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The Framing Effect
The Framing Effect illustrates how the description of an objective piece of information can alter someone’s preference. Specifically, a person’s opinion can change about something even when the objective information given to them is exactly the same, just framed differently.
For instance, people who are given 2 types of ground beef to choose from, one described as 25% fat…the other as 75% lean, will almost always choose the 75% lean ground beef even though the information given to them is objectively identical.
Levin, I.P., & Gaeth, G.J. (1988). How consumers are affected by the framing of attribute information before and after consuming the product. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 374-386.
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Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)
“If something exists, it exists in some amount. If it exists in some amount, then it is capable of being measured.”
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A Continuation of the Better-Than-Average Effect
The Better-Than-Average Effect (also known as “Illusory Superiority“) is a well-known social psychology phenomenon which states that people over-estimate their abilities on tasks or areas that are important to their self-esteem. Specifically, people believe they perform better than average on these tasks. More recent research has shown a continuation of this effect into people’s notions about their intimate relationships – not only do people think they personally are above average, but they believe their intimate relationships to be above average.
Isn’t that interesting as half of marriages end in divorce these days…
Buunk, B.P. (2001). Perceived superiority of one’s own relationship and perceived prevalence of happy and unhappy relationships. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40 (4), 565–574. doi:10.1348/014466601164984.
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Early Inklings of the Big-Five
It’s difficult to believe that a study conducted in 1934 by Louis Leon Thurstone showed evidence of 5 personality factors.
“Sixty adjectives that are in common use for describing people…were given to each of 1300 raters. Each rater was asked to think of a person whom he knew well and to underline every adjective that he might use in a conversational description of that person…the…correlation…coefficients for the sixty personality traits were then analyzed by means of multiple factor methods and we found that five [italics added] factors are sufficient to account for the coefficients…
It is of considerable psychological interest to know that the whole list of sixty adjectives can be accounted for by postulating only five independent common factors…we did not foresee that the list could be accounted for by as few…factors. This fact leads us to surmise that the scientific description of personality may not be quite so hopelessly complex as it is sometimes thought to be [italics added]. (Thurstone, 1934, p. 12-14) (as cited in Goldberg, 1993).
Thurstone, L.L. (1934). The vectors of mind. Psychological Review, 41, 1-32.
Goldberg, L.R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits, American Psychologist, 48, 26-34.