A short note for HICSS 2008 about frames and human rationality

1. Conversational Frames and Overcoming the Apparent Limits to Human Rationality
John C. Thomas
IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory
PO Box 704 Yorktown Heights, New York 10598
jcthomas@us.ibm.com
We argue that many of the apparent deviations from optimal decision making and
rationality exhibited in laboratory experiments may be due to differences in the apparent
conversational frameworks between investigators and subjects. Examples of such
deviations include neglect of base rates in probability judgments, failure to find optimal
solutions in “hidden profile” tasks, and the influence of path history on decisions. In the
first paradigm, people are typically asked to make probability judgments after reading a
description. For example, a subject is told that someone walks into a room and that they
are over 6’2” tall, have a thick neck and enormous biceps. Now, the subject is asked to
judge the chances that this person is a professional (American) football player or an
accountant. People typically judge that this person is much more likely to be a
professional football player and this judgment ignores the fact that there are many more
accountants than professional football players. The second paradigm refers to a situation
in which members of a small group are given partially overlapping information about
some decision task such as finding the best employee for a given job. The “optimal”
answer requires the group to use and combine some of the information which is uniquely
shown only to individuals while what people typically do instead is focus on the
information common to the group and thereby chose a non-optimal answer. In the third
paradigm, people make a decision such as whether to buy or sell a stock. Optimally, the
decision depends only on the probable future performance, but people are actually much
influenced by the history. There are many other situations wherein people in experiments
behave in a non-optimal fashion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).
These deviations from optimal behavior might be explained by looking at differences in
the conversational frameworks held by the experimenters and the subjects in these
situations. Various attempts have been made to provide “decision aids” for people that
would influence them to move toward greater optimality. However, since none of these
address the underlying problem of mismatching conversational frames, it is not surprising
that such attempts have typically had moderate or no success. Instead, we suggest aids to
help surface the conversational frames to the parties involved. In the base rate neglect
paradigm, for instance, the experimenters may see themselves as portraying some
objective information to subjects in a non-selective way. However, from a subject’s
point of view, this is an extremely odd conversational frame. Most commonly in telling a
story, the teller selects a small number of details meant to convey or foreshadow
something of importance to the story. We hypothesize that making these conversational
frames and their associated assumptions explicit may reduce many of the apparently non-
optimal behaviors of human decision makers.
Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky (1979): Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under
Risk, Econometrica 47 263-291.