Welcome to the second panel of today's conference.

My name is Bo Feng, I'm an associate professor in the Department

of Communications at UC Davis, and I'll be the moderator for this panel.

The theme of this panel is how perception changes reality.

I think this is a, a great continuation and

of complementation of the earlier panel, which looks at how perception of

the world, how perception of reality, including social events,

organizations and ethnic groups is shaped by different things.

In this panel, we're going to hear from, three wonderful panelists

talking about their research into the other side of the cycle of relationship

between perception and reality, how perception shapes reality,

shapes people's cognitions, behaviors, and so so on.

So we're going to have the presenters, panelists present first, and after that we

will open up the floor to questions from the audience and coming from the audience.

So, let me first introduce our first panelist, Dr. Alison Ledgerwood.

Dr. Ledgerwood is an associate professor of psychology at the University of

California Davis and also, a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Dr. Ledgerwood's research focuses on people's use of social psychological

controls to either immerse themselves in the current context or to transcend it.

She also studies symbols as tools that people use to communicate

group identity across time, space, and disparate individuals.

The title of her talk today is sticky frames,

why negatives lodge in the mind and what to do about it.

So without further ado,

let's welcome Dr. Alison Ledgerwood.

[APPLAUSE] >> Hi.

Let's see.

So because I'm being recorded, I can't pace, I have to stand next to that.

Okay, we'll see how that goes.

Remind me if I just start wandering over, to come back.

So I thought I would talk today about a, oh I can't, I cannot pace at all.

I'm just going to stand here calmly like I'm, like I'm fine with that.

[LAUGH] >> About a topic that,

that has been hinted on hinted at in some of the morning sessions.

So Amber hinted at negative news stories sticking more than positive ones.

We had some hints from Kim about what

negative behaviors might tend to stick to organizational identities.

Brad asked Christina a question about stereotypes sticking to social groups

[SOUND] and so I'm going to be talking a bit about

why that might happen in a very broad and general way and

more broadly, I'm going to be talking about the question of how do people think.

I'm kind of obsessed with this question.

I'm a social psychologist, which basically means I'm a professional people watcher.

So, this is what I do, I try to figure out how do humans think and

how could we maybe think better and

here's something I noticed a few years ago about how I seem to think.

Here's a typical week in my life,

which often seems to revolve entirely around publishing papers.

So here I am, that's me, just go with it.

I'm going along at baseline and let's say a paper gets accepted, I get this rush,

this blip of happiness, and then I'm back to baseline by about lunchtime.

[LAUGH] A few days later, a paper might get rejected, and that feels awful.

My world is crumbling, and so I wait for that blip to end but somehow,

I just can't stop thinking about it.

[LAUGH] Here's the kicker, though.

Even if another paper gets accepted the next day, well, that's nice but

somehow I just can't stop thinking about that stupid rejection.

So what is going on here?

Why does a failure often seem to stick in our minds, so much longer than a success?

Well, together, with my colleague Amber Boidstan who you heard from

earlier this morning, I started thinking about this question, a few years ago.

This question of do our minds get stuck on the negatives?

Now we all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things.

So the same proverbial glass, for instance, can be seen as half full or

half empty and there's quite a bit of research across the social sciences now

showing that the way you describe the glass to people matters quite a lot

in shaping how they feel about it.

So if you describe the glass as half full, this is called a gain frame because you're

focusing people on what's good, they tend to like it.

If you describe the same exact glass as half empty, a loss frame, well,

now people don't like it.

So here's an example of a kind of prototypical experiment that would look

at this question, that would test this question.

In this particular study,

participants were asked to evaluate a work team based on its past performance and

the participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions.

In one condition, one group of participants

read that 30 out of 50 of the team's past projects had been successful.

In the other group, the other condition, the participants read

that 20 out of 50 of the team's past projects had been unsuccessful.

So mathematically, objectively, the reality is exactly the same here, right?

It's just that some of the participants have had their attention focused on

the part of the glass that's full, and the other participants have had their

attention focused on the part of the glass that's empty.

Then they're asked, how good is this work team?

And what you can see is that participants evaluated the work team much more

positively when it's record had been described in terms of gains,

the success rate, compared to when it's record had been described in terms of

losses, the failure rate.

All right, so this kind of effect has been studied across economics,

psychology, political science, marketing, a whole range of different disciplines in

the social sciences and together, these studies basically converge on the core

idea that what people think about something, what they do,

depends on how information is currently described or framed.

So you can really think of the key message of this literature, this body of research,

as being about the power of the current context to shape people's perceptions and

behavior but because it focuses on the current context,

this literature, one assumption, or implication of this literature,

seems to be that people are just happy when they see a gain frame and

sad when they see a loss frame, right?

That it's easy to bounce from one to the other but

that assumption hasn't actually ever been tested.

So, we wanted to know what actually happens when you switch back and forth.

This seems like an important question to ask, right.

