How we are all being manipulated by the dark art of political framing

The Herald Scotland

18-05-2025

Ramp up the flimsiest evidence that fits your case, leave out all facts to the contrary, zoom in on threat and fear, use extreme and florid language, and crucially engineer an 'us versus them' narrative – and you're well on your way to shifting society's opinions into line with your own.
Framing – the dark art of how to influence others – is older than language. In evolutionary terms, we're highly susceptible to our opinions being shaped by the wily and manipulative.
To uncover the Machiavellian tricks that brainwash others without them knowing, The Herald on Sunday met with Professor Mikael Klintman, author of the new book Framing: The Social Art Of Influence, in his office at Sweden's Lund University.
Professor Mikael Klintman
The work is an indispensable guide to how information is distorted in the 21st century. Klintman is a leading expert on evolutionary sociology and how humans process information.
First, let's look at the bizarre but true tale of two middle-class Brits in France. They found 'a wonderful can of gourmet pate', Klintman explains, 'labelled Mousse Gourmand'. It sounded so French, so delicious. They gobbled it up, then discovered they'd eaten catfood.
Reality, Klintman explains, can be shaped and twisted. Call something 'gourmet' in France and exclude enough information (if you can't speak French, you won't know the 'pate' was actually Gallic Whiskas) and your frame is nearly complete.
All you need is an 'us and them' narrative. In this case, the 'us and them' narrative is the same used by ad agencies: eat this, wear this, buy this and you'll be part of the in-crowd. For the tourists, being part of the in-crowd meant eating French food.
'Framing is the process of shaping reality,' Klintman says, 'so that certain aspects stand out while others fade away.'
Reality is too huge for humans to grasp in its totality, he explains, so we have evolved to select facts deemed necessary for survival. It's necessary to eat food we believe is good.
'I'ts necessary to be part of the in-group.'
Now let's jump from that minor but illustrative example of unconscious framing to a matter of life and death: climate change.
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Slogans
You would think that the world's scientists telling us climate change is real and we've got to act would be enough to alter our behaviour, says Klintman. But it's not. He points to campaigning by Sweden's Green Party. 'Its latest slogan is 'the climate, the climate, the climate'.'
It's too big a frame. To the average voter it seems that the Green Party wants to 'take this immense responsibility for the global wellbeing of everyone'. It also misses the 'tribal aspect' – the us and them narrative – which makes everyone tick, whether we like it or not. Unsurprisingly, Klintman explains, the Greens are 'doing quite badly in Sweden'.
Better framing would see Greens tweak their messaging to explain 'what's in it for us Swedes', and how environmental policies would see 'Swedes get ahead, and be better off economically'.
Klintman notes that the debate around land reform in Scotland is very much divided into 'us and them' narratives. On one hand, it's about ordinary people taking back land and 'redressing ancient wrongs', on the other it's framed as 'economic meddling'.
Amsterdam in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the site of one of the most effective uses of framing. Then, it wasn't the bike-friendly city of today. Cars dominated and there were many fatalities, especially among cyclists.
Klintman explains how a bunch of parents got together and started drawing chalk lines on roads to show where bike lanes could go. They began accusing motorists of 'child murder'. Then, as the early 1970s oil crisis hit, they added a financial factor to their frame: bikes are cheaper so people will save money if Amsterdam becomes bike-centric.
The framing worked and today Amsterdam is, as Klintman says, 'the bicycle capital of the world'. Now clearly no motorist was deliberately killing children, but that hyper-emotional 'us and them' appeal was hugely effective.
You can simply invent a frame and stand back and watch as people fill it. Klintman explains that, about 30 years ago, the term 'burnout' became popular.
'Someone invented the term and suddenly everyone was on sick leave. Employers were annoyed, asking 'how come everyone is starting to get burnout?'. When a frame is constructed, people feel it.'
As he says, framing is essentially a fancy term for the old saying: 'A good salesman could sell sand in the Sahara.'
