City Research Online

Abstract

The risky choice framing effect disclosed that presenting data in a loss scenario lead decision-makers towards risky choices. Conversely, a gain scenario prevents them from taking a risk. Framing effect robustness has been widely confirmed by psychological literature. However, the framing of medical treatments, based on McNeil et al. (1982) paradigm, raised both methodological doubts and contrasting evidence. Our research aimed to investigate the presence and the nature of the framing effect in the McNeil et al. (1982) paradigm. In particular, we thought that the obtained switch of preferences across frames was due to a misleading formulation of the data given in a negative cumulative frequency format. We conducted three studies: (1) we replicated McNeil et al.’s (1982) original study (N=150) with medicine (n=50), statistics (n=50) and lay (n=50) students; (2) we tested (N=180) our hypothesis by comparing a cumulative frequency format with an alternative version, namely a linear progression one; (3) we compared (N=430) the effect of different formats (cumulative frequency, linear progression and interval frequency) on choices. Our results showed that, while the framing effect is present when employing a cumulative frequency format, it disappears when using a linear progression one. Moreover, our results show that decision-makers better understand information when given in a linear progression and an interval frequency format. In the current paper, we argue that the way in which a problem is formulated plays a relevant role in the representation of the decisional task and the decision-making.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The authors license this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Copyright © The Authors [2021] This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	medical framing effect, reverse pattern of choice, understanding numerical information, pragmatic approach
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HA Statistics R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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