In the real world after all,

people don't just encounter a single frame, like they do in the lab.

Instead, information is often repeatedly framed and

then reframed before people act on it.

So you might be talking to your doctor and hear him or

her describe a medical procedure, in terms of its success rate but

then go to get a second opinion or read an article online that talks about that same

procedure in terms of its failure rate.

Or you might be browsing the morning headlines and

see an article that talks about a program or policy in terms of the number of

workers who have lost their jobs and then see a different article that talks about

that policy in terms of the number of workers' jobs that have been saved.

So we wanted to know what happens in this kind of situation.

Can people really just switch back and forth or

do they get stuck in one way of thinking about it?

Does one of these frames, one of these mental labels,

tend to stick more in the mind?

And there's reason to think that at least some kinds of mental labels might be

cognitively or mentally sticky in this way.

That once we've thought about something in a particular way, that way of thinking

about it might tend to lodge in our heads and resist our attempts to change it.

There's a classic paradigm in psychology used to study creativity,

called the Duncker candle problem, that illustrates this idea nicely.

So if you're in a study that uses this paradigm, you walk into a room and you

see on the table in front of you a candle, a box of tacks, and some matches, and your

mission should you choose to accept it is to figure out how to light the candle and

then fix it to the wall in such a way that no wax drops onto the table below.

Any ideas for how to solve it?

It's kind of hard.

Here's the funniest solution I've seen to this problem.

[LAUGH] And here's the correct solution.

Notice though why it's so hard to solve, participants struggle with this a lot.

It takes them a long time and often they don't get it.

The reason it's so hard for

us to figure out the correct answer here is that once you've conceptualized that

box as a box, it's really hard to re-conceptualize it as a shelf.

That box label sticks in your head and it's very hard to change it.

So we thought maybe a similar thing would happen with gain and loss frames.

Now if frames can be cognitively, mentally sticky in this way

it makes sense to predict that loss frames would be especially sticky.

And that's because there's a general and presumably very adaptive human tendency to

prioritize or focus on potential negatives and safety.

The logic here, evolutionarily speaking,

is that if you're considering a visit to the prehistoric pond, and

you can think of this as getting a drink or as potentially aggravating a tiger it's

useful, it's functional, it's adaptive for the tiger conceptualization to stick.

Once you've thought about it,

you don't want to forget about the tiger in your excitement over the possibility

of getting a drink.

So, we thought that lost frames the, when we conceptualize something as a potential

loss that way of thinking about it might tend to stick in our heads, and

linger there, even in the face of a potential gain frame.

To put that idea a bit more formally, we reason that loss frames might be stickier

than gain frames in shaping people's thinking.

In particular, we predicted that the effects of a loss frame might linger

longer than those of a gain frame, when information is subsequently reframed, and

that this asymmetry might arise because it's more difficult for

people to mentally convert a loss-framed concept into a gain-framed concept

than to move in the opposite direction to re-conceptualize a gain as a loss.

All right, so one of the first experiments that we conducted to test this idea

we wanted to look at how switching from one frame to another would influence,

how people feel about an issue?

In this case, a surgical procedure.

So here's what we did.

We had participants read passage that looked like this.

We said imagine that a national panel is evaluating a recently developed surgical

procedure that involves new robotic technology.

A three year study evaluating the procedure has just concluded.

And then we randomly assigned participants to one of two conditions.

And the gain frame first condition participants read that based on the data

experts agree that the survival rate for the surgical procedure is 70%.

In the loss frame first condition they read instead that the mortality rate for

the surgical procedure is 30%.

Okay, so 70% of the glass is full or 30% of the glass is empty.

And we've carefully designed this material so

that the only difference between the two conditions

is this subtle change in the description or the way that the issue is framed.

We ask participants to evaluate the procedure, how much they liked it?

By moving some sliders along a series of unmarked scales like this one.

And we can pause here for a moment because we know from decades of framing research

exactly what should happen at time one after this initial first frame.

And what should happen is people should like the procedure when it's described in

terms of gains much more than when it's described in terms of losses.

In fact, that's exactly what we see.

So these are our data.

And people, when the procedure was described using a gain frame,

when it's described in terms of it's success rate, they like it.

They don't really like it when it's described in terms of losses,

in terms of it's mortality rate.

But unlike in previous framing studies, we didn't stop here.

We kept going, so we gave participants some more information that really simply

reframed the information they'd seen before, using the opposing frame.

So participants who had seen the procedure framed in terms of gains, it's surv,

survival rate, now saw it reframed in term of losses, it's mortality rate.

And people who had seen a loss frame at time one,

now saw the same information reframed in terms of gain.

Okay so one condition goes from gain to loss,

the second condition goes from loss to gain, and then we asked participants

to re-evaluate the procedure along with same skills they used before.

So here's why we use these unmarked slider scales.

We didn't want participants thinking oh, I circled five before,