Framing Effects on Personal Opinion and Perception of Public Opinion: the Cases of Physician-Assisted Suicide and Social Security

The authors draw from the psychological literaturs on cognitive accessibility biases & impersonal impact & construct competing hypotheses concerning the likelihood of issue frames affecting perceptions of opinion, & test them using data from an experimental field study that exposed respondents to opposing issue frames on two important issues: reforming Social Security & physician-assisted suicide. (42 refs)