Framing
The social art of influence
A smart, incisive toolkit for understanding how the framing of information influences the way we see the world.
In today’s chaotic media landscape, working out who and what to believe is a daunting task. Lies and misinformation are only part of the problem – often the way a story is presented has just as much effect on us as what the story is.
In Framing, sociologist Mikael Klintman offers a cutting-edge toolkit for exposing and analysing the rhetoric that saturates our everyday lives. Combining insights from the social sciences, economics and evolutionary biology, he lays out a four-part approach to understanding how information is ‘framed’ for us, built around the key elements of texture, temperature, position and size.
Demonstrating this approach through an array of real-world examples, from climate change denial to the subtle messaging of caviar ads, Klintman reveals how canny communicators mislead us without relying on overt deception. At the same time, he probes the deeper evolutionary and cultural roots of our susceptibility to frames.
Mikael Klintman is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Lund and a former Wallenberg Fellow of Environment and Sustainability at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, most recently Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight from Others (2019). His work has been featured in the Times, the Times Literary Supplement and on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed.
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