The framing-research literature names psychology and linguistics among three largely independent interdisciplinary roots of the framing concept, blaming its 'conceptual obliqueness' on that split ancestry

Reviewing the state of framing research in political communication, the communication scholars Dietram A. Scheufele and Shanto Iyengar place the concept's "interdisciplinary roots" in three distinct fields — sociology (Goffman 1974; Gamson and Modigliani 1987, 1989), psychology (Kahneman and Tversky 1979, 1984), and linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1981) — and attribute the field's "significant levels of conceptual obliqueness" to that split ancestry. Separately, they describe the field's core methodological divide as "two largely unrelated traditions of thinking": "Framing research is often traced back to two largely unrelated traditions of thinking. The first emanates from research conducted by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman and Tversky 1979, 1984) in which the term 'framing' was used to describe subtle differences in the definition of choice alternatives." In their usage those two traditions are the psychological equivalence-framing line and the sociological emphasis-framing line (Gamson, Goffman) — not psychology versus linguistics; linguistics enters only as the third of the interdisciplinary roots.

This is a named-author secondary synthesis of the field's own self-understanding, not a first-person account from Lakoff or Kahneman/Tversky. It places psychology and linguistics as two of three separate interdisciplinary roots and never connects them — which is the field-level support for treating those two lines as independent. (The specific "two largely unrelated traditions" phrase, by contrast, contrasts psychology with sociology, so it is not itself evidence of a psychology–linguistics split.) It anchors the vault's synthesis that the two are a case of independent convergence, not cross-influence, and it supplies the field-level frame the three primary-source findings then fill in from the inside — Kahneman/Tversky's own citations (claim-tversky-kahneman-1981-decision-frame-cites-no-linguistics-sociology), Lakoff's own stated genealogy (claim-lakoff-traces-political-framing-to-fillmore-not-psychology), and Entman's unifying synthesis (claim-entman-1993-framing-synthesis-omits-lakoff-fillmore).