One thing I like doing is bringing back old science experiments because, unless you do research in that specific field, how are you ever supposed to hear about the cool stuff that’s been done before?

This is an amazingly simple experiment that was done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1981. Kahneman is a giant in the field of behavioural economics, one of the most interesting sciences out there.

The experiment is very straightforward. Here’s the question given to the 307 participants:

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed.

About half the participants were asked to choose between these two programs:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

And the other half of the participants were asked to choose between these two programs:

If Program C is adopted 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.

Now, you might not have noticed, but they are actually the same choices. Programs A and C both involve 400 people being saved and 200 people dying. Programs B and D involved a one-third chance that everyone will be saved and a two-thirds chance that no one will be saved. So would you expect that each group would answer the same way…right?

That’s what I’d expect too but the way the question is asked–one is asked in terms of lives saved and the other in terms of lives lost–makes a huge difference. When asked to choose between A and B, 72% of people chose program A, whereas of those that were given the choice between C and D, 78% chose D. What the hell is going on?

This is what Tversky and Kahneman say: “choices involving gains are often risk averse and choices involving losses are often risk taking”. That is to say, when people though about the chance of saving more lives compared to the 200 that are “already saved” in program A, people weren’t willing to risk losing that 200 to save more. But when the same numbers are phrased as losses it sounds as though the 400 lives are already lost so people were willing to take the risk of saving everyone.

I don’t think that anyone is surprised that the way a question is worded affects how it is answered but people in this experiment are taking totally different risks based on the wording of a question. Think about how marketers, politicians, basically anyone with anything to gain, can and does use this kind of framing of a question to their advantage. How much control do we actually have over the decisions we make?