Mandel David R
Socio-Cognitive Systems Section, DRDC Toronto.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2014 Jun;143(3):1185-98. doi: 10.1037/a0034207. Epub 2013 Aug 26.
Framing effects have long been viewed as compelling evidence of irrationality in human decision making, yet that view rests on the questionable assumption that numeric quantifiers used to convey the expected values of choice options are uniformly interpreted as exact values. Two experiments show that when the exactness of such quantifiers is made explicit by the experimenter, framing effects vanish. However, when the same quantifiers are given a lower bound (at least) meaning, the typical framing effect is found. A 3rd experiment confirmed that most people spontaneously interpret the quantifiers in standard framing tests as lower bounded and that their interpretations strongly moderate the framing effect. Notably, in each experiment, a significant majority of participants made rational choices, either choosing the option that maximized expected value (i.e., lives saved) or choosing consistently across frames when the options were of equal expected value.
长期以来，框架效应一直被视为人类决策过程中不理性的有力证据，然而这一观点基于一个有问题的假设，即用于传达选择选项预期值的数字量词被一致地解释为精确值。两项实验表明，当实验者明确此类量词的精确性时，框架效应就会消失。然而，当相同的量词被赋予下限（至少）含义时，就会发现典型的框架效应。第三个实验证实，大多数人在标准框架测试中会自发地将量词解释为下限，并且他们的解释会强烈地调节框架效应。值得注意的是，在每个实验中，绝大多数参与者都做出了理性选择，要么选择使预期值（即挽救的生命）最大化的选项，要么在选项具有相同预期值时在不同框架下做出一致选择。
