Framing Effects

A “framing effect” is usually said to occur when equivalent descriptions of a decision problem lead to systematically different decisions. Framing has been a major topic of research in the psychology of judgment and decision making and is widely viewed as carrying significant implications for the “Rationality Debate” (e.g., Shafir and LeBoeuf 2002). Framing effects are commonly taken as evidence for incoherence in human decision making, and for the empirical inapplicability of the rational actor models used by economists and other social scientists. The first part of this entry presents a brief review of the empirical phenomena; the second part describes the standard normative interpretation of these empirical effects. Though the literature has not typically focused on the structure of human conversational environments, framing effects involve utterances selected by a “speaker” for a “listener”. A final section considers the possible implications of communicative factors for a normative and descriptive understanding of framing effects.