Strategic Numeracy: Self-Serving Reasoning About Health Statistics

Abstract

This research shows that the same people who appear to have low numerical competence when analyzing personally irrelevant health-related numerical information are able to overcome their reasoning shortcomings and make better judgments when they are shown equivalent information that is personally relevant, and when only a sophisticated kind of reasoning enables them to interpret this information in a favorable way. The fact that people can engage in poorer or more sophisticated numerical reasoning depending on whether that reasoning produces favorable or unfavorable conclusions has implications both for the concept of numeracy as an individual-difference variable and for health communication.

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