Improving Comprehension of Numbers in the News

Abstract

How many guns are there in the United States? What is the incidence of breast cancer? Is a billion dollar budget cut large or small? Advocates of scientific and civic literacy are concerned with improving how people estimate and comprehend risks, measurements, and frequencies, but relatively little progress has been made in this direction. In this article we describe and test a framework to help people comprehend numerical measurements in everyday settings through simple sentences, termed perspectives, that employ ratios, ranks, and unit changes to make them easier to understand. We use a crowdsourced system to generate perspectives for a wide range of numbers taken from online news articles. We then test the effectiveness of these perspectives in three randomized, online experiments involving over 3,200 participants. We find that perspective clauses substantially improve people's ability to recall measurements they have read, estimate ones they have not, and detect errors in manipulated measurements. We see this as the first of many steps in leveraging digital platforms to improve numeracy among online readers.

The Illusion of Wealth and Its Reversal

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Conceptual understanding and quantity inferences: a new framework for examining consumer understanding of food energy

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“…Adapting and extending the present set of questions to assess weather literacy in countries worldwide would help to understand systematic misconceptions and the degree to which they reflect the specific local weather risks people face around the globe (Keul et al 2018;Lee et al 2015;Stewart et al 2012;Weber and Stern 2011). Once these misconceptions have been identified, involving the public in the design and empirical evaluation of risk communication formats through large-scale crowdsourcing initiatives could be a new and promising approach to putting weather risks into perspective (see, e.g., the approach by Barrio et al 2016). Findings from other domains offer an important lesson for impact forecasts: Communicating impacts can change risk perception and behavior in unintended ways because people may ignore probabilities (Pachur et al 2014), infer them from the severity of the outcomes (Leuker et al 2018), or respond based on affect (Loewenstein et al 2001;Slovic et al 2004).…”