If you don't frame an argument well, then forget it, nobody will listen. Klintman looked at studies into junk food and young men. In one study, they were told eating garbage would knock some years off their lives. 'The guys said, 'oh that's a shame but this tastes good so we're going to continue'.'
Clearly, telling teenagers they'll only 'live to 90 instead of 95' won't resonate much. Then, however, another group was told that the junk food industry was a multi-billion-pound enterprise which was 'trying to convince, even deceive, you into buying this stuff'.
The group was told that additives went into food to make it more addictive and that 'it's a cynical industry and they have aggressive lobbyists who put pressure on policymakers'.
Tricks
THAT frame worked. 'It triggered the hunter-gatherer in us.' It was crucial for our ancient ancestors not to be deceived. That's why we hate tricksters. Being conned back in the Stone Age likely meant death. Don't forget humanity lived as hunter-gatherers for well over 90% of our existence on Earth. Ancient traits run deep.
'We've evolved to be really alert to not being deceived. So it's a much better frame to have a concrete out-group who tries to fool you.'
Klintman suggests parents who are worried about smartphones should pursue that framing strategy, and claim tech companies trick us about child welfare. 'We need ancestral resonance frames which trigger our long genetic memory,' he says.
Focusing on exam results may be less effective than simply scapegoating tech giants.
Klintman says that, across the West, the same tactic is now being used by the right when it comes to issues like immigration or LGBT rights.
'We have a strong readiness to define who is with us and who is against us,' he says. That makes us susceptible to 'politicians who work really hard at making voters distinguish between 'us and them' and create suspicion'.
For the left, it's 'much harder' to sell any narrative which pushes the notion of having 'a world as one and overcoming social injustice'. But clearly, he notes when the left does adopt an 'us and them' narrative it tends to win.
Klintman points to left-wing revolutions which succeeded because an 'in-group and out-group' was set up that 'created anger and immense energy' around the idea of 'exploitation'. Just think of what happened to French aristocrats when they were turned into an out-group.
To defeat the right, Klintman says the left must harness some of these harsher tactics. He categorises framing as either 'Apollonian or Dionysian'. The god Apollo was wise and kind, so that's the big broad frame of 'let's save the world'; the god Dionysus was wild and chaotic and that's the tighter 'group-oriented' frame.
Framing is also very time-specific. You need to push your framing at the right moment. Amsterdam's shift to becoming the global bike capital was helped considerably by the oil crisis. Klintman turns to women's rights and the role of women in the workplace.
Clearly, there were calls – especially among the 50% of the population who were women – for equal rights prior to the 20th century. But until the First World War, the argument had a tight moral frame centred on the issue of equality.
Suddenly, though, as war broke out, women were needed in ammunition factories with men at the front. That much bigger frame of protecting the wider group changed the game.
Professor Mikael Klintman
Timing
INDUSTRIAL expansion from the 1950s onwards, he says, was the next accelerant. Again, women were needed in the workplace and that made the frame for equal pay and better conditions become more salient. Similarly, today, amid economic crisis, the framing of immigrants as an economic drain has more resonance than it would ordinarily.
What's bad can be made good by carefully-timed framing. Evidently, Hitler is the ultimate example, Klintman explains. In the midst of economic chaos, Hitler framed persecuting Jews as an act which benefited Germany. His monstrous framing worked.
Donald Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' mantra also turns bad into good. Klintman explains that what Trump is essentially doing is framing more oil extraction as an act which benefits the American people. 'It's about strengthening our group in the US, that we shouldn't let others from outside – especially not from politically correct places like America's east coast or Europe – dictate.'
You can, if you're smart, also exploit bad acts against you and frame yourself as the good guy. Take Kazakhstan. The country was ruthlessly mocked by the comedian Sasha Baron Cohen as Borat. Initially, the mockery hurt Kazakhstan. 'People were really offended. They were pissed off, and I understand that. It's a poor country with many challenges and this was punching down.'
