the social sciences, frames have been defined and used in many disparate ways. Entman called framing "a scattered conceptualization" and "a fractured paradigm" that "is often defined casually, with much left to an assumed tacit understanding of the reader."[13] In an effort to provide more conceptual clarity, Entman suggested that frames "select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described."[13]
Entman's[13] conceptualization of framing, which suggests frames work by elevating particular pieces of information in salience, is in line with much early research on the psychological underpinnings of framing effects (see also Iyengar,[18] who argues that accessibility is the primary psychological explanation for the existence of framing effects). Wyer and Srull[19] explain the construct of accessibility thus:
People store related pieces of information in "referent bins" in their long-term memory.[19]
People organize "referent bins" such that more frequently and recently used pieces of information are stored at the top of the bins and are therefore more accessible.[19]
Because people tend to retrieve only a small portion of information from long-term memory when making judgments, they tend to retrieve the most accessible pieces of information to use for making those judgments.[19]
The argument supporting accessibility as the psychological process underlying framing can therefore be summarized thus: Because people rely heavily on news media for public affairs information, the most accessible information about public affairs often comes from the public affairs news they consume. The argument supporting accessibility as the psychological process underlying framing has also been cited as support in the debate over whether framing should be subsumed by agenda-setting theory as part of the second level of agenda setting. McCombs and other agenda-setting scholars generally agree that framing should incorporated, along with priming, under the umbrella of agenda setting as a complex model of media effects linking media production, content, and audience effects.[20][21][22] Indeed, McCombs, Llamas, Lopez-Escobar, and Rey justified their attempt to combine framing and agenda-setting research on the assumption of parsimony.[22]
Scheufele, however, argues that, unlike agenda setting and priming, framing does not rely primarily on accessibility, making it inappropriate to combine framing with agenda setting and priming for the sake of parsimony.[16] Empirical evidence seems to vindicate Scheufele's claim. For example, Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley empirically demonstrated that applicability, rather than their salience, is key.[14] By operationalizing accessibility as the response latency of respondent answers where more accessible information results in faster response times, Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley demonstrated that accessibility accounted for only a minor proportion of the variance in framing effects while applicability accounted for the major proportion of variance.[14] Therefore, according to Nelson and colleagues, "frames influence opinions by stressing specific values, facts, and other considerations, endowing them with greater apparent relevance to the issue than they might appear to have under an alternative frame."[14]
In other words, while early research suggested that by highlighting particular aspects of issues, frames make certain considerations more accessible and therefore more likely to be used in the judgment process,[13][18] more recent research suggests that frames work by making particular considerations more applicable and therefore more relevant to the judgment process.[14][16]
Equivalency versus emphasis: two types of frames in media research[edit]
Chong and Druckman suggest framing research has mainly focused on two types of frames: equivalency and emphasis frames.[23] Equivalency frames offer "different, but logically equivalent phrases," which cause individuals to alter their preferences.[1] Equivalency frames are often worded in terms of "gains" versus "losses." For example, Kahneman and Tversky asked participants to choose between two "gain-framed" policy responses to a hypothetical disease outbreak expected to kill 600 people.[24] Response A would save 200 people while Response B had a one-third probability of saving everyone, but a two-thirds probability of saving no one. Participants overwhelmingly chose Response A, which they perceived as the less risky option. Kahneman and Tversky asked other participants to choose between two equivalent "loss-framed" policy responses to the same disease outbreak. In this condition, Response A would kill 400 people while Response B had a one-third probability of killing no one but a two-thirds probability of killing everyone. Although these options are mathematically identical to those given in the "gain-framed" condition, participants overwhelmingly chose Response B, the risky option. Kahneman and Tversky, then, demonstrated that when phrased in terms of potential gains, people tend to choose what they perceive as the less risky option (i.e., the sure gain). Conversely, when faced with a potential loss, people tend to choose the riskier option.[24]
Unlike equivalency frames, emphasis frames offer "qualitatively different yet potentially relevant considerations" which individuals use to make judgments.[23] For example, Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley exposed participants to a news story that presented the Ku Klux Klan's plan to hold a rally.[14] Participants in one condition read a news story that framed the issue in terms of public safety concerns while participants in the other condition read a news story that framed the issue in terms of free speech considerations. Participants exposed to the public safety condition considered public safety applicable for deciding whether the Klan should be allowed to hold a rally and, as expected, expressed lower tolerance of the Klan's right to hold a rally.[14] Participants exposed to the free speech condition, however, considered free speech applicable for deciding whether the Klan should be allowed to hold a rally and, as expected, expressed greater tolerance of the Klan's right to hold a rally.[14]
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that framing can affect the outcome (i.e. the choices one makes) of choice problems, to the extent that several of the classic axioms of rational choice do not hold.[25] This led to the development of prospect theory as an alternative to rational choice theory.[26]
The context or framing of problems adopted by decision-makers results in part from extrinsic manipulation of the decision-options offered, as well as from forces intrinsic to decision-makers, e.g., their norms, habits, and unique temperament.
