Rates and the judgment of government performance

Abstract

Many official statistics reported to the public appear in the form of rates, such as crimes or diseases per 100,000 people, with the choice of a base number (for example per 1,000,000, per 100,000, or per 1,000) remaining largely a matter of the choices or traditions of statistical agencies. Because prior studies have shown that people tend to judge the likelihood of an event based on the numerator alone (thus exhibiting denominator neglect), we hypothesize that ratio bias influences citizens’ perceptions of risks and conditions in society when interpreting real government statistics. To probe this hypothesis, we designed a pair of survey experiments in which a sample of US adults was randomly allocated to treatment groups receiving the same official statistics about violent crime (from the FBI) and infant mortality (from the CDC) but framed as rates with different base numbers (with an additional group receiving only the absolute number of events). We find some evidence of the expected ratio bias when violent crime is framed in terms of different base numbers, but the results for infant mortality were less consistent. For both violent crime and infant mortality, however, absolute numbers led to perceptions of the greatest risk and least favorable conditions, while individual rates (per person) led to perceptions of the least risk and the most favorable conditions. These findings suggest that citizens’ substantive judgments about risks and conditions in society may be influenced to some extent by the framing of rates by government statistical agencies when reporting official statistics to the public.

Exploring Numerical Framing Effects: The Interaction Effects of Gain/Loss Frames and Numerical Presentation Formats on Message Comprehension, Emotion, and Perceived Issue Seriousness

“…Research on numerical framing effects has important implications for equivalency framing research (Pedersen, 2017). Emerging evidence (e.g., James & Ryzin, 2019; Lee et al, 2019; Pedersen, 2017; Pedersen & Larsen, 2019) shows that numerical presentation formats function as an important framing device by interacting with gain/loss frames in which they are embedded. Thus, equivalency framing need not be "narrowly identified with the frames on losses and gains" (Pedersen, 2017, p. 13).…”

Effectiveness, efficiency, and equity tradeoffs in public programs: A citizen experiment

“…Prior literature on behavioral public administration in this area focuses on overall performance (James et al, 2020) and is generally concerned with issues of framing performance information (Belardinelli et al, 2018; James & Van Ryzin, 2019; Olsen, 2015; Pedersen, 2017), questions of blame avoidance (Marvel & Girth, 2016; Piatak, Mohn and Leland 2017; Johnson et al, 2019), trust in the data (Schmidthuber et al, 2023), or how public officials use such information (James et al, 2020 and the citations therein).…”