Confirming and Correcting Preconceptions: Health Literacy as Adaptive Comprehension

Under what conditions can a nonprescription drug label serve as refutation text? The role of directed attention and processing strategy

“…Prior to offering an interpretation of our findings, we should note that prior efforts to use this paradigm to produce refutation change have been only modestly effective, with confirmatory updating values on our 6-point scale ranging from 0.70 to 1.04 and corrective updating values ranging from −0.11 to −0.39 ( Ryan, 2011 ; Ryan and Costello-White, 2015 ). The updating scores in this study are +0.76 and −0.27, respectively.…”

“…There is a small body of research that documents knowledge-based reading failures ( Bostrom et al, 1994 ; Catlin et al, 2015 ; Ellen et al, 1998 ; Jungermann et al, 1988 ; Lokker et al, 2009 ; Ryan, 2011 ; Shone et al, 2011 ). The clearest demonstration is that by Ryan (2011) and Ryan and Costello-White (2015) . Their methodology involves a pretest–posttest assessment of truth ratings assigned to a set of 30 claims about the facts to be found on a facsimile aspirin label.…”