Behavioural economics has covered this for decades and it still catches me.
"You will lose 200 PLN" is more persuasive than "you will save 200 PLN", even though the amount, the situation and the decision are identical. Loss aversion is well replicated — the framing changes the decision without changing any fact.
In news writing it shows up as choices about which side of a number to report. A programme "cutting benefits for 30%" and a programme "maintaining benefits for 70%" can be the same programme.
The mechanical counter is to compute the complement of every percentage you read. 90% for means 10% against. A 30% drop needs a baseline. 90% survived means 10% did not.
It takes about two seconds and it is the single highest-yield reading habit I have picked up. I started doing it after seeing how consistently framing tracked editorial position across a set of articles I was reading (the analyses are on faktoskop.pl if the underlying data is of interest).
Does anyone teach this explicitly? It seems like it should be a standard part of media literacy curricula and I never encountered it in one.
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