Varying Metacognition Through Public Opinion Questions: How Language Can Affect Political Engagement

Shulman, Hillary C.; Sweitzer, Matthew D.

doi:10.1177/0261927x17707557

Cited by 22 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…For communicators in the throes of a crisis, it is critical to convey factual, precise information that will also engage the general public. Under normal circumstances, communicating with technical, idiosyncratic words, or jargon, is viewed negatively by audiences [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. In particular, research in science communication and beyond has found that the presence of jargon damages persuasive efforts [9] and can have a disengaging effect on audiences [4][5][6].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Processing fluency experiences can range from difficult and effortful (disfluent) to easy (fluent). Prior research guided by FIT [4,6,11,12] has found that jargon-laden messages lead to a more disfluent experience than messages that do not contain jargon. And, as a result of these feelings of effort, people reported less interest, liking, and engagement with the scientific topics under investigation.…”

Section: Explaining the Negative Effects Of Jargonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second page displayed the substance of the information about the topic. In the jargon condition, 20 terms were included that were replaced with simpler terms or explanations in the no-jargon condition, a technique used in previous research [4,6,11,12,17,18]. These paragraphs were held on screen for a minimum of eight seconds to better ensure participants read the information (105 words each).…”

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Don’t dumb it down: The effects of jargon in COVID-19 crisis communication

Shulman

Bullock

2020

PLoS ONE

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Experts are typically advised to avoid jargon when communicating with the general public, but previous research has not established whether avoiding jargon is necessary in a crisis. Using the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, this online survey experiment (N = 393) examined the effect of jargon use across three different topics that varied in situational urgency: COVID-19 (high urgency), flood risk (low urgency), and federal emergency policy (control). Results revealed that although the use of jargon led to more difficult processing and reduced persuasion for the two less-urgent topics (flood risk, emergency policy), there was no effect of jargon in the COVID-19 condition. Theoretically, these findings suggest that the motivation to process information is an important moderator for crisis communication in particular and science communication in general. Practically, these findings suggest that science communicators, during times of crisis, do not need to "dumb down" their language in the same way they should during non-crises.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Explaining the Negative Effects Of Jargonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Don’t dumb it down: The effects of jargon in COVID-19 crisis communication

Shulman

Bullock

2020

PLoS ONE

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“…For instance, Leroy et al (2010) showed that perceived difficulty of medical texts directly reduces people's health information comprehension. Similarly, Shulman and Sweitzer (2018) reveal that processing difficultyinduced by different language usecan negatively influence one's political interest and efficacy, which is shown to be a meaningful predictor of knowledge acquisition. In sum, existing studies on processing fluency undoubtedly point towards the critical role of perceived complexity (i.e.…”

mentioning

confidence: 91%

“That Looks Hard!”: Effects of Objective and Perceived Textual Complexity on Factual and Structural Political Knowledge

Tolochko¹,

Song²,

Boomgaarden³

2019

Political Communication

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Communication of political information is vital for a well-functioning democratic system, and texts are one of the main mediums of politics. Most studies dealing with political text consider how such texts communicate content, rather than the structural characteristics of texts themselves. The current study focuses on complexity as one of the focal structural characteristics of political text. Previous research showed that different types of textual complexity affect learning processes. Such prior studies are, however, limited both conceptually and empirically. This study addresses these gaps by employing a largescale experimental design (N= 822), investigating how different dimensions of textual complexity affect factual and structural political knowledge, and whether such relationships are mediated through perceived complexity. Results indicate that different levels (high vs. low) and different dimensions of textual complexity (semantic vs. syntactic) influence reader's perception of text, as well as their factual and structural knowledge. Only semantic complexity has an effect on one's perceived complexity, which in turn negatively affects factual and structural knowledge. Syntactic complexity directly lowered one's factual knowledge acquisition, while there was no direct effect of syntactic complexity on structural knowledge. The results suggest that text complexity indeed plays an important role in political information acquisition, and our findings also highlight the importance of perception in mediating the structural effects of the text.

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“…Scholars associate relevance with intersubjectivity on the basis of individuals' shared cognitive structures (for example, Schutz, 1970;Sperber and Wilson, 2002). In an example concerning common-response intersubjectivity, Pennington and Hastie (1992) showed that a shared narrative cognitive schema caused individuals acting as jurors, who had not deliberated together, to judge evidentiary information in story form to be more relevant than non-narrative information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making policy information relevant to citizens: a model of deliberative mini-publics, applied to the Citizens’ Initiative Review

Richards

2018

Policy &Amp; Politics

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Research on deliberative mini-publics has neglected two topics: the information on which deliberation is based, and communication techniques by which mini-publics convey their findings to the public. This article sheds light on those two topics, by showing that a criterion for evaluating information -intersubjective relevance -structures information within mini-publics and information that mini-publics share with the wider public. The article explains how information satisfying that criterion can foster intersubjectivity, deliberation and desirable outcomes of deliberation. The article proposes a theoretical model to explain those associations, and presents evidence from the Citizens' Initiative Review, lending support for the model. key words participatory governance • participatory democracy • democratic deliberation• political communication relevance. In this article, I describe this standard and techniques for implementing it in practice. To explain how information satisfying this standard could foster deliberation and beneficial deliberative outcomes, I propose a theoretical model. Finally, I assess the model with empirical findings concerning mini-publics' communications to the populace.

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Varying Metacognition Through Public Opinion Questions: How Language Can Affect Political Engagement

Cited by 22 publications

References 28 publications

Don’t dumb it down: The effects of jargon in COVID-19 crisis communication

Don’t dumb it down: The effects of jargon in COVID-19 crisis communication

“That Looks Hard!”: Effects of Objective and Perceived Textual Complexity on Factual and Structural Political Knowledge

Making policy information relevant to citizens: a model of deliberative mini-publics, applied to the Citizens’ Initiative Review

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