by Bill Dale

Thanks to the many people who contacted me about the article on reframing. I have had many very interesting questions regarding how to apply reframing in the current political climate. Perhaps it is worth restating some of the fundamental principles of framing and reframing, then we will look at how to apply them and answer some of the most common questions.

One of the first things to remember is that a frame is physical and so gets stronger every time you use it including when you attempt to negate it. As we said before Donald Trump and others have used this tactic successfully in spreading their message by using their opponents’ social media power. Every time the democrats retweeted a Trump tweet they were inadvertently reinforcing his message, though they thought they were rebutting it.

Frames trump facts . This is a fundamental principle which appears to go against our intuition. Surely people are logical? Surely we analyse all the available information before coming to a decision? Surely we are not influenced by who has said something rather than what was said? Actually, the more that we understand about people and how human beings make judgments and decisions, especially decisions under uncertainty, the more we realise that most of the decisions we make are made automatically, by what Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author Daniel Kahneman refers to as System 1.

When we are aware of the potential for bias, we are still influenced by the bias!