Читать книгу Sustainable Management for Managers and Engineers - Группа авторов - Страница 32

When deciding on options, the choice architecture frames the features an individual should pay attention to, or make salient, and those an individual should disregard. This is another form of simplification that was identified by Kahneman and Tversky [KAH 79] as the isolation effect. According to this, in order to simplify alternatives, people often ignore the characteristics that the alternatives share and decide by comparing the components that differentiate them. This form of choice can produce inconsistent preferences because a pair of possibilities can be decomposed into common or different characteristics in many ways, and different decompositions may lead to different preferences; therefore, framing is critical in driving preference.

Tversky and Kahneman [TVE 86] present a paradigmatic example of how framing and salience may influence decision-making. In an experiment³, patients with lung cancer were presented with two different frames of the same treatment options. In one group, patients received a “survival frame” and were told that through surgical treatment, of 100 people, 90 individuals who had the surgery lived through the post-operative period, 68 were alive at the end of the first year, and 34 were alive at the end of five years; alternatively, through radiation therapy, of 100 people, 77 were alive at the end of one year and 22 were alive at the end of five years. Patients in the second group received the same figures in a “mortality frame” and were told that through surgical treatment, of 100 people, 10 died (instead of saying that 90 were alive) during surgery or within the post-operative period, 32 died by the end of the first year and 66 died by the end of five years; however, through radiation therapy, of 100 people, none died during treatment, 23 died by the end of one year, and 78 died by the end of five years. The seemingly inconsequential difference in the presentation of the procedures produced a marked effect. The preference for radiation therapy was 18% in the survival frame and 44% in the mortality frame. The same effect was also identified with physicians and business students. The terminology is critical: while the survival frame is centered in hope, the mortality frame is centered in fear. People in both cases receive the same information and should logically show the same preferences, despite the wording. This violates the principle of invariance because different representations of the same choice problem produced different preferences and it can easily be used in nudging interventions by simply choosing the wording carefully.