In Freakonomics, Steven Levit tells a story of a day care center in Israel that was tired of parents being late to pick up their kids. So, they turned to a market solution: they charged a penalty fee if you were late to pick up your kids.
But rather than lowering the number of late parents, the number actually shot up. Why? Because before there was a social contract that said, “If you are late to pick up your children, you are causing others inconvenience and you are bad.” But if there is a fee, there is now a market contract that says, “It costs you $5 an hour to park your kids here.”
Parents with late kids were no longer bad, they were just taking advantage of a great new service by the day care. That was not the intent of the day care, they wanted less kids after 5 pm. Now they had more. Why?
This is The Framing Effect in action. The Framing Effect says that the wording or the context in which options are presented directly impact (or frame) our selections. In this case, leaving your kids at day care late moved from a social frame to a transactional or economic frame. Parents now judged base on a cost-benefit analysis (Is it worth $5 to run this errand and know my kids are safe?) The fine was seen as a fee.
When we make decisions, the Framing Effect is good in some ways (can provide context, background, etc.) but bad in other ways (today’s context may not be tomorrow’s). Decisions that are made today are therefore at risk of being overly framed by current contexts or biases and not looking out into the future or too far into the past.
Frames themselves are the objects that make up our world view. They can be experiential (social, personal, economic, political, etc) and they can be emotional (based on past experiences, joys, traumas, hopes, fears, etc). If you have been in a situation where a large mean dog attacked you, your frame may from that point on include a fear of large dogs – even if they are friendly.
With this deeper understanding, we can see that frames can be imposed by other people, but also by our own experiences. We use frames to filter our environment, to quickly interpret context, and to formulate appropriate responses.
When we have a team in an office setting making decisions, we are dealing with framing from many angles. First, the information they are receiving may have been presented to them in a framed way. Like the difference in these two sentences:
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Work bogs down at Charlie’s desk.
as opposed to
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Work bogs down when it reaches the QA stage.
Charlie is the QA guy. On the surface, both of these sentences say the same thing – work is bogging down when it reaches QA / Charlie. But when we read the first sentence, we are reading the problem as Charlie. When we read the second sentence, the problem is workflow at the QA stage which involves Charlie, but may not necessarily be due to Charlie.
The Frame (Charlie v QA) (personal v functional) has a direct impact on how people initially process the problem and begin to devise solutions.
Photo by Katie Fergos
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