Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we're going to look at
another effect that was studied by Amos Tversky and
Daniel Kahneman. So for this I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical situation that
we have a rare virus outbreak and it's going to affect this 600 person village.
So what you have to do is decide one of two programs in order to confront
this situation. If you choose program A then 200 people will be saved. If you
choose program B then there's a one-third chance that everyone will be
saved and a two-thirds chance that no one will be saved. So which of these
programs would you adopt? Now half of the participants in Tversky and Kahneman's study
received the same question about this rare virus outbreak in a village of 600
people but the program options that they received were slightly different. What
they received said okay if you choose program A 400 people will die. If you
choose program B then there's a one-third chance that no one will die
and a two-thirds chance that everyone will die. Which program would you like to
choose? Now you can think about your own answer when I first framed this question.
Of course the participants didn't know that there were different versions
of these forms. You can think about which program sounds better in either case.
What Tversky and Kahneman found is that in the first situation Program A was
popular. People liked saving the 200 lives. In the second version, same
question and mathematically identical answers, right, you can probably notice
that, you know, program A is the same thing here,
program B is the same thing but in the second case program B was more popular.
So what's going on? Well, what's the difference between these framings here?
How are they, how are the programs framed in different ways? Well, the first framing
is all about people being saved and the second is
about people dying. So based on this Tversky and Kahneman suggested that when
it comes to thinking about benefits
people like to be certain. They like certainty. They'd like to know that this
is what I'm getting, this is the benefit of this program: 200 people are going to be
saved. That sounds good. But when it comes to thinking about losses, people want to
avoid losses and they're willing to take risks to avoid losses.
So we start thinking about the people that are going to die, you're thinking about
the losses and as a result you're willing to take riskier options.
That's why program B is suddenly more popular because people like, you know, I
don't like to think about 400 people dying, I will take a chance to try to
save everyone. I will risk it, I'll roll the dice and see what happens. Maybe we
can save everyone, maybe we can avoid these losses altogether. Ok so this
shows how the way that we frame choices, the way we describe them, the words that
we choose, and whether we're thinking about the benefits or the losses influences
our decision making. We see this all the time in daily life. You see
medications, for instance, focus on their benefits. They tell you that they have a
70% effectiveness rate rather than tell you that they have a 30% failure
rate. Or when you go to a gas station would you rather see a sign that there's
a cash discount if you pay with cash or that there's a credit card fee? Do we
think of this as a reward for using cash, a benefit, or do we think of it as a loss,
as a penalty for using a credit card? Maybe that will influence which
people prefer. We also see this in politics. We see that the way that
certain programs are described will influence whether people like them or
not. Do we decide that a program should be
described as helping the needy or is it providing welfare, which is a term that
has negative connotations? People want to avoid a welfare state and so they may
find that they like a program that provides assistance to the needy and
they don't like a program that's providing welfare, even though the
program may be exactly the same thing. So how we frame things matters. It
influences the choices that people make and how we frame the default options
also matters. So now we'll look at a study by Eric Johnson and Daniel
Goldstein and what Johnson and Goldstein did was they looked at organ donation
programs and they looked at whether the program was an opt-in program or an
opt-out program. So what that means is in an opt-in program you have to choose to
be a part of the organ donation program. In other words, you're not in the program
until you check that little box that says I want to join the organ donation
program. In an opt-out program it says you're in the organ donation
program. If you don't want to be in the organ donation program then you have to
check this box that says I do not want to be in the organ donation program.
So the question is, how does this influence what people choose? The
answer seems to be that if it's an opt-in program, enrollment rates are
lower. Countries that have an opt-in program tend to have lower rates of
enrollment in their organ donation programs. Countries that have an opt-out
situation where you're part of the program unless you choose not to be tend
to have much higher rates of enrollment in their organ donation programs. So
what this demonstrates is that how things are framed, how we see things as a
default option of being in this program or not, has an influence on the decision
we make. This is a decision that, you know, is tough to make. Perhaps I mean
there's, you know, philosophical and religious implications of thinking about
what's going to happen to your body after you die. I mean that might be a hard
question to try to even begin to think about and so rather than think about it
the easier choice is just let this form decide. The people who designed it, let's
just go with whatever happens and then I don't have to think about it. Then I
don't have to consider all the implications of this. Now this also means
that we're sort of sacrificing our free will a bit to the people who design
the forms, right? We tend to just go with however things are framed and we tend
not to think about you know whether or not we really want to be a part of this
program or not. Now of course you can say for yourself
"well that's how other people behave and not me. I would think about it and I
would have my choice of whether I'm in the organ donation program or not" but if
we look at the average you're probably like most people and you probably won't
actually do that. You'll tend to go with the crowd just like many other
people do. Ok, so this shows how framing really does matter and if you think
about how we design questions, how we design possible programs, whether we
focus on the benefits or the losses and that's going to influence the decisions
that people make and how risky people might want to be in making those
decisions. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and
subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!