Framing Effects and Fuzzy Traces: ‘Some’ Observations

Framing effects occur when people respond differently to the same information, just because it is conveyed in different words. For example, in the classic ‘Disease Problem’ introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people’s choices between alternative interventions depend on whether these are described positively, in terms of the number of people who will be saved, or negatively in terms of the corresponding number who will die. In this paper, I discuss an account of framing effects based on ‘fuzzy-trace theory’. The central claim of this account is that people represent the numbers in framing problems in a ‘gist-like’ way, as ‘some’; and that this creates a categorical contrast between ‘some’ people being saved (or dying) and ‘no’ people being saved (or dying). I argue that fuzzy-trace theory’s gist-like representation, ‘some’, must have the semantics of ‘some and possibly all’, not ‘some but not all’. I show how this commits fuzzy-trace theory to a modest version of a rival ‘lower bounding hypothesis’, according to which lower-bounded interpretations of quantities contribute to framing effects by rendering the alternative descriptions extensionally inequivalent. As a result, fuzzy-trace theory is incoherent as it stands. Making sense of it requires dropping, or refining, the claim that decision-makers perceive alternatively framed options as extensionally equivalent; and the related claim that framing effects are irrational. I end by suggesting that, whereas the modest lower bounding hypothesis is well supported, there is currently less evidence for the core element of the fuzzy trace account.

Judgment and Decision Making

Everyday life is comprised of a series of decisions, from choosing what to wear to deciding what major to declare in college and whom to share a life with. Modern era economic theories were first brought into psychology in the 1950s and 1960s by Ward Edwards and Herbert Simon. Simon suggested that individuals do not always choose the best alternative among the options because they are bounded by cognitive limitations (e.g., memory). People who choose the good-enough option “satisfice” rather than optimize, because they are bounded by their limited time, knowledge, and computational capacity. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were among those who took the next step by demonstrating that individuals are not only limited but are inconsistent in their preferences, and hence irrational. Describing a series of biases and fallacies, they elaborated intuitive strategies (i.e., heuristics) that people tend to use when faced with difficult questions (e.g., “What proportion of long-distance relationships break up within a year?”) by answering based on simpler, similar questions (e.g., “Do instances of swift breakups of long-distance relationships come readily to mind?”). More recently, the emotion-versus-reason debate has been incorporated into the field as an approach to how judgments can be governed by two fundamentally different processes, such as intuition (or affect) and reasoning (or deliberation). A series of dual-process approaches by Seymour Epstein, George Lowenstein, Elke Weber, Paul Slovic, and Ellen Peters, among others, attempt to explain how a decision based on emotional and/or impulsive judgments (i.e., system 1) should be distinguished from those that are based on a slow process that is governed by rules of reasoning (i.e., system 2). Valerie Reyna and Charles Brainerd and other scholars take a different approach to dual processes and propose a theory—fuzzy-trace theory—that incorporates many of the prior theoretical elements but also introduces the novel concept of gist mental representations of information (i.e., essential meaning) shaped by culture and experience. Adding to processes of emotion or reward sensitivity and reasoning or deliberation, fuzzy-trace theory characterizes gist as insightful intuition (as opposed to crude system 1 intuition) and contrasts it with verbatim or precise processing that does not consist of meaningful interpretation. Some of these new perspectives explain classic paradoxes and predict new effects that allow us to better understand human judgment and decision making. More recent contributions to the field include research in neuroscience, in particular from neuroeconomics.

Non-native Readers Are More Sensitive to Changes in Surface Linguistic Information than Native Readers*

In the present study we challenge the generally accepted view based primarily on L1 data that surface linguistic information decays rapidly during reading and that only propositional information is retained in memory. In two eye-tracking experiments, we show that both L1 and L2 adult readers retain verbatim information of a text. In particular, the reading behaviour of L2 German learners revealed that they were sensitive to both lexical (synonyms) and syntactic (active/passive alternation) substitutions during a second reading of the texts, while L1 exhibited only reduced sensitivity to the lexical substitutions. The results deliver an important piece of evidence that complies with several current processing (e.g., Shallow Structure Hypothesis), acquisition (Declarative/Procedural Model) and cognitive (e.g., Fuzzy Trace Theory) approaches and adds a new dimension to their empirical and theoretical basis.

The Influence of Verbatim Versus Gist Formatting on Younger and Older Adults’ Information Acquisition

It is well-established that pre-decisional information seeking decreases with age (Mata & Nunes, 2010). However, it is still unknown whether age differences in information acquisition are influenced by the type of information provided. Fuzzy-trace theory suggests that decision makers prefer gist-based over verbatim-based processing, and that this preference increases across the lifespan. Therefore, we hypothesized that age differences arise when presenting participants with verbatim details (such as exact numbers) but not gist information (such as ”extremely poor” or “good”). In a lab-based experiment, 68 younger adults and 66 older adults completed a gist-based and a verbatim-based search task before making health insurance choices. Younger and older adults reviewed similar amounts of information in either condition. In line with Fuzzy-trace theory, however, older adults sought more information when presented with gist rather than verbatim information. The role of age-associated covariates and implications for decision-making will be discussed.