Using analogies to communicate information about health risks (2013)
Authors
Abstract
Analogies are often used to explain health-related concepts in medical practice, but it is unclear whether they actually improve understanding and, if so, why. Here, we studied these issues in experiments on probabilistic national samples in two countries, focusing on two questions. First, we investigated whether analogies are helpful in communicating medical information to people with different levels of numeracy and for tasks of different levels of difficulty. Second, following existing theories of analogies, we studied what characteristics of analogies improve their helpfulness. Our results revealed that for difficult medical problems, analogies were helpful to high-numeracy people but less so to low-numeracy people. For easy medical problems, the results were reversed. Different analogies were successful in different cultural contexts. In accord with theoretical expectations, the most helpful analogies were those with high similarity of the relationships between objects in their target and base and those with highly familiar bases. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic entry
Galesic, M., & García-Retamero, R. (2013). Using analogies to communicate information about health risks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 27, 33-42. doi:10.1002/acp.2866 (Full text)