If you were offered $5 today versus $10 in a month, what would you prefer?
This is the exact question that was asked in a psychological experiment, which has been repeated multiple times by different experimenters and it looks like most of the people who participate in the experiment tend to choose option 1, i.e., $5 today over the $10 in a month. This proved to the experimenters the existence of a bias that we tend to value short term rewards more than long term rewards, also called “temporal discounting”.
When the same question was reframed as
“Would you prefer $5 today and $0 in a month or $0 today and $10 in a month?”,
the predominant choice shifted to option 2, the larger and delayed reward.
Research experiments conducted by Eran Magen, Bokyung Kim, Carol S. Dweck, James J. Gross, and Samuel M. McClure concludes that reframing can promote self-control while avoiding the need for additional willpower expenditure.
Self-control without willpower sounded bizarre just a few days back to me but here I am, after having read the research and what they have inferred from the results, I now am a believer.
The question then to ask is –
What impact can reframing have on our lives?
What happens if
- we change the questions we ask of ourselves or of our loved one’s?
- we change the questions we ask of our customers or employees?
- we change the questions we ask of our perceptions?
- we reframe the problem that we are trying to solve?
The impact of framing a question or a problem defines or restricts the answers or solutions that we can expect. So, it is super critical for us to be very wary and deliberate about how we frame things – be it how we view the world or the way we define a problem to solve or seek feedback.
