Cognitive Psychology · Simplified
Decision Framing Laboratory
Four decisions, made one at a time. Two of them are the same decision as two of the others.
Decision 1 of 4
A shipment at risk
Which do you choose?
How this works. Nothing is explained until all four decisions are made, because knowing what is being looked at would change what you do. There are no right answers here and nothing is scored. Answer as you actually would.
What you did
The same two decisions, twice each
Key idea: Each pair contained exactly the same numbers. Saving two hundred crates out of six hundred and losing four hundred out of six hundred are the same outcome, and a one-in-three chance of saving all of them is a two-in-three chance of losing all of them. Nothing about the world changed between the two versions. What changed was where the description put the starting point: as something gained from nothing, or as something lost from everything. People tend to take the certain option when the wording is about what is saved, and to gamble when it is about what is lost, which means the description is doing work that the outcomes are not. If a preference can be reversed by rewording, it is not simply a preference about outcomes.
Four decisions from one person is a demonstration, not a measurement: the effect is a tendency across groups, and any individual can be perfectly consistent without that being surprising. Being consistent is not a sign of superior reasoning, and switching is not an error in any simple sense, because there is no rule of rationality that says two descriptions of the same outcome must feel the same. What the finding shows is narrower and more useful: a description choice that looks neutral is not, and anyone writing one, in a policy brief, a consent form or a news report, is making a choice whether they intend to or not.
The longer version adds a manipulation of how certain the certain option is, a shift of the reference point itself, and further scenarios outside the stock-loss setting. It is at Decision Framing Laboratory in the main collection.