To: one_less who wrote (758 ) 4/27/2012 8:43:33 PM From: TimF Read Replies (1) | Respond to Cognitive Bias of the Day: The Framing Effect 1 Comment · Critical Thinking framing effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when the way in which an option is presented can alter people’s decisions.this Bleeding Heart Libertarians post by Matt Zwolinski conveys the results of an experiment described in Thomas Schelling’s Choice and Consequence , on the subject of child tax exemptions.Schelling told his students that a standard exemption is allowed for each child, and that the amount of the exemption is independent of the taxpayer’s income. He asked their opinion of the following proposition: should the child exemption be larger for the rich than for the poor? Almost all of the students said that it should not.Should the childless poor pay as large a surcharge as the childless rich? The students answered no.Our intuitions say that the rich should not receive a higher credit than the poor, but that they should pay a higher surcharge. But as Schelling pointed out, “surcharge” and “credit” are just two different ways of describing the same thing, a purely verbal distinction created by an arbitrary choice about how many children we assume as the baseline case. So what our intuitions are telling us to do – have the rich pay a higher surcharge but receive a lower credit – is logically impossible . This illustrates that simple moral rules — e.g., when in doubt, favor the poor — do not always (or necessarily even often!) work reliably.thethinkerblog.com
