In 1996, Doug Keene and Paul Begala explored the idea of perceptual framing in the mind, demonstrating how potential jurors will apply a private storyline from a seemingly unrelated frame (declaring their ideas of the cause of homelessness) to a legal case later on. When asked, subjects drew out storylines focused either on circumstances and situation, or character and choices to explain their private stories about the source of homelessness. Working along these personal narrative lines, the sur-veyors showed which side of a case against a corporate defendant the authors of which homeless storyline were likely to favor.8 Bear in mind, nobody was asked, “Because you see homelessness as a moral failing, will you favor the corporate defendant in this civil case?” Had they all been asked such a direct question, the results would have been almost universal “no” answers. Contact business attorney orange county if you face any business legal issues.
What this study took advantage of, and what is frequently missed, is that this private mental framing process is not a one-way street with only one stop along the way. Inviting a decision maker to pull out his or her “homelessness” frame can prime a related response for the next event; using the same frame of mind jumping from homelessness, to guessing sources of a crime, to presuming another’s political affiliations, to intuiting the “real” reason for an injured plaintiff’s complaint, to projecting someone’s ultimate deliverance or damnation. Pavlov called this inner talent for taking one rehearsed response and linking it to another situational cue, then to another, translation.
The influence of framing is left completely unaccounted for when lawyers or consultants discuss attitudes, ideas and beliefs with focus groups, potential jury panels or interviewing jurors after trials. TTrere, far too often, direct questions about this most powerful level of indirect influence are relied on to try and reveal the path persuasion may take, or already has taken, for a given decision maker.
In this way, it appears our own inner storylines can betray our best efforts to influence others. While we all know deci-sion making is not a consciously-driven experience, we still want conscious play- by-play accounts when we ask for them. When you ask someone else what causes homelessness, a storyline is invoked for them and maybe revealed aloud, indi-rectly, in the bits of spoken narrative along that unconsciously given line.
But, when we are asked why some-one decides one way or another, we’ve all rehearsed a storyline that suggests one, and only one, attitude, idea or belief “caused” that decision to be made.
Furthermore, our storyline also presumes that singular attitude, idea or belief came across in the decision maker’s head in one grammatical sentence just waiting for us to come along and demand to hear it quoted aloud by a part of the brain that has virtually no access to the decision process at all: the conscious part.