Kazakhstan's tourist board launched adverts which seemed fairly traditional – lovely shots of the country and its people and food – but the final words were 'very nice!', said in the voice of Borat. They'd taken his damaging catchphrase and 'turned it into something positive'.
The frame that Kazakhstan had put on itself was pretty cool. The country seemed 'ironic, self-deprecating, they'd the self-confidence to joke about themselves. It takes a lot of strength to do that'.
There's a symbiotic relationship between politics and the media when it comes to framing. Politicians use framing to divide us and win votes, and the media continually 'repeats' these frames. Say a frame often enough and it 'becomes the truth'.
The simplicity of framing attracts the type of journalism that's big on sensation and low on interrogating facts. You'll see much less framing in, say, The Financial Times than on GB News.
'That framing of two sides – one good, one evil – really connects,' says Klintman. He points to the work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung who studied what is known as 'archetypes' found in the world's best-known and oldest stories. 'The clear simplicity of storylines with one character who is good and one who is bad resonates very well.'
Even something as mundane as the weather can be framed. Klintman could simply look out his window in Lund and say 'it's cloudy'. That's a very 'thin' frame with little detail and so it hasn't much impact on anyone.
But if he started to claim that such miserable weather was what made the Vikings great explorers then 'I could turn this frame that it's cloudy into something very positive'. Have some 'beautiful, famous person' say those words, rather than a university professor, he adds, and the frame improves.
Immigrants
MOST criticism – whether of books, plays, films or art – is heavily framed. You could simply say that Charles Dickens is a great writer because of how he documented Victorian life, but leave out the fact that sometimes Dickens wrote in wearyingly long metaphors. So you wouldn't give a full picture of him as a writer, just a tightly framed and biased close-up.
'It's about how you position your frame,' says Klintman. 'You elevate some things, you overlook others. That's frame positioning: what is it you're zooming in on?' In journalism, it's classic editing by omission.
Klintman says framing isn't just about positioning, but also texture, temperature and size.
Take texture. That's about detail. The more detail you include, then 'the smoother' the frame. You'll often see frames with lots of detail about the in-group, but little about the out-group. The out-group gets a 'rougher' frame.
It goes back to the 'evolutionary basis' of framing, he says. We know lots about our own group, so that makes us more empathetic, but little about outsiders so that limits empathy.
Think of the infamous 'they're eating the dogs' claim that Trump used against Haitian immigrants. Most Americans know little about Haiti, so that rough framing comes into play.
It would have been impossible for Trump to use such claims about Americans he deems opponents, say liberal college students, as they're still part of the in-group.
Again, says Klintman, 'texture has to do with binaries, with good versus bad'.
Then there's heat. You can heat up frames. 'The heat of a frame is about how emotionally engaging it is.' Think of those Amsterdam parents calling motorists child killers. 'That frame was smoking hot,' Klintman adds.
But a super-hot frame won't work unless there's a clearly defined out-group. In New Delhi, says Klintman, environmentalists claimed pollution was a 'crime against humanity that's killing many, many people'. That's a very hot frame, but it didn't 'resonate' as it had no out-group. Everyone in New Delhi was creating pollution, the rich and the poor. 'So there wasn't any convincing story there.'
You have also got to land your frame on 'the zeitgeist'. Klintman has looked at how his own students react to some moral issues. When asked if they think people should be subjected to a 'carrot or stick' approach when it comes to environmental matters like driving less, most vote for the carrot. 'They almost always say it should be voluntary, and you should give encouragement.'
But on an issue like someone making sexual remarks in the office, the students back the stick. They're shocked at any suggestion which links curtailing inappropriate behaviour with reward or encouragement.
However, 70 years ago, Klintman says, you could imagine an office in which someone was rewarded for being 'the perfect gentleman of the week' because they hadn't behaved inappropriately. 'Maybe, in a few years, people will feel more aggressive towards those who continue to fly, drive or eat meat,' he adds. If that happens, then the frame can change.
