Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals

Too little theory and research has considered the effects of communicating statistics in various forms on comprehension, perceptions of evidence quality, or evaluations of message persuasiveness. In a considered extension of Subjective Message Construct Theory (Morley, 1987), we advance a rationale relating evidence form to the formation of impressions of evidence. We compare visual versus verbal representations of statistical evidence associated with multivariate relationships in a community‐based field experiment (N= 206). Verbal forms were found to be better comprehended than visual forms and contributed to enhanced understanding when compared to an attention control condition. Comprehension was found to mediate the effect of statistical evidence form on perceptions of evidence quality, while comprehension and perceptions of evidence quality moderated judgments of message persuasiveness. In addition to the effects of evidence form on subjective impressions of statistical evidence, we advance perceiver characteristics as another realm in which persuaders may identify persistent patterns associated with comprehension and judgments of statistical evidence. Numeracy skills, race, and gender emerge as characteristics with merit in this regard. Nonsignificant findings associated with perceiver characteristics were found. Finally, we consider the results for evidence form and perceiver characteristics on comprehension and judgments of statistical evidence for their theoretic and pragmatic importance.     

Children's judgements and emotions about social exclusion based on weight

This study examined children's judgements and emotions associated with weight‐based social exclusion using an ethnically diverse sample of one hundred and seventeen 9‐ and 13‐year‐old children. Children were interviewed about three scenarios depicting weight‐based exclusion in athletic, academic, and social contexts. Children's judgements of exclusion, emotions attributed to the excluder and excluded targets, and justifications for judgements and emotions were examined. Overall, children judged weight‐based exclusion to be wrong for moral reasons. However, they viewed weight‐based exclusion in athletic contexts as less wrong compared with academic contexts, and they used more social‐conventional reasoning to justify judgements and emotions attributed to excluders in athletic contexts compared with academic and social contexts. Children also expected excluded targets to feel negative emotions, whereas a range of positive and negative emotions was attributed to excluders. In addition, older children were more accepting of weight‐based exclusion in athletic contexts than in academic and social contexts. We discuss the results in relation to the development of children's understanding of, and emotions associated with, exclusion based on weight.