Effects of different types of framing in advertising messages on human decision behaviour

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the occurrence of a framing effect in advertising messages when confronted with different types of frames. A quantitative study, conducted by the authors showed that positively and negatively framed advertising messages were created for the attribute framing type and the goal framing type. Furthermore, there exist significant differences in human choice behaviour due to the framing of the message in the attribute frame and in the goal frame. Participants in the positive framing condition of the attribute framing experiment reached higher scores to all three measured dimensions than those assigned to the negatively framed advertising message. Also in the goal framing experiment, subjects were found to prefer the positively framed advertising message. These results suggest that a framing effect is occurring in the attribute framing type and in the goal framing type due to the different framing of the advertising message.