Tversky and Kahneman (1981) demonstrated systematic reversals of preference when the same problem is presented in different ways, for example in the Asian disease problem. Participants were asked to "imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows."
The first group of participants was presented with a choice between programs: In a group of 600 people,
Program A: "200 people will be saved"
Program B: "there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved"
72 percent of participants preferred program A (the remainder, 28%, opting for program B).
The second group of participants was presented with the choice between the following: In a group of 600 people,
Program C: "400 people will die"
Program D: "there is a 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and a 2/3 probability that 600 people will die"
In this decision frame, 78% preferred program D, with the remaining 22% opting for program C.
Programs A and C are identical, as are programs B and D. The change in the decision frame between the two groups of participants produced a preference reversal: when the programs were presented in terms of lives saved, the participants preferred the secure program, A (= C). When the programs were presented in terms of expected deaths, participants chose the gamble D (= B).[27]
Framing effects arise because one can frequently frame a decision using multiple scenarios, wherein one may express benefits either as a relative risk reduction (RRR), or as absolute risk reduction (ARR). Extrinsic control over the cognitive distinctions (between risk tolerance and reward anticipation) adopted by decision makers can occur through altering the presentation of relative risks and absolute benefits.
People generally prefer the absolute certainty inherent in a positive framing-effect, which offers an assurance of gains. When decision-options appear framed as a likely gain, risk-averse choices predominate.
A shift toward risk-seeking behavior occurs when a decision-maker frames decisions in negative terms, or adopts a negative framing effect.
In medical decision making, framing bias is best avoided by using absolute measures of efficacy.[28]
Researchers have found[25] that framing decision-problems in a positive light generally results in less-risky choices; with negative framing of problems, riskier choices tend to result. According to behavioral economists[citation needed]:
positive framing effects (associated with risk aversion) result from presentation of options as sure (or absolute) gains
negative framing effects (associated with a preference shift toward choosing riskier options) result from options presented as the relative likelihood of losses
Researchers have found[citation needed] that framing-manipulation invariably affects subjects, but to varying degrees. Individuals proved risk averse when presented with value-increasing options; but when faced with value decreasing contingencies, they tended towards increased risk-taking. Researchers[who?] found that variations in decision-framing achieved by manipulating the options to represent either a gain or as a loss altered the risk-aversion preferences of decision-makers.
In one study, 57% of the subjects chose a medication when presented with benefits in relative terms, whereas only 14.7% chose a medication whose benefit appeared in absolute terms. Further questioning of the patients suggested that, because the subjects ignored the underlying risk of disease, they perceived benefits as greater when expressed in relative terms.[29]-
Researchers have proposed[30][31] various models explaining the framing effect:
cognitive theories, such as the Fuzzy-trace theory, attempt to explain framing-effects by determining the amount of cognitive processing effort devoted to determining the value of potential gains and losses.
prospect theory explains the framing-effect in functional terms, determined by preferences for differing perceived values, based on the assumption that people give a greater weighting to losses than to equivalent gains.
motivational theories explain framing-effects in terms of hedonic forces affecting individuals, such as fears and wishes—based on the notion that negative emotions evoked by potential losses usually out-weigh the emotions evoked by hypothetical gains.
cognitive cost-benefit trade-off theory defines choice as a compromise between desires, either as a preference for a correct decision or a preference for minimized cognitive effort. This model, which dovetails elements of cognitive and motivational theories, postulates that calculating the value of a sure gain takes much less cognitive effort than that required to select a risky gain.