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Freedom
THE smoking ban reflects many of the key issues around framing: positioning, whether the frame is thick or thin, and heat and texture.
The issue was bogged down in debates between those who focused on health and those who focused on freedom. Then, however, the issue of occupational health was brought into the frame. The idea being that someone's freedom to smoke in bars could result in cancer for the bar staff.
The smoking ban reflects many of the key issues around framing, says Mikael Klintman
So, the position of the frame changed. It heated up with the idea of innocent people dying, it got thicker in terms of the amount of information to process, and more texture was added when it came to information on the people involved. Indeed, smokers became an effective out-group, in some sense.
'It was reframed,' says Klintman. Result? Smoking bans all over the world.
Framing doesn't depend on lying. 'People aren't very gullible when it comes to believing what's false. But we're extremely susceptible to how things are framed,' he adds.
However, there's an element of misinformation in framing, mostly due to what's left out of the picture or the way the picture is presented. 'It's more about being misleading than making false claims. You don't have to lie in order to deceive.'
For example, there are crimes committed by migrants. 'You can make it sound as if that's something inherent in that group, that it's in their nature or something in their culture makes them more inclined to commit crime.'
However, that framing depends on leaving out the fact that immigrant communities are more 'marginalised', and all marginalised communities – regardless of race – see higher levels of crime linked to poverty. Such framing also ignores similar crimes committed by non-migrants.
A British example might be grooming gangs, where paedophile offences by white men are seldom raised by the right when such crimes are discussed.
Some right-wing voices often refer to migrants coming to Britain as 'males of fighting age' – a frame which implies violence. That excludes findings by refugee charities which say many migrants are young men because the journey from nations like Iran across Europe, where there's exposure to the risk of violence or rape and people traffickers, is less dangerous for single men than women or families.
'A big part of framing is the reality that's left out,' Klintman says. 'That's used to mislead, even though it might not be lies. You can lie with valid facts by leaving certain things out. With framing you can get away with misleading without being accused of lying.'
To inoculate yourself against manipulative framing, you need to think 'what's the context? What alternate frames could there be if we broaden it out and ask what the situation is for certain groups'.
Every issue has multiple frames put over it, from Covid and the Ukraine War, to a domestic argument with your partner, or your relationship with your boss.
Reward
WE can see the roots of framing going back to the animal kingdom, to a time before the human race. Klintman explains that simple experiments with gorillas show framing at work.
Let's say you have 10 pieces of fruit for a gorilla. If you give the ape one piece, followed by one piece, followed by one piece, but then interrupt the pattern and give two pieces, the animal will show signs of happiness. Food has been framed as a reward.
However, if you just give those same 10 pieces of fruit one by one, with no interval where there are two pieces offered, the same gorilla shows no signs of happiness – even though it's received the same amount. Food is just food.
The same amount of food has been framed in different ways. This is framing around what's called 'loss aversion', Klintman explains. The gorilla is being made to feel that it's losing something when it's actually not. 'Framing came before human language,' he adds.
That's why if you see a teacher in a classroom sitting on a chair that's higher than the pupils, power is being framed. It's primitive body language as framing.
When Klintman was younger, his boss at Ikea, where he worked, played the gorilla trick with bonuses. Extra money was handed out randomly, not annually at Christmas, for example. Framing the reward this way, as something unexpected, 'made us happy, like the gorillas – we got two fruits – so we worked our asses off'.
Before we evolved into humans, disgust was a vital sense for our ape-like ancestors. It saved them from contaminated food or diseased dead bodies. So, framing around disgust and disease remains powerful today. Think of the metaphor 'a cancer in society'. Klintman notes how Trump often accuses his enemies of being 'disgusting'.
