Framing

Alternative framing possibilities also provide for forms of ev­eryday variation in meaning. Consider an example from my colleague Charles Fillmore (see References, sec. A3). Sup­pose you have a friend named Harry who doesn't like to spend much money. You could conceptualize him and describe him in two very different ways. You could say either "He's thrifty" or "He's stingy." Both sentences indicate that he doesn't spend much money, but the first frames that fact in terms of the issue of resource preservation (thrift), while the second frames the issue in terms of generosity (stinginess).

Now imagine an invocation that says: Spend as little money as possible. This is the message that a balanced bud­get amendment would send to Congress. There are three ways to interpret this invocation: Either "Be thrifty" or "Be stingy" or both. Liberals argue that the government should be thrifty but not stingy. Conservatives argue, on the basis of Strict Father morality, that thriftiness in government is never stinginess, since cutting off government funding just makes people more self-disciplined and self-reliant and so is good for them.

The point is that such an invocation, which is a very real invocation, has two interpretations depending on framing. Moreover, the meaning of that framing depends on world-view, as we have seen throughout this book. But Strict Fa­ther morality demands a view of the human mind in which such framing and worldview differences do not and cannot exist. Moral rules, in order to be moral rules, must be under­standable in the same way to everybody. The very existence of different worldviews and different modes of framing shows that this is false. The human mind is such that framing differences and worldview differences really do exist, not just here and there in minor ways, but on a truly massive scale. The prohibition "Don't murder babies" may or may not apply to taking a morning-after pill, depending on whether a cluster of cells is framed as a "baby" and taking such a pill is framed as "murder."

Variability in meaning due to framing and worldview dif­ferences and to the properties of categories (fuzziness, radial structure, prototypes) creates such a huge meaning variability in normal, everyday human reasoning that the conditions needed for the Strict Father model to be coherent are just not met.

Rewards and Punishments

Such variability also occurs in the understandings of rewards and punishments. Anytime you specify a reward or a punish­ment, you use human categories that are subject to die same kinds of meaning variability. This means that "rewards” and "punishments" vary in their meaning. Remember the moral of Brer Rabbit; being thrown into the briar patch, which would have been a punishment to others, was a reward to him.

Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and a small army of co-workers have produced, over two decades, an enormous body of research (see References, sec. A5) detailing how people do not operate by folk behaviorism, that is, according to an objective characterization of what ought to be in their best interests—what ought to count as reward and punish­ment. Their experiments show in case after case that people just do not reason that way even when it matters a lot to them. Often, the source of that failure is due to the fact that people use other forms of reasoning that get in the way of a reward-punishment form of "rationality"—prototype-based reasoning, alternate framings, worldview differ­ences—which affect how categories of people and events are understood and even affect judgments of simple probability.

The fact is that people do not reason all the time, or even primarily, in terms of maximizing clear and unequivocal re­wards and punishments. This fact undermines the principle of the Morality of Reward and Punishment, on which Strict Father morality is based. If punishment isn't always under­stood as punishment, or if punishment is not usually the basis on which people act, then the whole Strict Father paradigm is undermined. Using punishment to exact obedience to au­thority and so build self-discipline and self-reliance won't work. And as we saw in the last chapter, it doesn't work in the case of childrearing.