Cognitive neuroscientists have linked the framing-effect to neural activity in the amygdala, and have identified another brain-region, the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex (OMPFC), that appears to moderate the role of emotion on decisions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain-activity during a financial decision-making task, they observed greater activity in the OMPFC of those research subjects less susceptible to framing-effects.[32]
Framing theory and frame analysis in sociology[edit]
Framing theory and frame analysis provide a broad theoretical approach that analysts have used in communication studies, news (Johnson-Cartee, 1995), politics, and social movements (among other applications).
According to some sociologists, the "social construction of collective action frames" involves "public discourse, that is, the interface of media discourse and interpersonal interaction; persuasive communication during mobilization campaigns by movement organizations, their opponents and countermovement organizations; and consciousness raising during episodes of collective action."[33]
Word-selection or diction has been a component of rhetoric since time immemorial. But most commentators attribute the concept of framing to the work of Erving Goffman on frame analysis and point especially to his 1974 book, Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Goffman used the idea of frames to label "schemata of interpretation" that allow individuals or groups "to locate, perceive, identify, and label" events and occurrences, thus rendering meaning, organizing experiences, and guiding actions.[34] Goffman's framing concept evolved out of his 1959 work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a commentary on the management of impressions. These works arguably depend on Kenneth Boulding's concept of image.[35]
Sociologists have utilized framing to explain the process of social movements.[11] Movements act as carriers of beliefs and ideologies (compare memes). In addition, they operate as part of the process of constructing meaning for participants and opposers (Snow & Benford, 1988). Sociologists deem the mobilization of mass-movements "successful" when the frames projected align with the frames of participants to produce resonance between the two parties. Researchers of framing speak of this process as frame re-alignment.
Snow and Benford (1988) regard frame-alignment as an important element in social mobilization or movement. They argue that when individual frames become linked in congruency and complementariness, "frame alignment" occurs,[36] producing "frame resonance", a catalyst in the process of a group making the transition from one frame to another (although not all framing efforts prove successful). The conditions that affect or constrain framing efforts include the following:
"The robustness, completeness, and thoroughness of the framing effort". Snow and Benford (1988) identify three core framing-tasks, and state that the degree to which framers attend to these tasks will determine participant mobilization. They characterize the three tasks as the following:
diagnostic framing for the identification of a problem and assignment of blame
prognostic framing to suggest solutions, strategies, and tactics to a problem
motivational framing that serves as a call to arms or rationale for action
The relationship between the proposed frame and the larger belief-system; centrality: the frame cannot be of low hierarchical significance and salience within the larger belief system. Its range and interrelatedness, if the framer links the frame to only one core belief or value that, in itself, has a limited range within the larger belief system, the frame has a high degree of being discounted.
Relevance of the frame to the realities of the participants; a frame must seem relevant to participants and must also inform them. Empirical credibility or testability can constrain relevancy: it relates to participant experience, and has narrative fidelity, meaning that it fits in with existing cultural myths and narrations.
Cycles of protest (Tarrow 1983a; 1983b); the point at which the frame emerges on the timeline of the current era and existing preoccupations with social change. Previous frames may affect efforts to impose a new frame.
Snow and Benford (1988) propose that once someone has constructed proper frames as described above, large-scale changes in society such as those necessary for social movement can be achieved through frame-alignment.
Frame-alignment comes in four forms,: frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension and frame transformation.
Frame bridging involves the "linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 467). It involves the linkage of a movement to "unmobilized [sic] sentiment pools or public opinion preference clusters" (p. 467) of people who share similar views or grievances but who lack an organizational base.
Frame amplification refers to "the clarification and invigoration of an interpretive frame that bears on a particular issue, problem, or set of events" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 469). This interpretive frame usually involves the invigorating of values or beliefs.
