Premium
Alternatives in Framing and Decision Making
Author(s) -
Geurts Bart
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12005
Subject(s) - counterfactual thinking , framing (construction) , framing effect , logical equivalence , counterfactual conditional , psychology , social psychology , cognitive psychology , computer science , epistemology , persuasion , mathematics , philosophy , structural engineering , discrete mathematics , equivalence (formal languages) , engineering
There is a wealth of experimental data showing that the way a problem is framed may have an effect on people's choices and decisions. Based on a semantic analysis of evaluative expressions like ‘good’, I propose a new explanation of such framing effects. The key idea is that our choices and decisions reveal a counterfactual systematicity: they carry information about the choices and decisions we would have made if the facts had been otherwise. It is these counterfactual alternatives that may diverge between otherwise equivalent versions of the same task, and thus explain the effects of framing.