Framed Choices and Decision Making - Essay Example

A framing effect is a form of cognitive bias that defines how people usually react to different situations with particular choices. These frame choices usually depend on whether a particular choice presents a gain or loss to the person in question. In most cases, people often tend to avoid risks especially when they are presented with a positive frame; however, people often take or seek risks when they are faced with a negative frame (Svenson and Maule, 1993). The gain and loss defined within these frames include scenarios describing outcomes that may include life saved or lost and the patient treated from a disease or not treated among other scenarios.

Many psychological experiments have determined that young adults are more like to be enticed with risk-taking when subjected to loss frame trials than older adults. For example, fresh graduates would prefer taking meat labeled lean since this represents options framed positively. In other words, they will take only such since they are considered healthy and they would like to remain healthy. On the other hand, this set of individuals will have a negative frame of failure. Young people especially graduates will never want to fail in life; thus, they will take the lowest risks that lead them to failure. Additionally, young youths will never take risks that lead to loss when it comes to entertainment for older adults. For instance, they will still take a risk of buying a moving ticket even after losing one with an equal amount (Svenson and Maule, 1993). Examining each of the above cases, the decision-making on the loss or game-framed choices is usually pegged on emotion, since each of these decision-makings is only pegged on thinking rather than certainty.