Inspired by XKCD comics’ Thing Explainer, we are now posting descriptions of our new publications as they come out using the 1000 most commonly used English words (http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/). We find it not only clears out the jargon to help non-experts understand our research, it helps us understand our research better too.
Whitman, J. C., Zhao, J., & Todd, R. M. (2017). Alternation between different types of evidence attenuates judgments of severity. PLoS ONE 12(7): e0180585. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180585. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180585
In this description we had to use four less simple words: Example, climate, mold, and insects.
To understand real-world problems we usually need to think about more than one kind of information at a time. For example, to see signs of climate change we need to keep track of how often we see different kinds of event, such as wild fires or sea water rise, over many years. In these studies we wanted to know if keeping track of two kinds of event at the same time would make people think a problem is less bad than if they only had to keep track of one kind of event at a time. We showed people pictures of pear trees. Each tree had a different number of pears that were eaten by insects or hurt by mold. We told people that every picture showed the pear crop for a year. Every time they saw a picture people had to say whether it showed insects or mold. At the end of every 12 pictures they had to say how good the crop was for that run of 12 years. Some 12-year runs were worse than others because they had more trees with more bad pears. In the first two studies there were two kinds of run. In one kind of run there was just one kind of problem, mold or insects, to keep track of. In the other kind of run they had to keep track of both mold and insects. These studies showed that if there was only one kind of problem then people thought that the crops were worse than if there were two kinds of problem.
In a third study we asked whether this was because it is harder to change between kinds of problem than to think about one problem at a time. In this study each 12-year run always had two kinds of problem, mold and insects. But in one kind of run they all showed mold pictures one after the other and then all of the insect pictures together or the other way around. In the other kind of run the mold and insect pictures were all mixed together. People thought the problem was worse when they saw all of the mold or insects together than when they had to keep changing between pictures showing insects and mold. This showed that, when you have to keep track of different kinds of information, if you keep changing between them then you don’t think the problem is as bad. We think this study shows that when a problem is confusing we may not worry about it as much. Maybe this is because thinking about confusing problems takes so much effort we don’t have enough brain power left over see how bad they are. The take-home: If you want people to see how bad a problem like climate change is, don’t confuse them by making them keep changing between different kinds of information. Show them different kinds of information one at a time!
(written by Rebecca Todd)
