The Role of Cognitive Effort in Framing Effects

Framing effects are a common bias in people making risky decisions. The account for this bias is found in the loss aversion derived from Prospect Theory. Most often in the decision making literature this is the effortful processes that are claimed to reduce framing effects in risky choice tasks i.e. investing of mental effort should de-bias the decision makers. However, in goal framing studies, effortful mental processes may produce those effects. In our experiment participants were primed with either effortful or effortless modes of processing before a classical Asian Disease scenario. As hypothesised, framing effects were obtained only through effortful processing. This suggests the effortful and reflective nature of framing effects.