Bias in Wording

The Prospect Theory was created by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnmenen (pictured left) in 1979. According to the Prospect Theory, people value a certain gain more than a probable gain with equal or greater value, while the opposite is true for losses (see fig. 2). Furthermore, the discontentment associated with the loss is greater than the pleasure associated with the same amounts of gain.

To demonstrate, A study was conducted by Amos Tversky that investigated the cause and effect of the Prospect Theory. The study consisted of 120 Stanford graduates. The participants were used to give their preference of dying from natural causes versus unnatural causes. The following data summarizes the probabilities of each type of death in an itemized format.
Estimates of Probabilities of Death From Various Causes:

Cause: Subject Estimates/ Statistical Estimates

Heart Disease: 0.22 /0.34

Cancer: 0.18 /0.23

Other Natural Causes: 0.33/ 0.35

All Natural Causes: 0.73/ 0.92

Accident: 0.32/ 0.05

Homicide: 0.10/ 0.01

Other Unnatural Causes: 0.11/ 0.02

All Unnatural Causes: 0.53 / 0.08
The above data represent the probability estimate of one group in the study. Another group was not asked to estimate the probabilities for separate causes but only the probability of death by natural versus unnatural causes. The probability estimate of a natural death by this second group was 0.58, significantly lower than when the subjects considered each cause separately. The second group's estimate of an unnatural death was 0.32, again significantly lower than for the first group. The most notable aspect of the estimates is that the subjects significantly underestimated the probabilities for natural causes and vastly overestimated the probabilities for unnatural causes. This indicates that probably people give more attention to worrying about the unnatural dangers and not enough to the natural dangers (Berstein, 1996).

The work done by Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated people's attitudes toward risks concerning gains may be quite different from their attitudes toward risks concerning losses. In addition, authors use the prospect theory to create bias. When an author applies the prospect theory to his or her writing, the author can then cause the reader to change their focus on loss and gain by appealing to the reader's emotion.

Take Away: Words are powerful. When an author uses statistics, information has to be delivered without being skewed or slanted to their point of view. And ask myself, are all the subjects involved in the study being held equal, or are they manipulated to illustrate a philosophy?.

Reference:
Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996.
symptomresearch.nih.gov (graph)