How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science of Finding Love

by Logan Ury

Imagine you’re a cancer doctor. You have a patient with lung cancer, and you have to decide how to treat them. Surgery or radiation? Surgery gives your patient a better chance at living long term, but is also riskier in the short term—they could die while under the knife. You consult your research and see short-term survival rates: 90 percent for surgery and 100 percent for radiation. What would you pick? What about if, instead, you read about short-term mortality rates—10 percent for surgery and 0 percent for radiation? In a now-famous study, health care researcher Barbara McNeil asked physicians to make that exact hypothetical choice. And she asked one group of doctors to choose based on survival rates and the other group on death rates. Perhaps alarmingly, the exact same information, presented in two different ways, resulted in vastly different decisions. When she described the surgical option in terms of the chance of survival, 84 percent of physicians chose this option. When she discussed surgery in terms of the chance of dying, only half of them opted for this treatment. Why did this happen? The doctors responded to how the outlooks were framed. The framing effect is our tendency to evaluate things differently based on how they’re presented—whether that’s a surgeon assessing risk, or a heartbroken person deciding how to move on after the end of a relationship.