Frames and frame control: such a central aspect of social and power dynamics, yet there are so few books and resources on this topic.
Most of the resources discussing frames are still clustered in seduction, pick-up, and the “manosphere“.
Next come sales, especially from authors schooled in NLP.
And lastly, there are negotiation books, which also often end up discussing frames.
And even when frame control is discussed, it’s most often a paragraph or a mention.
I haven’t seen any great resources fully dedicated to frames.
And academia and social research have largely ignored frames.
Now, that being said, scattered around, we can find some good stuff on frames and frame control.
This list only contains top-notch information on frames and frames’ control:
Contents
12. Primal Leadership
Goleman says that when two people with different emotional states meet there is a tug of war at the amygdala level.
And the ones that “stick to their (emotional) guns”, end up winning the other individual over to their own emotional state of choice (for example: when an unflappable person meets a confrontational one, the confrontational one will eventually calm down).
Goleman never calls them “frames”, but he is talking about frames.
11. The Shadow Negotiation
Another book proving my original point:
Many authors talk about “frames”.
They just rarely call them frames and rarely apply the framing nomenclature.
For example, Deborah Kolb talks about reframing your opponents’ frames, but instead of calling her techniques reframing, she calls them “strategic turns”.
Still, this is a great book to understand how frames affect negotiations and how you can use them to your advantage.
And her example of “interrupting the move” (i.e., “breaking the pattern”) was genius.
And talking about “genius” and “negotiations”:
10. Negotiation Genius
This is simply the best book I have read on negotiation.
It’s not laser-focused on frames, but since frames are often about negotiation and the negotiation of meaning, this book will help you with both.
9. Pitch Anything
When I started reading “Pitch Anything,” I was flabbergasted.
“God”, I thought, “this book is ThePowerMoves applied to negotiation! This guy is the real deal!”
But by the time I had finished, I felt that Oren Klaff remained stuck on one type of frame control only: frame dominance.
His techniques zero in on wresting control of the interaction. And that’s all cool and dandy: you need those skills as well.
But frame domination sometimes leads to an escalation of conflicts, and it can ruin relationships.
In life as much as in sales, you also need frame control skills that help you negotiate the frame, or persuade others without making enemies.
That’s why I recommend the reader get a wider overview of frames, which includes collaborative frames and frame negotiations.
Alright, the warning being sounded, this is still an awesome read on frames and (frames conflicts).
8. Pre-Suasion
Pre-suasion is all about “pre-framing”.
And pre-framing is all about influencing people by exposing or manipulating their frame of mind and frame of reference before they are exposed to a certain stimulus.
In psychology, this is called “priming”, and depending on how you “prime” people, you might as well call it “pre-framing”.
Priming as a psychological construct has been under heavy fire during the recent psychological replication crisis, and it’s even been branded as a “pop-psychology myth“.
But, of course, the war against psychology went too far. Priming is real, and so is the effectiveness of pre-framing.
7. How to Make Girls Chase
Frames are very popular in male pick-up, seduction, and dating advice.
As a matter of fact, that’s pretty much the only area of self-help and social skills that ever addressed frames, and that’s where the name “frame” even comes from.
Chase talks about frames referring to what he calls the “hard push”, a name that, at the time of writing this post in the midst of cancellation culture, may land him straight into cancellation :).
However, the dynamics he refers to are correct, and they also happen in general socialization, or what we call here “power showdowns” or “power escalations”.
6. Talking From 9 to 5
So much genius insight here.
Not just frames but also power dynamics concerning gender and sexual conflict.
The only con for most people reading is that Deborah Tannen, the author, is a linguist and researcher, so her books can come across as long and tedious to those who are used to a more engaging “Malcolm Gladwell” style of psychology.
5. The Secret Handshake
The Secret Handshake is the perfect example of how there is great wisdom around, but it’s very scattered.
In particular, Kathleen Kelley Reardon opened my eyes to the best ways to teach frames and frame control.
