A meta-analysis of query theory, a psychological process account of framing effects

Query Theory (QT) offers a psychological process theory of preference construction that shows how attentional processes and memory dynamics give rise to framing effects and other judgment and choice anomalies. These same anomalies are also modeled by Prospect Theory (PT) and its functional or "as-if" account, particularly through its feature of loss aversion. Given the lack of clear evidence that loss aversion results from differences in emotional reactions to gains versus losses, it is worth asking whether QT's process account—which explains framing effects as resulting from attentional shifts and subsequent differences in memory retrieval—provides a psychological process account of the loss-aversion feature of PT. Since QT's introduction in 2007, a series of studies have examined its accounts of framing effects in risky choice, intertemporal choice, and multi-attribute decisions. The present review used meta-analytic techniques to evaluate the main claims of QT by synthesizing findings from 27 papers. Across three meta-analyses, we find that (1) decision frame significantly affects query order (d = 0.34, CI95 = [0.27,0.41], n = 11,202), (2) QT mechanisms (query order and content) partially mediate the effect of decision frame on choice, and (3) manipulating query order decreases the effect of decision frame on choice from d = 0.92 (CI95 = [0.74,1.09], n = 1,680) to d = 0.39 (CI95 = [0.25,0.53], n = 1,720).