{"id":3226,"date":"2017-04-17T22:31:38","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T02:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=3226"},"modified":"2017-09-06T13:48:14","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T17:48:14","slug":"president-vs-bilingualism-decision-making-under-the-framing-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2017\/04\/17\/president-vs-bilingualism-decision-making-under-the-framing-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Presidential election vs bilingualism: how does the framing effect impact our decision-making"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you a logical thinker?<\/p>\n

If you are a human being with a healthy dose of confidence, your answer is most likely \u201cSure, I use logic most of the time.\u201d Or, if you identify with the virtue of modesty, you would probably say, \u201cNo guarantees, but I make my best effort.\u201d If either of the above describes you, at one point or another the election of the 45th<\/sup> U.S. president was probably among the biggest mysteries for you. Hillary Clinton sure has had her fair share\u00a0of scandals and hypocrisy, but so do many seasoned politicians; Donald Trump, on the other hand, had no political experience, more than a handful racist, sexist, and xenophobic statements, and multiple alleged sexual assaults. Furthermore, because of his background, Donald Trump is also under a lot of suspicion of abusing power for personal gains. How on earth did Donald Trump turn out so much more appealing in a presidential election?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s think about this man named Donald Trump. One of the first things that come to mind, apart from his surrealistic hairstyle and iconic orange tan, is his famous slogan \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d Accompanying that is his series of warnings against Mexicans, Muslims, and Chinese etc. for taking away jobs, security, and prosperity from the once<\/em> great country. Regardless of how much truth you might find in these statements, you have remembered them well. Conversely, Hillary Clinton was the \u201csafe choice,\u201d but other than that her campaign\u00a0was much less memorable than that of Donald Trump. This, my friend, is where psychology comes into play. Putting personal charisma aside, Donald Trump is a master at psychological manipulation, which is in fact a very important skill for politicians. Throughout his campaign he focused heavily on the perceived loss America has experienced during the past decade while selectively overlooking what Obama\u2019s presidency has accomplished. Alarmed voters were thus much more easily convinced to take their chance by putting their faith in the politically inexperienced candidate in hopes of cutting the perceived losses.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The accurate understanding of a common cognitive bias helped Donald Trump turn one of his biggest disadvantages into an advantage. This bias, named the\u00a0framing effect<\/strong>, illustrates how presenting the exact same choice in different lights can influence people\u2019s decisions. When focusing on perceived losses, people are generally more inclined to take risks in decision-making compared to when the focus is on perceived gains. For example, many\u00a0stores\u00a0utilize the framing effect by\u00a0displaying\u00a0countdowns of their product\u00a0promotions. Anxious consumers who fear the loss of an opportunity to save money will likely fall for the marketing strategy and engage in irrational shopping. The same result\u00a0would not be achieved if the stores instead show how many days the promotions have\u00a0lasted. Psychologists have tested this phenomenon on everyday decisions and discovered that the bigger the perceived difference, the stronger people\u2019s decisions are impacted by the framing effect (Sun & Mellers, 2016).<\/p>\n

At this point, you are probably still\u00a0skeptical of whether this \u201cframing effect\u201d is a real thing. You probably ask yourself: \u201cCan\u2019t it be the mere difference in wording that leads people to understand the choices in different\u00a0ways?\u201d Again, psychologists have the answer for you. In order to eliminate\u00a0the individual difference in comprehension,\u00a0Chick\u00a0et al.\u00a0(2016) specifically trained participants to read ambiguously worded\u00a0material, and assessed their skills afterwards to ensure their have learned to decipher\u00a0ambiguous wording using the exact same method. The following decision making task demonstrated that\u00a0the framing effect was still evident in their decision-making. Now this evidence should be enough to convince you that the framing effect is indeed a cognitive phenomenon rather than merely individual differences in reading and comprehension skills.<\/p>\n

So the new question is: what factors influence our decisions when dealing with different frames? The intuitive answer would be emotions. After all, it sounds pretty\u00a0reasonable that the perception of a potential loss can cause us distress and push us to make irrational decisions. But how do we test a process that only exists in people\u2019s heads? Once more, psychologists have found a way through language. It has been noticed that although most people are quite susceptible to the framing effect, when they are asked to make decisions in a language other than their mother tongue, the effect is significantly reduced (Oganian, Korn, & Heekeren, 2016). The emotion theory would attribute this phenomenon to the difference in emotional distances: when you are using your mother tongue, you are more emotionally related to the decision thus more vulnerable to the framing effect, whereas decision making in a foreign language reduces your emotional attachment and therefore helps you to think more logically.<\/p>\n

But is it true?<\/p>\n

Our omnipotent psychologists will give you a deeper peek into how our minds work\u00a0through yet another experiment. While it stands\u00a0true that people show reduced framing effect when switching from mother tongue to a foreign language, Oganian et al. discovered that the exact same phenomenon is also evident\u00a0when people switch from a second language back to their mother tongue. This finding is sufficient to disprove the “emotional attachment” view. What this language-switch effect implies, instead, is that it is actually\u00a0the\u00a0switch itself that’s influencing people’s decision-making. Switching\u00a0between languages requires more attention than using either language alone, therefore people must attribute\u00a0more cognitive resource to the task. This reallocation of attention enhances cognitive control \u2013 in other words, puts\u00a0you in greater charge\u00a0of your\u00a0decision-making process rather than just letting it float through the\u00a0biased\u00a0mind\u00a0\u2013 which\u00a0in turn reduces the impact of the framing effect.<\/p>\n

Of course, this cognitive bias alone is in no way the full account of President Trump\u2019s victory. However,\u00a0if you read some foreign reports on the presidential election campaigns and ended up deciding\u00a0to vote against Donald Trump, it might not be just the input from fresh\u00a0perspectives, but also the freeing from\u00a0the framing effect that contributed to you making such a decision.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Chick, C. F., Reyna, V. F., & Corbin, J. C. (2016). Framing effects are robust to linguistic disambiguation: A critical test of contemporary theory. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, And Cognition, 42(2), 238-256. doi:10.1037\/xlm0000158<\/p>\n

Oganian, Y., Korn, C. W., & Heekeren, H. R. (2016). Language switching\u2014but not foreign language use per se\u2014reduces the framing effect. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, And Cognition, 42(1), 140-148. doi:10.1037\/xlm0000161<\/p>\n

Sun, Y., & Mellers, B. (2016). Trade-upgrade framing effects: Trades are losses, but upgrades are improvements. Judgment And Decision Making, 11(6), 582-588.<\/p>\n

Images:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.mathsthoughtbook.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/unleash-creativity-e1406073565218.jpg<\/p>\n

http:\/\/i2.cdn.cnn.com\/cnnnext\/dam\/assets\/150806212843-07-fox-debate-trump-0806-super-169.jpg<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.autismafter16.com\/sites\/default\/files\/imagecache\/article_large\/article-images\/glass%20half%20empty.jpg<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.specialistlanguagecourses.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Bilingualism.jpg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you a logical thinker? If you are a human being with a healthy dose of confidence, your answer is most likely \u201cSure, I use logic most of the time.\u201d Or, if you identify with the virtue of modesty, you would probably say, \u201cNo guarantees, but I make my best effort.\u201d If either of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6374,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[266316,130416,80217],"tags":[885],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6374"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3226"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3718,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226\/revisions\/3718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}