On the flip side, Klintman notes that when a colleague at an academic conference took out MAGA hats and asked the audience to wear them they evinced 'disgust, like it was contaminated, as they were liberals'. They were also been pushed into the frame of their perceived out-group.
Last summer's far-right riots in Britain perfectly illustrate framing at its worst, Klintman says. The murders of three young girls were falsely blamed on migration. We should look at the disorder from 'an evolutionary perspective'. What unfolded led to a 'mobilisation against the other group'.
A similar dynamic was at play during Covid when Asian people were targeted for abuse and even attack.
So it's crucial, Klintman believes, that young people learn in school about framing – what's left out of the picture, what's exaggerated, what's designed to manipulate us – 'if we want to preserve and strengthen our democratic societies'.
To some degree, Klintman believes, we open ourselves to being manipulated in the way we structure our lives. In a sense, we put a frame around ourselves. He notes that he spends most of his days with people very similar to himself – white, educated, middle class. We may be less inclined to fall for framing if we meet people from 'many different groups'.
Liberals
KLINTMAN notes how many working-class communities in the West were damaged by job losses over recent years while liberal-left political leaders who once represented low-income voters were not. The result was working-class voters and the parties they traditionally voted for began looking at the world through different frames, and the bond disintegrated between them. 'That made it easy for the right to present these simple framings of 'us and them', that we've been fooled long enough by both left elitists and immigrants.'
The left thought about politics on 'a big large global scale, of a better world, but forgot about the risk of unemployment. It's easy to be idealistic when you're not at risk'. So the framing was all wrong.
Clearly, adverts work the same as political propaganda in terms of framing. Ad execs 'are the masters of framing', and the industry is stocked with behavioural research experts. Their trick is framing products around 'identity – who we want or don't want to be'.
Klintman loves watches. He's references Patek Philippe adverts for watches which can cost millions, which use the slogan 'you never actually own a Patek Philippe watch, you merely look after it for the next generation'.
An item of obscene expense and gross ostentation is turned into a product associated with values like fatherhood. The image which accompanies the tag line is often of fathers and sons. 'The most vain thing becomes something admirable,' Klintman explains.
Again, it's about out-groups and in-groups: do you want to be the handsome, cool, kind dad? Sure you do, so buy this watch.
Framing can also nudge you. The ad industry often hits you online with ads for wildly expensive goods. That triggers feelings of being unable to afford luxuries. Nobody likes to feel poor. So you might look at cheaper goods by the same brand and end up buying mid-range products. 'It's about broadening the frame from what feels outrageous to what feels normal.'
The same happens in politics. An extreme statement will catch your attention, probably online, and it may nudge you towards similar but less extreme views. 'You're not Nazi, you're not Stalinist, but you'll maybe go halfway,' Klintman adds.
Social media is the great 'accelerant'. It 'excels at retexturing frames – turning nuanced issues into stark binaries'. Social media, therefore, works perfectly for 'us v them' narratives. 'This can mobilise support but also harden opposition,' Klintman adds.
He notes the climate activist Greta Thunberg's use of social media which frames the environmental debate as good versus bad, and heats the issue to the max with 'emotional appeals' such as fear and anger.
However, when used well, framing 'broadens' the appeal of climate action by, for example, linking it with the creation of new jobs.
Framing goes deep into our professional lives too. At work, framing is constantly at play. If managers soften their frame from 'you're not meeting expectations' to 'I see potential for you to develop', then they're retexturing the frame.
If your boss says 'just do it', then you'll do it, but morale will fall. However, if the boss says 'doing this will eliminate stress' then the reframing encourages agreement. The board saying 'this is profitable' won't have the same positive effect on staff as executives saying this is 'morally right'.
Klintman adds: 'I've personally encountered situations where an employee gets labelled a troublemaker by one manager for raising concerns about inefficiencies, but when a new leadership team comes in and sees the same concerns, suddenly that same employee is praised as a visionary. It's a pretty stark reminder that power is partly about controlling the frame.'