Framing effects for Co2 emissions metrics in car advertisements

In this article, we examine the framing effects for CO2 emission metrics (i.e., units of measurement) in car advertisements. Three studies consistently show that consumers pay more attention to foreground (e.g. g in g/km) than background information (e.g. km in g/km), and suffer from a “numerosity” framing bias such that they perceive bigger numbers as an expression of bigger quantities. We discuss both theoretical and regulatory implications of these results.