From this Slate.com article:
People may be distracted by certain language choices or irrelevant details in the scenarios being posed. In a classic psychology experiment, people chose to save 200 lives rather than take a one-in-three chance at saving 600 lives. Yet if asked instead to choose between sending 400 people to death or taking a two-in-three chance that 600 people would die, they embraced the latter option. The options presented in the two scenarios are identical, of course, just worded differently. Which suggests that the way you tell a story affects what emotions people feel upon hearing it, which in turn affects their decision-making.
This is something we knew already ? the art of polling relies in part on how the question is framed. Then there’s the Reiteration Principle, whereby cultural beliefs become ingrained through repeated exposure (such as the socialist saw of Businessman Bad, Make Environment Hurt):
What do we mean when we say that someone did something intentionally? Most philosophers assume that we’d all agree that this is a question of the actor’s state of mind. Experimentalist Joshua Knobe of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill asked college students: If a businessman interested only in profits knowingly harms the environment, should we say he did so intentionally? The students answered yes. Yet if the same businessman knowingly helped the environment, they said no. Apparently, intentionality depends not just on an actor’s state of mind, but also on the outcome he or she produces.