She uses very simple yet effective ways of describing frame-power dynamics. She puts an arrow up for “one-up” actions, an arrow down for “one down” and more submissive actions, and “one across” for neutral actions.
You can use “one-up” and “one down” to attack, counter-attack, or defend. And you can use “one across” to buy yourself time.
So simple, yet so effective.
I couldn’t help but use a similar framework for my lesson on frames.
4. Don’t Think of An Elephant
The only book on this list to discuss framing at a political and mass-communication level.
George Lakoff, the author, is obviously a Democrat. But he doesn’t hide it, so it doesn’t bother me one bit.
And what he says simply makes sense, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum.
This whole book is an exercise in frame wars and frame control, applied to politics and public discourse.
Lakoff discusses how the Republicans framed the political debate around key issues such as taxation (tax-relief) and climate change (climate change instead of global warming) in a way that benefited them.
By winning the frame war against the unsuspecting Democrats, Republicans convinced millions of people to vote against their own economic interests.
So, in a way, this is also a book on how to use frames to manipulate and persuade people.
You might not agree with it, but his analysis of frames is spot on.
Genius book.
3. Getting Past No
There is a genius insight in “Getting Past No“.
And it’s one of the foundational concepts of this website and of our general life strategies for power and success.
And that insight is that you will gain every time you can turn a competitive frame into a win-win frame.
Says William Ury:
Whenever the other party goes into positional and confrontational bargaining, you must reframe it to a more helpful win-win approach.
That’s become one of the main tenets of ThePowerMoves.com
As a general rule, there is always more power in turning as many relationships into win-win, rather than fighting (frame) wars.
2. The Social Strategist
No surprise The Social Strategist is the highest-ranking book on frames and frame control.
After all, it’s this website’s first and current main book.
And TPM was the first website to properly address frames outside of very niche social research or less rigorous self-help.
It’s also one of the very few books to properly call “frame control”, and there is a whole chapter dedicated to it, not just snippets here and there as it’s the case for many other books in this list.
1. Power University
Question: What’s the best book on frame control?
Answer: The best book on frame control is not a book but a course, and it’s the Power University course.
Here is what one Power University alumnus has to say:
Power University doesn’t just describe frames as a book does; it also shows you clear video examples from real life, mock dialogues, and quizzes.
The quizzes test your intuition, help you develop your social radar to “see” frames, and teach you how to influence them.
I started this website and the course because there was little available on power dynamics.
There was nothing much on frames, either, so I put a lot of information on frames, frame control techniques, and how to use frames to increase your personal power and life success.
We talk about frames a lot in Power University.
And there are three dedicated lessons.
You can get 30% of those lessons’ content in this free article:
Bonus: Mental Frames
So far, we have discussed mostly social frames.
But frames are also used to control oneself, and one’s mind.
Meditations
Meditations is the first, most iconic text discussing frames as a way to control oneself and one’s mind.
Marcus Aurelius:
Whatever happens in your life, you decide what that means to you and how you feel about.
And that’s the essence of frames applied to any external event—to control one’s own feelings about it.
Aurelius also recommends only focusing on what you can control and letting everything else drop out of focus.
In a way, that means embracing a smaller frame of the world, only looking at a small portion of reality. The only part that matters: is what you can control.
Frames for self-help are also popular in male self-help and pick-up literature.
Frames discussed in pick-up are often framed as “imposing one’s frame” or “constructing one’s own reality”. Both can be helpful if one does them strategically. But it can also make people come across as social retards when applied indiscriminately or as mentally unhealthy when that “reality distortion” goes too far.
For more on self-help-related frames, see:
- Learned Optimism: Changing Your Internal Dialogue to Be Happier and More Optimistic, by an actual psychologist researcher
- Personal Power II: Possibly my favorite self-help product Tony Robbins discusses reframing to change the meaning of what life events mean to you
- Creating Lasting Change: Tony Robbins, again. Schooled in NLP, Robbins goes heavy on frames. He talks a lot about changing people’s frames to influence their moods and behavior
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