George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Called the “father of framing” by The New York Times in
Don't Think of an Elephant,
"Lakoff explains how framing is about ideas—ideas that come before policy, ideas that make sense of facts, ideas that are proactive not reactive, positive not negative, ideas that need to be communicated out loud every day in public."
From Lakoff's introduction to
Don’t Think of an Elephant
:
While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon addressed the nation on TV and said, “I am not a crook.” And everybody thought about him as a crook.
This gives us a basic principle of framing: When you are arguing against the other side, do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want.
An example: On the day that George W. Bush arrived in the White House, the phrase tax relief started coming out of the White House. It was repeated almost every day thereafter, was used by the press in describing his policies, and slowly became so much a part of public discourse that liberals started using it.
Think of the framing for relief. For there to be relief, there must be an affliction, an afflicted party, and a reliever who removes the affliction and is therefore a hero. And if people try to stop the hero, those people are villains for trying to prevent relief. When the word tax is added to relief, the result is a metaphor: Taxation is an affliction. And the person who takes it away is a hero, and anyone who tries to stop him is a bad guy. This is a frame. It is made up of ideas, like affliction and hero.
The language that evokes the frame comes out of the White House, and it goes into press releases, goes to every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper. And soon the New York Times is using tax relief. And it is not only on Fox; it is on CNN, it is on NBC, it is on every station because it is “the president’s tax-relief plan.”
And soon the Democrats are using tax relief—and shooting themselves in the foot. It is remarkable. We have seen Democrats adopting the conservative view of taxation as an affliction when they have offered “tax relief for the middle class.”
The Libs have made it an art.
Labor is fast catching up
In Australia and around the world, there has been a steady shift to the right since the Thatcher/Reagan/Howard years; and it has been fanned by the ways conservatives have been able to use frames to influence how people react.
It's deliberate. They've done their homework.
They have carved out words and phrases and made them minefields for progressives—who keep stumbling into them.
They have created issues around frames.
- "Budget repair" means the budget must be broken. There's a visceral reaction to broken things: They feel bad. Someone must have broken that budget.
- Why do we need "Border Security" and a "Border Force"? It must be because refugees who come "illegally" are dangerous. We are right to be frightened. We should vote for a government that keeps them away.
- "A YES vote will divide Australia" suggests that there will be two classes of Australians. "It's unfair — they will be getting benefits they haven't earned and I won't."
They now own these frames. Even using the words to deny their truth triggers the frames and reinforces the conservative positions.
Notions such as only conservatives being capable of managing economies, of refugees presenting threats to security, of bringing down crime rates by mandatory sentencing and building more prisons are all frames they have created and all are, in fact, wrong. But facts fail before frames.
Everything we communicate triggers frames. They're the way our brains make sense of the world. We must work with them.
