What is Framing?

And how does it affect my life?

Image created by Joshua Clements

Have you ever thought about how the words you use to describe an event or a situation in your life may determine the outcome or impact your reality?

Here’s an example from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Italy won; France lost.”

Kahneman asked, “Do those statements have the same meaning? The answer depends entirely on what you mean by meaning?”

From a purely logical stance, the statements mean the same thing. “For the purpose of logical reasoning, the two descriptions of the outcome of the match are interchangeable because they designate the same state of the world. As philosophers say, their truth conditions are identical: if one of the statements is true, then the other is true as well,” Kahneman wrote.

But the average person doesn’t want to get tied up with logical reasoning. According to Kahneman’s book, they also base many of their thoughts on the faster, more emotional state of mind.

He wrote, “There is another sense of meaning, in which ‘Italy won’ and ‘France lost’ do not have the same meaning at all… The two sentences evoke markedly different associations. ‘Italy won’ evokes thoughts of the Italian team and what it did to win. ‘France lost’ evokes thoughts of the French team and what it did that caused it to lose.”