Framing, Priming, and Mental Set

Framing effects happen because the brain doesn't just process raw numbers, it processes numbers wrapped in words, and the wrapping carries emotional weight. '90 percent survival' highlights living; '10 percent mortality' highlights dying. Same math, different feeling, different choice. This matters because it proves judgment isn't purely rational calculation. It's calculation filtered through language, and whoever controls the wording can nudge the decision without changing a single fact.

Priming works through a different but related mechanism: spreading activation in memory. Exposure to one concept (words about cleanliness) activates a web of related concepts in your mind, making them easier and faster to retrieve. So when you hit an ambiguous cue like 'SO_P,' the primed concept wins the race to consciousness, even though you have no idea the earlier words influenced you at all. Priming is framing's quieter cousin: framing shapes how you interpret information you're actively given, priming shapes what comes to mind before you're given anything.

Mental set extends this same theme of mental shortcuts into problem-solving. If a strategy solved problems one through ten, you keep reaching for it on problem eleven, even when the setup has quietly changed and a different approach would work faster. The shortcut that built efficiency now blocks insight. All three ideas sit together because they show cognition running on efficient defaults: wording, recent activation, and past success all bias you before deliberate reasoning gets a vote, which is exactly why Unit 2 treats heuristics and biases as a package.