Framing: The social art of influence Mikael Klintman
Event details
In today's chaotic media landscape, working out who and what to believe is a daunting task. Lies and misinformation are only part of the problem - often the way a story is presented has just as much effect on us as what the story is.
Sociologist Mikael Klintman, author of Framing: The social art of influence, will offer an incisive toolkit for exposing and analysing the rhetoric that saturates our everyday lives. Combining insights from the social sciences, economics and evolutionary biology, he will lay out a four-part approach to understanding how information is 'framed' for us, built around the key elements of texture, temperature, position and size.
Demonstrating this approach through an array of real-world examples, from climate change denial to the subtle messaging of caviar ads, Mikael will reveal how canny communicators mislead us without relying on overt deception. At the same time, he will probe the deeper evolutionary and cultural roots of our susceptibility to frames.
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
About the speaker
Mikael Klintman is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Lund, Sweden and a former Wallenberg Fellow of Environment and Sustainability at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. His books include Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight from Others (2019) and Framing: The social art of influence (2025), both Manchester University Press. His work has been featured in the Times, the Times Literary Supplement and on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed.
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