I’m still working on Nudge but the basic concepts are in the early going. The second half of the book works through how these nudges might be implemented in various public policy issues: health care, school choice, marriage, etc. There are still many fascinating bits in the public policy discussion, and of course it’s easy there to see what’s at stake, but true to form I’m most interested in the way the conceptual underpinnings lend themselves to various kinds of analogies, especially analogies in teaching and learning. (There are powerful analogies and even outright connections here as well for my work on Paradise Lost and Milton generally, but I’ll save that for another time.)

Tonight I want to meditate just for a moment on Thaler and Sunstein’s use of a psychological concept called “framing.”  The authors explain this idea with a simple example. Credit card companies didn’t want customers to perceive that they paid more when they bought something with a credit card. Nevertheless, the government decreed that credit card companies could not force retailers to charge the same price for credit as for cash. So the credit card companies “framed” the choice this way: the credit price was a normal price, and if one paid cash one could receive a “cash discount.” At first blush, the idea seems too transparently manipulative to work. But work it does.

The credit card companies had a good intuitive understanding of what  psychologists would come to call “framing.” The idea is that choices depend,   in part, on the way in which problems are stated.

But why would so simple a technique actually work? Stated in cold prose, the manipulation is not only transparent but almost ridiculous. Who could be fooled by such tactics? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains have evolved. Our “blink” brain (to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) tends to have a fast, all-at-once, go-from-the-gut response, typically linked to emotion and fight-or-flight reactions. Its speed was critical to our survival on the savannah, and Gladwell argues persuasively that there’s often an eerie trustworthiness in these rapid responses, as they are less susceptible to certain kinds of biases in our more executive brains, what psychologists call our “reflective systems.” This reflective system is slower but more rational. (The paradox that Gladwell explores is how this very rationality can methodically and persuasively lead us into cascading errors of judgment–but that’s another story.) Thaler and Sunstein argue that people employ their “reflective system” erratically, largely because there’s so much information to process (and that’s just in everyday life–online doesn’t enter into it) and because decisions have to be made fairly quickly. The result is that even simple kinds of framing can have enormous effects. The authors explain:

Framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive  decision makers. Their Reflective System does not do the work that would  be required to check and see whether reframing the questions would produce   a different answer. One reason they don’t do this is that they  wouldn’t know what to make of the contradiction. This implies that  frames are powerful nudges, and must be selected with caution.

Here’s where my ears perked up. It’s one thing to say that people are lazy and unreflective. Even to the extent it may be true, it’s not a very inviting doorway to understanding–more like an invitation to a good upbraiding. Box the apprentice’s ears and make him work harder next time. It’s also not a very effective strategy for awakening the joy of learning, in my view (though I suppose everyone needs some of this extrinsic motivation now and then). By contrast, it’s another thing altogether to consider that people don’t think about the framing itself because “they wouldn’t know what to make of the contradiction.” To put it another way, a way I think is consonant with Thaler and Sunstein’s argument, to think about framing is not just to detect and denounce various kinds of manipulation. Rather, it’s to awaken one to the intensely provisional quality of most of understanding itself, since all understanding happens in a context, and contexts appear relevant to a large degree depending on how questions and choices are framed. To think about framing, then, is to explore (to a certain extent) the instability of the boundary between context and irrelevant detail.

If you think I’m going too meta with this train of thought, re-read Hamlet. Or talk to any theater director. I was doing just that a couple of days ago, and she said something quite wonderful about context: the prop on the stage, placed within a charged context, acquires weight–that is, meaning and significance. And it’s the placing within that context (“framing” not only as the order of choices but the placing-within-a-context) that’s the larger point Thaler and Sunstein are making, I believe. Ultimately, what they term “choice architecture” depends on the time-and-space marker of the frame. And thinking about the frame in those terms makes folks feel uncertain, a feeling they’d like to avoid.

But of course asking our students to dwell within these thoughts, uncertainties, and contradictions is at the heart of what we call education. As Jerome Bruner points out in Toward a Theory of Instruction, inquiry is born out of “conjectures and dilemmas,” while too often education is about reporting results. And insofar as students sense their job is to memorize and spit back those results stripped of the conjectures and dilemmas that lend them meaning and human significance (honestly felt with uncertainties intact), they will naturally be suspicious of any effort to get them to think about framing per se. Yet thinking about framing, and learning the art of reframing, is at the heart of the mystery of human consciousness.

I’ve thought a good deal about framing lately. Sometimes I call it “tuning,” to evoke a musical analogy. Either way, it’s a participatory meta-perspective I try to urge upon myself and my students, not so we all join Hamlet in his rest, but so we can become better choice architects ourselves.

Still thinking all this through–definitely a work in progress. And while I’m sure there are very sophisticated philosophical reflections available on this topic, and I hope to find them and welcome their insights, I have to say that Scott McCloud gets to the heart of the matter mighty well:

From "Understanding Comics," by Scott McCloud