FRAMING: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION You think with your brain. Every
thought you have is physical — an activation of neural circuits.
At least hundreds of thousands of such circuits are fixed in
your brain — learned all through life. Most of your thought — an
estimated 98% — is unconscious, effortless, uncontrolled, and
automatic. Many of these neural circuits have the form of
“frames,” which structure our understanding of everyday life. A
hospital frame, for example, contains elements for doctors,
patients, nurses, operating rooms, emergency rooms, and so on,
as well as the kinds of things that typically happen in
hospitals. Everything else is outside the frame — igloos,
elephants, baseball games, and so forth. Frames are structured
in a hierarchy. To understand a kitchen, you have to understand
food preparation and eating. In politics, the highest frames are
moral frames. The reason is that all politics is moral:
political leaders propose policies because they are right — not
because they are wrong or don’t matte