PR & The Psychology of Human Preferences

People make decisions based on the way choices are presented to them or framed, according to two psychologists who first discovered this some 30 years ago during their investigations into how people make decisions.

Recently, one of them, Yale professor Daniel Kahneman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for the work he and his academic partner, the late Amos Tversky, had been doing since the early 1970s to uncover the psychological roots of the preferences that guide people in making choices.

And PR consultants have good reason to cheer. After all, a lot of what we do is done in the hope of obtaining supportive behaviour from client’s customers, employees and the other influencers who make a difference to their success.

Kahneman and Tversky were the first to show conclusively that, for most people, losses loom larger than gains. This means that we're often willing to gamble to prevent a loss but not to obtain a gain.

In the language of economics, we're risk averse toward gains and risk seeking with regard to losses. The ways in which we present choices can make a big difference in how our audiences decide to respond. In other words, we're not exactly rational in our decision making.

Public relations, with its undeniable emphasis on using communication to encourage the kind of behaviors that will nourish an organisation, can also make use of the insights gained in the study of what Kahneman and Tversky call the psychology of human preferences.