Recently my father-in-law took away a couple of photographs of ancestors that my wife had found on-line to frame on our behalf.

Each week he attends a framing class at a college and he has been learning the art of making pictures look good for several years now. Yesterday the pictures came back and they were transformed.

Somehow he had managed to make two different sized images look like a perfectly matched pair. This wasn’t just a matter of using matching mounts and frames, but of judging to perfection the size of the mount so that each picture looked just right on it’s own and sufficiently similar when viewed together.

It’s not just pictures that are influenced by their frames. Psychologists have identified that our own perceptions of products and prices are shaped by what we encounter around a product, even when those elements have no direct relevance to the product in question.

Our brains collect and filter vast amounts of peripheral information at an unconscious level and this has the effect of causing us to make connections or references to arrive at our perception of something else without us realising that it has happened.

This mechanism can leave us open to influence. When a store says that the product was $1000 but is now $299 it’s hard not to feel that the $299 is a good price; we almost certainly wouldn’t try and haggle such a heavily discounted price down.

But if we happened to know that a shop bought a $299 item for $35 we might react very differently and feel that a discount was entirely reasonable.

Recently a study found further evidence of the framing effect (coupled with a priming effect) when they manipulated the way in which participants thought about the amount of money they had available, or the amount of calories they should be consuming.

They found that people spent far more and ate far more when the product’s price or food’s calories were framed in relation to a larger number; for example, the money in their bank account or the number of calories that were allowed each week.

When the frame was smaller – such as the money in their wallet or the daily calorie allowance – they spent less and ate less.

The level of the difference was dramatic. Thinking about a larger financial frame of reference caused people to spend over a third more (36%) at the market.

Focusing on weekly rather than daily calorie allowances led to people taking more than twice as many M&Ms from a bowl (118%).

Whilst studies such as these are somewhat unsettling when one considers how little conscious control we can exercise over behavioural decisions, they also provide an opportunity for us to use these mechanisms to our advantage.

If you’re trying to keep control of your spending focusing on the cash available in your wallet or considering it in terms of a daily allowance should reduce the amount you spend over the course of a month.

Similarly, if you’re trying to lose weight, rather than thinking in terms of a daily calorie allowance, break it down even further into a morning and evening amount.

Source: University of Chicago Press Journals (2007, November 13). Big Ticket: You’ll Spend More Thinking About Your Bank Account Than About Your Wallet. ScienceDaily.

Image courtesy: Patty Maher