Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Heuristics and Biases in Audience Decision Making 225

Schema Activation-Related Heuristics and Biases

The Schema Accessibility Heuristic

Before making a decision, audience members spontaneously activate a schema to guide their search

for information. The schema they activate affects both their decision-making process and its out-

come.^181 The schema directs their attention toward information that is relevant to it and away from

information that is not. Yet at a conscious level, audience members remain unaware their atten-

tion is being directed selectively. Instead, they believe they are considering all the evidence in an

open-minded way.^182

Audiences evoke what this text terms the schema accessibility heuristic when they base

their search for information on the schema that is easiest for them to access. Easy-to-access

schemata include those that are frequently activated and recently used.^183 For expert decision

makers, the most accessible schemata are usually the most relevant ones.^184 This is not the case

for novices.

However, both experts and novices are susceptible to activating irrelevant or slanted schemata

based on contextual cues or “frames.”^185 Voters are susceptible to activating schemata that frame

issues to the advantage of one politician or the other when they hear catchphrases such as “law

and order,” “forced busing,” and “right-wing conspiracy.”^186 TV news viewers are susceptible

to activating schemata based on the newscasters’ framing of the day’s events.^187 The media can

frame the news in ways that prime viewers to activate particular schemata regarding their beliefs

about equality, freedom, gender, race, patriotism, international concerns, and the economy and

thus lead them to attend to particular aspects of an issue and to formulate particular opinions

about it.^188

Relying on an easily accessible schema can be appropriate in many situations,^189 even when it is

at the expense of statistical information. For example, a study of medical residents at a major New

York City teaching hospital fi nds that only fi rst-year residents use base-rate information to make

their diagnoses. Experienced residents disregard base-rate information about the patient group

and yet are more likely to make the correct diagnosis of an individual patient. The study’s authors

conclude that experienced residents develop a schema that allows them to make decisions based on

the symptoms presented by the individual patient.^190 Nonetheless, relying on an easily accessible

schema can also be a source of bias as the following sections indicate.

Framing Effects: The Power of Spin

Framing effects occur when two sets of information that apparently have the same meaning but

use different wording activate different schemata and thus lead to different decisions.^191 Marketers

know that consumers are especially susceptible to framing effects. Consumers are generally more

willing to pay premiums to avoid losses when the label “insurance” is used to explain those pay-

ments.^192 Consumers prefer ground beef described as 75% lean to ground beef described as 25%

fat.^193 How many consumers would want to eat a hamburger if the product in the burger called

“lean, fi nely textured meat” were labeled “pink slime” instead? Not many, it turns out.^194

Audiences other than consumers are also affected by framing. For example, voters tend to allo-

cate more police to a community with a 3.7% crime rate as opposed to one described as 96.3%

“crime free.”^195 Doctors are more likely to recommend a procedure that saves 10 out of 100 lives

than one that allows 90 out of 100 to die.^196 Pollsters routinely fi nd that wording a survey question

in a particular way can frame an issue and that differently worded survey questions can produce

contrary results.^197