Framing: Dead or Alive?
By admin in ABC of Influence | 0 comments
Framing is such a powerful influence tactic, I want to dig a little deeper again here.
It really doesn’t matter how reasonable or educated you are. Medical doctors are probably some of the best-educated specialists in their field, yet even their decision making processes can be influenced by framing.
Scientific Study about Framing
20 years ago (1987) the New England Journal of Medicine published a study called “On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies”.
(You just gotta love these scientists for coming up with names like that…)
So what was the study about?
It was about cancer patients and what would be the best way to treat their cancer.
What the researches did was asking questions. They basically asked one group of medical specialists (Group A):
“How should lung cancer patients be treated? Radiation therapy or surgery? And by the way, patients who get surgery have a 65% chance of surviving after one year.”
About 75% responded surgery was the best choice.
Then they asked another group of medical specialists (Group B) the same question, and presented the same facts. Only, the framed the facts a little different:
“”How should lung cancer patients be treated? Radiation therapy or surgery? And by the way, patients who get surgery have a 35% chance of dying after one year.”
58% responded surgery was the best choice.
75% vs. 58%! For a major medical decision (we’re talking dead or alive her). Medical professionals after years of study and experience.
That’s intense, isn’t it?
In the next post on framing, I’m gonna let you in on a powerful framing exercise and lay out a nice step-by-step process to follow.
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