Winning the Frame Game

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When Washington communications consultant Susan Nall Bales talks to environmental groups, she tells them that they can’t fix government policies until they become more conscious of the stories they’re telling and the hidden chains of reasoning these stories can set off in people’s minds.

In explaining their issues, environmentalists tend to predict a wide range of disasters: catastrophic weather, species extinction, tropical pests heading north, you name it. (The classic example is probably Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which began: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”) The question is not whether environmentalists have science on their side; many of today’s disaster forecasts, such as global warming, may well be accurate. But Bales demonstrates why doomsday scenarios, factual or not, alienate the public.

She shows two slides. First she displays a cover of the children’s book Chicken Little. When activists sound like Chicken Little, she says, the message is that the sky is falling, it’s your fault, and you have to lower your living standards. Not surprisingly, that message attracts only true believers. Then she puts up a second slide, of The Little Engine That Could. A far better message, she tells her clients, is that good old American technology can solve environmental problems, and that citizens willing to exert political will can hold government and business accountable.

Susan Bales is not just another Washington spin doctor. As president of the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute, she has synthesized four decades of social-science research into an approach called “strategic frame analysis,” which is designed to help progressive advocacy groups do a better job of getting their messages across to the public at large. Bales has worked with activists on issues ranging from child development and health care to foreign policy. She and her collaborators—pollster Meg Bostrom, anthropologist Axel Aubrun, and numerous others—do more than help groups craft better messages; they emphasize a whole new model of communications on public issues.

A constant refrain in Bales’ work is that people have deeply held preconceptions (“frames”) that render their views almost impervious to new, contradictory information. “It’s not enough to present evidence,” Bales says. “You have to change the frame.”

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