What did Alison Ledgerwood's research find about negative framing?

Alison Ledgerwood of UC Davis extended a classic framing experiment. People judged a jobs policy described as saving 70% of jobs, or as losing 30%, and were then offered the opposite frame. Those who began with the positive frame easily switched to seeing it as bad, but those who began with the negative frame refused to see it as good. A negative first impression is much harder to reverse than a positive one.

• Ledgerwood traces the bias to evolution: noticing the tiger matters more than the berries.
• She says the brain rarely calibrates, treating a lost first chair in a school orchestra almost like a tiger.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Hidden Brain (2026-10-12). Read the whole episode summary →

▸More from this episode