b l o g g i n s p a c e wiki
The Framing Effect
So you are in the grocery store and you are looking for a bottle of toilet bowl cleaner. There are several of them. One very pretty bottle says "Kills 99% of bacteria" and the one next to it says "Allows only 1% of bacteria to survive."
Most people will buy the 99% bottle because 99 is bigger than 1, right? They have been framed by The Framing Effect. Both bottles are claiming the exact same result if you purchase them and take them home and use them. Humans just like bigger things, I guess.
A&W Root Beer Hamburgers
There are cases where The Framing Effect has backfired.[1][2]
Back in the 1980s, A&W Root Beer restaurants introduced a 1/3rd pound hamburger to compete with McDonald's Quarter Pounder. Dumb Americans were "reverse framed"' due to their lack of mathematics skills. Since they didn't understand that a third of something is bigger than a quarter of something, the hamburger sold terribly and was eventually discontinued.