Framing Tips From a Veteran That Will Change Your Messaging

How professor John List persuades with words

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Writing is painful because no one taught us how. Why is it so difficult to convey a value proposition in a few sentences?

John List, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, reveals the formula for writing quickly and persuasively. The secret is framing.

How a message is framed, List tells Tim Ferris, can be the difference between millions of dollars and nothing.

Listen to the full episode with John List and Tim Ferris on the popular behavioral economics podcast playlist

What is Framing?

“Framing” is when we take two things that are identical and describe them in different ways to change behavior. Behavioral economists like List know from psychology that consumers will evaluate the same product differently depending on how it is framed.

For example, Levin and his colleagues (1988) found that consumers enjoy ground beef that is “75% lean” over the same product presented as “25% fat.”

If the ground beef is the same in both scenarios, why do consumers prefer the one described as “lean”?

As Daniel Kahneman said, “people don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.” How the beef was framed, changed how consumers evaluated it.

In another experiment, Amos Tversky and his team (1982) found that patients are significantly more likely to choose surgery when doctors describe the procedure as having a “90% survival rate” versus a “10% death rate.”

In line with Levin’s ground beef experiment, the surgery stayed constant but describing it in terms of survival rate influenced patients to choose it.

How John List Applies Framing

The Dominican Republic loses millions of dollars a year from tax evasion. Despite receiving reminder letters from the government to pay taxes, citizens and businesses choose to break the law.

Running out of ideas, the DR turned to John List and his colleagues for help. Tax evasion then decreased by millions of dollars.

How did List and his team do it? They changed how the reminder letters were framed. They added one sentence that changed how citizens perceived the gravity of their law-breaking behavior.

One of these two sentences was added to the existing tax letters:

• Treatment 1: “Just a reminder that if you don’t pay your taxes, you might have to serve jail time.” (45% increase)
• Treatment 2: “Just to remind you, if you don’t pay your taxes, we can make your name public and let the world know that you haven’t paid your taxes.” (19% increase)

Treatment 1 increased tax collection in dollars by 45% and treatment 2 by 19%.

Conclusion

How a message is framed can completely change the behavior of the one reading it. As List demonstrated, adding one sentence can be enough.

Instead of thinking, “what is my value proposition”, think “how should my value proposition be described?”

References

Holz, J. E., List, J. A., Zentner, A., Cardoza, M., & Zentner, J. (2020). The $100 million nudge: Increasing tax compliance of businesses and the self-employed using a natural field experiment (No. w27666). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Levin, I. P., & Gaeth, G. J. (1988). How consumers are affected by the framing of attribute information before and after consuming the product. Journal of consumer research, 15(3), 374–378.

Lewis, M. (2016). The undoing project: A friendship that changed the world. Penguin UK.

McNeil, B. J., Pauker, S. G., Sox Jr, H. C., & Tversky, A. (1982). On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. New England journal of medicine, 306(21), 1259–1262.