Same question, different words
Saved 20 of 60, or lost 40 of 60: identical facts, and most people choose differently depending on which words they meet.
Every choice arrives dressed in words, and the words point at what is gained or what is lost.
Losses loom larger than gains, so the loss wording pushes toward the gamble.
Meeting the SAME choice in both wordings, days apart, shows you your own consistency.
Then and now
Framing went from a single striking reversal to a mapped effect: real, replicable, and strongest exactly where choices are dressed in risk.
Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1981)
Where it began“The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice”
Science, 211, 453-458
The founding demonstration: preferences reversed when the same outcomes were described as lives saved versus lives lost.
Steiger, A. and Kuhberger, A. (2018)
State of the art“A meta-analytic re-analysis of the framing effect”
Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, 226, 45-55
The modern accounting: across hundreds of studies the framing effect is real and reliable, with its size shaped by how the choice is presented.
What we do and do not claim
There is no right answer in a framing pair, and the page says so before you choose. It measures consistency, never cleverness.