Framing Stem Cells

With the “Vox Day” business winding down (one way or another), it’s time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No– seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong?

Anyway, Janet is thinking about “framing” and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three “core values” that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach:

• cures for diseases are good
• economic competitiveness is good
• human embryos should be accorded a special moral status

And notes, correctly, that these are, to some extent, mutually exclusive. She ends by asking:

So, at this point my question boils down to this: Does the framing strategy amount to getting your audience to (at least temporarily) forget about their core values that resonate with the other side’s frame?

Nisbet can obviously speak for himself, but I’ll pop in quickly to note one possible probelm with this, because it’s an error that physicists are particularly prone to. The way Janet has phrased this treats “the public” as a large population of identical people, rather than a large heterogeneous collection of people with radically different properties.

The problem is that there’s an implicit assumption that everybody shares all three of those values, and I don’t think that’s the case. They certainly don’t all place the same weight on those values, particularly the third.

The aim of “framing” this issue, then, is two-fold: first, to get the message to resonate with that portion of the population whose weighting is already closest to that of the framers themselves. People who place more weight on curing disease than protecting embryos are going to be receptive to a pro-stem-cell-research argument based around “Think of the diseases we can cure!” The first goal is to reach those people.

“But if they’re already inclined that way, what’s the point?” you may be asking. The point is that while they might be more inclined to favor disease cures than embryos, they’re not necessarily interested in science. If you just put out straight, dry stories about the research itself, they’re likely to say “Science is Hard! Kthxbai!” and go on about their business without ever reading enough about the research to care about the funding.

If you come at them through the right frame, though, saying, “Hey! We can cure diseases! (By the way: science!)” you’re more likely to get their attention, and hold it through an explanation of the science. Which is more likely to produce the desired result, namely increasing the number of people who have an active interest in the scientific issue, and will support the policy goals of the framers.

That’s the first goal. The second goal is to shift the weights that relatively uncommitted people put on the different values. That’s the whole goal of the anti-stem-cell groups. They place a much higher weight on the protection of embryos than the curing of diseases, and their argument is based around appeals to the general public to put more weight on that factor. Babies are cute, killing is wrong, therefore killing babies is not an acceptable path to curing diseases.

In some sense, this is merely a more charitable re-framing of Janet’s question– “getting your audience to forget about their core values that resonate with the other side’s frame?” is just an extreme case of re-weighting.

But it’s also, as I see it, the response to another point:

This is not, as far as I can tell, a communication strategy that aims at changing the public’s core values. Rather, the strategy seems to focus on bringing some of the pre-existing core values to the foreground until they’ve answered the survey the way you want them to, or they’ve voted the way you want them to, or they’ve gotten tired of thinking about the issue again so they retire from deliberation with the “settled” view you want them to have.

The way I see it, that is “changing the public’s core values.” If you make them care more about one value, and less about the others, that’s a change. “Core values” are not an all-or-nothing thing, but rather a set of priciples given different weights by different people at different times.

You don’t need to create new core values to change the public view of an issue. You just need to change how much weight people give those values when they make decisions.