The two questions were effectively identical. In both cases, if you picked the gamble, you wound up with a 50-50 shot at being worth $2,000. In both cases, if you picked the sure thing, you wound up being worth $1,500. But when you framed the sure thing as a loss, people chose the gamble. When you framed it as a gain, people picked the sure thing. The reference point—the point that enabled you to distinguish between a gain and a loss— wasn’t some fixed number. It was a psychological state. “What constitutes a gain or a loss depends on the representation of the problem and on the context in
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