Framing
The selection of some aspects of a situation and not others, so that the audience sees it as a particular kind of problem with a particular kind of solution. A frame is not a lie; it is a choice about what is in the picture, and it is the most common instrument of persuasion in daily use.
Erving Goffman gave the term its modern sense in 1974, describing the frames through which people make sense of what is happening around them, and Robert Entman's 1993 definition is the one most cited: to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient, so as to promote a particular definition, interpretation, evaluation, or remedy. The experimental evidence came from Kahneman and Tversky, whose subjects chose differently between identical medical outcomes described as lives saved and as lives lost.
The same event can be framed as a tax cut or a revenue loss, a security measure or a surveillance program, an estate tax or a death tax. None of the pairs involves a false statement. The frame does its work before any statement is evaluated, by settling what the thing is.
On this site, framing is a family rather than a technique, because it is done in so many ways: by Cherry Picking the facts in the picture, by Loaded Language in naming them, by False Dilemma in limiting the options, by Agenda Setting in deciding what is discussed at all, and by Frame Control in holding the frame once set. The defense is to name the frame and try another, which is harder than it sounds.
Sources
- Entman, Robert M. "Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm." Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x
- Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
- Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453–458. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7455683