Page 149 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 131

give up $20 than it is pleasurable to gain $20. Your advisors framed
the first policy decision so that Program B looked like the bigger
loss; in the second version, your advisors framed it so that Program
A looked like a sure loss. How the question is framed is of enormous
importance.
But this is just an imaginary event. It is a hypothetical situation.
Surely such a simple rewording of a request cannot influence real be-
havior, right?. Don’t bet on it. In an experiment I did in collabora-
tion with two of my students, Marti Gonzales and Mark Costanzo,
we showed that framing can play a major role in determining
whether people are willing to commit several hundred dollars to in-
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sulate their homes to conserve energy. In one condition, after ex-
amining each home, energy experts gave each homeowner a detailed,
individualized description of how much money they could save each
year on heating bills. In the other condition, auditors were trained to
frame the description in terms of loss; that is, they provided the same
information but informed the homeowners that they were losing
money every day—that it was akin to throwing money out the win-
dow. Homeowners in the “loss” condition were twice as likely to in-
vest the money to insulate their homes as those in the “save”
condition.
Let’s look at the prevention of breast cancer. Breast cancer poses a
serious health threat for many women. Fortunately, early detection and
diagnosis of breast cancer can greatly improve a woman’s chances of
surviving the disease. However, one of the best methods for detecting
breast cancer, a monthly breast self-examination, is not performed reg-
ularly by the vast majority of women. Beth Meyerowitz and Shelly
Chaiken developed and distributed three pamphlets designed to in-
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crease routine breast self-examination by women. One pamphlet
contained only information concerning the need to perform self-ex-
aminations and how to do them. The second pamphlet contained this
information plus arguments emphasizing the positive consequences of
self-examination (e.g., women who perform such examinations have
an increased chance of finding a tumor at the early, treatable stage).The
third pamphlet stressed the negative consequences of failing to per-
form a self-examination (e.g., women who do not perform such exam-
inations have a decreased chance of finding the tumor at the early,
treatable stage). Meyerowitz and Chaiken found that, 4 months after
reading the pamphlet, only those women who received the pamphlet