Frame extensions represent a movement's effort to incorporate participants by extending the boundaries of the proposed frame to include or encompass the views, interests, or sentiments of targeted groups.
Frame transformation becomes necessary when the proposed frames "may not resonate with, and on occasion may even appear antithetical to, conventional lifestyles or rituals and extant interpretive frames" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 473).
When this happens, the securing of participants and support requires new values, new meanings and understandings. Goffman (1974, p. 43–44) calls this "keying", where "activities, events, and biographies that are already meaningful from the standpoint of some primary framework, in terms of another framework" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 474) such that they are seen differently. Two types of frame transformation exist:
Domain-specific transformations, such as the attempt to alter the status of groups of people, and
Global interpretive frame-transformation, where the scope of change seems quite radical—as in a change of world-views, total conversions of thought, or uprooting of everything familiar (for example: moving from communism to market capitalism, or vice versa; religious conversion, etc.).
Although the idea of language-framing had been explored earlier by Kenneth Burke (terministic screens), political communication researcher Jim A. Kuypers first published work advancing Frame analysis (framing analysis) as a rhetorical perspective in 1997. His approach begins inductively by looking for themes that persist across time in a text (for Kuypers, primarily news narratives on an issue or event) and then determining how those themes are framed. Kuypers's work begins with the assumption that frames are powerful rhetorical entities that "induce us to filter our perceptions of the world in particular ways, essentially making some aspects of our multi-dimensional reality more noticeable than other aspects. They operate by making some information more salient than other information...."[37]
In his 2009 essay "Framing Analysis," in Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action[38] and his 2010 essay “Framing Analysis as a Rhetorical Process,” [39] Kuypers offers a detailed conception for doing framing analysis from a rhetorical perspective. According Kuypers, "Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event, and are generally the central organizing idea." [40] Kuypers's work is based on the premise that framing is a rhetorical process and as such it is best examined from a rhetorical point of view. Curing the problem is not rhetorical and best left to the observer.
Preference reversals and other associated phenomena are of wider relevance within behavioural economics, as they contradict the predictions of rational choice, the basis of traditional economics. Framing biases affecting investing, lending, borrowing decisions make one of the themes of behavioral finance.
The role framing plays in the effects of media presentation has been widely discussed, with the central notion that associated perceptions of factual information can vary based upon the presentation of the information.
In ‘’Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age,’’[42]Jim A. Kuypers examined the differences in framing of the war on terror between the Bush administration and the U.S. Mainstream News between 2001 and 2005. Kuypers looked for common themes between presidential speeches and press reporting of those speeches, and then determined how the president and the press had framed those themes. By using a rhetorical version of framing analysis, Kuypers determined that the U.S. news media advanced frames counter to those used by the Bush administration:
the press actively contested the framing of the War on Terror as early as eight weeks following 9/11. This finding stands apart from a collection of communication literature suggesting the press supported the President or was insufficiently critical of the President’s efforts after 9/11. To the contrary, when taking into consideration how themes are framed, [Kuypers] found that the news media framed its response in such a way that it could be viewed as supporting the idea of some action against terrorism, while concommitantly opposing the initiatives of the President. The news media may well relay what the president says, but it does not necessarily follow that it is framed in the same manner; thus, an echo of the theme, but not of the frame. The present study demonstrates, as seen in Table One [below], that shortly after 9/11 the news media was beginning to actively counter the Bush administration and beginning to leave out information important to understanding the Bush Administration’s conception of the War on Terror. In sum, eight weeks after 9/11, the news media was moving beyond reporting political opposition to the President—a very necessary and invaluable press function—and was instead actively choosing themes, and framing those themes, in such a way that the President’s focus was opposed, misrepresented, or ignored.[43]
Table One: Comparison of President and News Media Themes and Frames 8 Weeks after 9/11[44]
Themes
President's Frame
Press Frame
Good v. Evil
Struggle of good and evil
Not mentioned
Civilization v. Barbarism
Struggle of civilization v. barbarism
Not mentioned
Nature of Enemy
Evil, implacable, murderers
Deadly, indiscriminant Bush Administration
Nature of War
Domestic/global/enduring War
Domestic/global/longstanding War or police action
Similarity to Prior Wars
Different Kind of War
WWII or Vietnam?
