Agamemnon and Climate Change

We now have a framework for thinking about framing effects and rationality. We saw that framing effects can involve quasi-cyclical preferences. Someone has quasi-cyclical preferences when they prefer A to B and B to C, despite knowing that A and C are different ways of framing the same outcome. So, the question of whether framing effects can be rational is really the question of whether it can be rational to have quasi-cyclical preferences. This chapter presents what I take to be compelling reasons for thinking that it can be rational to have quasi-cyclical preferences. To see why, we need to broaden our perspective on decision-making to include factors not typically taken into account by theories of rational choice. I want to focus on two in particular.