Patience
Not mentioned
Some, but running out
International Effort
Stated
Minimally reported
In 1991 Robert M. Entman published findings [45] surrounding the differences in media coverage between Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and Iran Air Flight 655. After evaluating various levels of media coverage, based on both amount of airtime and pages devoted to similar events, Entman concluded that the frames the events were presented in by the media were drastically different:
By de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem, while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage… [T]he contrasting news frames employed by several important U.S. media outlets in covering these two tragic misapplications of military force. For the first, the frame emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation, for the second, the frame de-emphasized the guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology.
Differences in coverage amongst various media outlets:
Amounts of Media coverage dedicated to each event
Korean Air
Iran Air
Time Magazine and Newsweek
51 pages
20 pages
CBS
303 minutes
204 minutes
New York Times
286 stories
102 stories
In 1988 Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth did a study on the effects of framing attribute information on consumers before and after consuming a product (1988). In this study they found that in a study on beef. People who ate beef labeled as 75% lean rated it more favorably than people whose beef was labelled 25% fat.
Linguist and rhetoric scholar George Lakoff argues that, in order to persuade a political audience of one side of and argument or another, the facts must be presented through a rhetorical frame. It is argued that, without the frame, the facts of an argument become lost on an audience, making the argument less effective. The rhetoric of politics uses framing to present the facts surrounding an issue in a way that creates the appearance of a problem at hand that requires a solution. Politicians using framing to make their own solution to an exigence appear to be the most appropriate compared to that of the opposition.[2] Counter-arguments become less effective in persuading an audience once one side has framed an argument, because it is argued that the opposition then has the additional burden of arguing the frame of the issue in addition to the issue itself.
Framing a political issue, a political party or a political opponent is a strategic goal in politics, particularly in the United States of America. Both the Democratic and Republican political parties compete to successfully harness its power of persuasion. According to the New York Times:
Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was 'framing.' Exactly what it means to 'frame' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines.
Because framing has the ability to alter the public’s perception, politicians engage in battles to determine how issues are framed. Hence, the way the issues are framed in the media reflects who is winning the battle. For instance, according to Robert Entman, professor of Communication at George Washington University, in the build-up to the Gulf War the conservatives were successful in making the debate whether to attack sooner or later, with no mention of the possibility of not attacking. Since the media picked up on this and also framed the debate in this fashion, the conservatives won.[7]
One particular example of Lakoff's work that attained some degree of fame was his advice to rename [47]trial lawyers (unpopular in the United States) as "public protection attorneys". Though Americans have not generally adopted this suggestion, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America did rename themselves the "American Association of Justice", in what the Chamber of Commerce called an effort to hide their identity.[48]
The New York Times depicted similar intensity among Republicans:
In one recent memo, titled 'The 14 Words Never to Use,' [Frank] Luntz urged conservatives to restrict themselves to phrases from what he calls ... the 'New American Lexicon.' Thus, a smart Republican, in Luntz's view, never advocates 'drilling for oil'; he prefers 'exploring for energy.' He should never criticize the 'government,' which cleans our streets and pays our firemen; he should attack 'Washington,' with its ceaseless thirst for taxes and regulations. 'We should never use the word outsourcing,' Luntz wrote, 'because we will then be asked to defend or end the practice of allowing companies to ship American jobs overseas.'
From a political perspective, framing has widespread consequences. For example, the concept of framing links with that of agenda-setting: by consistently invoking a particular frame, the framing party may effectively control discussion and perception of the issue. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in Trust Us, We're Experts illustrate how public-relations (PR) firms often use language to help frame a given issue, structuring the questions that then subsequently emerge. For example, one firm advises clients to use "bridging language" that uses a strategy of answering questions with specific terms or ideas in order to shift the discourse from an uncomfortable topic to a more comfortable one.[49] Practitioners of this strategy might attempt to draw attention away from one frame in order to focus on another. As Lakoff notes, "On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started coming out of the White House."[50] By refocusing the structure away from one frame ("tax burden" or "tax responsibilities"), individuals can set the agenda of the questions asked in the future. Cognitive linguists point to an example of framing in the phrase "tax relief". In this frame, use of the concept "relief" entails a concept of (without mentioning the benefits resulting from) taxes putting strain on the citizen:
The current tax code is full of inequities. Many single moms face higher marginal tax rates than the wealthy. Couples frequently face a higher tax burden after they marry. The majority of Americans cannot deduct their charitable donations. Family farms and businesses are sold to pay the death tax. And the owners of the most successful small businesses share nearly half of their income with the government. President Bush's tax cut will greatly reduce these inequities. It is a fair plan that is designed to provide tax relief to everyone who pays income taxes.
Alternative frames may emphasize the concept of taxes as a source of infrastructural support to businesses:
The truth is that the wealthy have received more from America than most Americans—not just wealth but the infrastructure that has allowed them to amass their wealth: banks, the Federal Reserve, the stock market, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the legal system, federally sponsored research, patents, tax supports, the military protection of foreign investments, and much much more. American taxpayers support the infrastructure of wealth accumulation. It is only fair that those who benefit most should pay their fair share.
Frames can limit debate by setting the vocabulary and metaphors through which participants can comprehend and discuss an issue. They form a part not just of political discourse, but of cognition. In addition to generating new frames, politically oriented framing research aims to increase public awareness of the connection between framing and reasoning.
The initial response of the Bush administration to the assault of September 11, 2001 was to frame the acts of terror as crime. This framing was replaced within hours by a war metaphor, yielding the "War on Terror". The difference between these two framings is in the implied response. Crime connotes bringing criminals to justice, putting them on trial and sentencing them, whereas as war implies enemy territory, military action and war powers for government.[50][53]
Recent[update] popularization of the term "escalation" to describe an increase in American troop-levels in Iraq. This implies that the United States has deliberately increased the scope of conflict in a provocative manner. It also implies that U.S. strategy entails a long-term military presence in Iraq, whereas "surge" framing implies a powerful but brief, transitory increase in intensity.[54]
The "bad apple" frame, as in the proverb "one bad apple spoils the barrel". This frame implies that removing one underachieving or corrupt official from an institution will solve a given problem; an opposing frame presents the same problem as systematic or structural to the institution itself—a source of infectious and spreading rot.[55]
The "taxpayers money" frame, rather than public or government funds, which implies that individual taxpayers have a claim or right to set government policy based upon their payment of tax rather than their status as citizens or voters and that taxpayers have a right to control public funds that are the shared property of all citizens and also privileges individual self-interest above group interest.[citation needed]
The "collective property" frame, which implies that property owned by individuals is really owned by a collective in which those individuals are members. This collective can be a territorial one, such as a nation, or an abstract one that does not map to a specific territory.
Program-names that may describe only the intended effects of a program but may also imply their effectiveness. These include the following:
"Foreign aid"[56] (which implies that spending money will aid foreigners, rather than harm them)
"Social security" (which implies that the program can be relied on to provide security for a society)
"Stabilisation policy" (which implies that a policy will have a stabilizing effect).
Based on opinion polling and focus groups, ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm, has advanced the position that global warming is an ineffective framing due to its identification as a leftist advocacy issue. The organization has suggested to government officials and environmental groups that alternate formulations of the issues would be more effective.[57]
In her 2009 book Frames of War, Judith Butler argues that the justification within liberal-democracies for war, and atrocities committed in the course of war, (referring specifically to the current war in Iraq and to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay) entails a framing of the (especially Muslim) 'other' as pre-modern/primitive and ultimately not human in the same way as citizens within the liberal order.[58]
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Curry, Tom. 2005. "Frist chills talk of judges deal (Page 2)." "The question in the poll was not framed as a matter of whether nominee ought to get an up-or-down vote. And that framing of the issue, Republican strategists believe, is the most advantageous one..."; MSNBC
